Editor's Message

1. New MTO Guide (HTML)

Up until recently the MTO Guide was available only in its original form, as plain ASCII text, left over from the days when MTO was an email-only publication. By rights, we should have made an HTML version when we began offering MTO on the World-Wide Web, some time ago! With the many tasks involved in publishing a bimonthly journal, we never got around to doing it. Last month I asked David Loberg-Code, a member of the SMT Networking Committee, to make an HTML document out of the ASCII text. He completed that task a few weeks ago and the new version is now available. Those who look at it will notice that information on retrieving documents by email with mto-serv is still included, as are the sections on Gopher, FTP, and on searching the MTO database via email. Further, information on subscribing, unsubscribing, and setting mail options by sending requests to listproc remains as well. None of that information is necessary for those who read MTO primarily on the Web. However, some people may have only limited access to the Web and may still use other means of retrieving MTO items. We therefore decided to retain those sections of the Guide in case someone wants to print it out and have all the information in one document, if not for personal use then perhaps for a friend who cannot yet use the Web yet at all. As our survey last year indicated, there is still a sizable number of non-Web subscribers who expressed concern about the possibility of terminating all non-Web access. We decided that email, Gopher, and anonymous FTP access would remain in place, and so the Guide covers those topics.

We hope that the new version of the Guide will be useful, and thank David for producing it.

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2. Multimedia issue planned

In September 1997 we plan to publish an issue devoted to pedagogical uses of multimedia in the classroom, and scholarly uses on the Net. Elizabeth West Marvin and Aleck Brinkman, SMT Networking Committee Chair, are preparing an article based on their experiences in teaching a course on multimedia at the Eastman School. MTO Co-editorial Board member Dave Headlam, also at Eastman, will contribute a second essay based on his uses of multimedia in the classroom. Finally, Ann McNamee will discuss her extensive, and truly pioneering, involvement with the technology in producing a stunning multimedia version of an essay she published in MTO during its early days, Grazyna Bacewicz's Second Piano Sonata (1953): Octave Expansion and Sonata Form (MTO 0.4, September 1993). I am very excited about this planned issue, not only as an opportunity to demonstrate the possibilities of multimedia for teaching and scholarly publishing but also, hopefully, to motivate authors to explore and employ multimedia technologies to present their research in MTO. And there's more...

Berg scholar Patricia Hall, one of my colleagues at UCSB, is working closely with the director of our campus Microcomputer Lab, Bill Koseluk, to create a multimedia database of Wozzeck sketch materials. Their work blazes the trail of multimedia databases for musicological and music-theoretical research. Searching the database on keywords will result in displays of graphical images of sketch pages that match user-specified criteria. Prose descriptions accompany each image. The November 1997 issue of MTO, or perhaps January 1998, will feature an essay by Hall and Koseluk on the project.

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3. mto-talk discussion

Eytan Agmon's essay on the "Bridges that Never Were," which appeared in MTO 3.1 (January 1997), inspired a quite interesting and extensive exchange of ideas on mto-talk. Roger Wibberley's article on *ficta* (MTO 2.5) also resulted in a lengthy exchange on mto-talk, as well as an essay-length response by Margaret Bent (MTO 2.6), whose work figured prominently in Wibberley's essay. We are pleased to see that MTO and mto-talk are getting such attention and are beginning to realize their potential as media for scholarly electronic publishing.

In both cases, the mto-talk discussions were generated by a relatively small number of participants--a fraction of the full MTO readership--who posted several comments in what turned out to be a conversation among three to five main discussants. Although the number of mto-talk participants has at times been fairly small, I don't believe that to be bad necessarily, or cause for concern, and certainly not a sign of uninterest on the part of the many other mto-talk subscribers. Often people don't feel confident enough to take part in a complex intellectual discussion involving ideas with which they have only passing familarity, or none at all. Yet as "lurkers" they can learn and, so, benefit from the conversation as it evolves. For those trying to learn, as well as for those "in the know," reading postings from a few well-informed people is preferable to reading comments from many who are at best ill-informed.

For this reason, mto-talk Manager Robert Judd has not limited the postings of a single individual, and we have no plans to establish policy to do that. In extreme conditions (e.g. an extended mto-talk monolog) there might be cause for concern, and the list manager can handle that if the problem arises. All 'talk' postings include a Subject line indicating their contents. A stroke of the 'delete' key quickly dispenses with messages of no interest.

We encourage all those to participate in a discussion who feel they have something substantive to contribute, and hope that activity on mto-talk continues to grow. Together with MTO, it offers a unique opportunity for us all to learn from each other.

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Lee A. Rothfarb, General Editor
Music Theory Online
University of California, Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA 93106-6070
U.S.A.

mto-editor@societymusictheory.org
voice: (805) 893-7527 (with voice mail)
fax: (805) 893-7194