[Ralph P. Locke]

“Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal” is an open-access publication that anybody can click on, read, or download. No subscription, no fee, no password: https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/mmp/.–The word “Performance” in the title is meant to suggest that, in addition to topics of the more usual sort, we (I’m part of the advisory editorial board) welcome contributions specifically addressing the pleasures and challenges involved in the acts of making music and listening to it.–Issue 3 (February 2023) contains four scholarly articles on widely disparate topics. The first and third are directly performance-related:

• a discussion of the tuning of the ancient Japanese shakuhachi (flute) and its modern-day version(s),
• a comparison of two Lieder (German art songs) by nineteenth-century composers Ferdinand Hiller and Vinzenz Lachner,
• the first detailed account (with excerpts from unpublished interviews) of the conductor Thomas Schippers’s remarkable tenure as music director of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, and
• two memoirs of musical life in Communist-era Hungary (including its classical-radio broadcasts) by the late Bálint András Varga (author of numerous highly praised volumes of interviews with composers from around the world).

–The reviews are equally wide-ranging: we learn about a book on Liszt’s own techniques of arranging orchestral music (e.g., his own symphonic poems) for the special medium of two pianos, and about recordings of:

• music of Hildegard of Bingen reinterpreted by soprano Ann Moss and musicians from both classical, world, and electronic music traditions,
• an Italian opera by Pietro Avondano first performed in Portugal (including the question of how freely to perform recitatives), and
• a symphony (from the mid-1950s) by an important Czech composer, Svatopluk Havelka (1925–2009).

–Articles in the first two issues of M&MP have already been downloaded by numerous readers, many of whom seem to have located the article through a keyword search.–But I (speaking as someone who contributes an occasional review) hope that more and more people will also go directly to M&MP to find some intriguing and important research, reflections, and documents about the art and practice of music in different places and times, including today.

Ralph P. Locke

Professor Emeritus of Musicology, Eastman School of Music (University of Rochester)

Senior Editor, Eastman Studies in Music (University of Rochester Press)

Research Affiliate, University of Maryland School of Music

RLocke@esm.rochester.edualso: Ralph.P.Locke@gmail.com Short biography and list of published writings: https://www.esm.rochester.edu/faculty/locke_ralph/

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