Editor's Message
![[Contents of vol. 3.4]](../../gifs/contents.gif){kind=small}
1. Summer Issue
Due to the year's end rush and summer travel plans of MTO's editorial consultants, it was not possible to have a feature essay ready for publication by our July release date. Nevertheless, we have a fairly full issue, including two commentaries, two book reviews, three reports in our Music Theory International (MTI) section, as well as dissertation listings, announcements, a job posting, and new books. Because of the time it takes for reviewing and revising submissions, summer is a difficult time to produce and publish a feature essay. Consequently, summer issues may focus on other items, such as commentaries, reviews, and reports, which are also important for keeping up with scholarship in music theory.Authors are encouraged to submit essays at any time during the year, and we will do our best to bring them to publication within 3-4 months, including during the summer when possible.
2. Internet Focus
A recent Price Waterhouse Consumer Technology Survey shows that, even with the current emphasis on graphics, sound, video, virtual reality, and animation, the Internet is still driven primarily by the dissemination and gathering of information. The tremendous influx of business interests on the Net has given it an image of an emergent competitor with commercial television, where packaging often dwarfs content. For electronic publications such as MTO, the emphasis must of course be on qualitative scholarly content enhanced, but not overpowered, by graphical and audio supplements. That remains our objective.In the next issue of MTO several authors will present their work in multimedia, for the Net and otherwise. We hope that our readers will take note of the techniques used, will learn and, perhaps, follow up on the pioneering efforts of our authors by undertaking multimedia projects for classroom instruction or, hopefully, for MTO!
3. UCSB Support for MTO
For the last two years, the College of Letters and Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has generously supported MTO. The College continues to support our journal for the coming academic year. Without UCSB's help, we would not have been able to establish and run MTO or, for that matter, the SMT Web site as a whole. For all financial assistance, SMT and MTO are very grateful and wish to acknowledge the University's generosity.4. Glimpse: Site Search Engine
MTO subscribers who access the journal through our home page may have noticed a new service at the site. A few weeks ago we implemented a free-text search utility called Glimpse. Its simple interface allows users to search all publicly available areas of the SMT Web site, including of course the MTO areas, by entering any text string. Glimpse offers the option of case-sensitive or insensitive searches, and to limit the number of matches. As configured, Glimpse searches all directories containing issues of MTO as well as those containing past and current mto-talk discussion. Search results are organized by directory, and each match is displayed as a link leading to the document containing the specified search word(s). We hope that Glimpse will prove useful for research, or just for targeted browsing of the SMT Web site.Subscribers should keep in mind the MTO database, which also allows searching, but only of those items indexed in the database: essays, commentaries, and reviews, though not the dissertation listings, job postings, ads, announcements, or new book listings, nor the mto-talk archive. However, searching the MTO database yields results that associate essays with their related commentaries, something that Glimpse does not do.
5. Research Profile Database
MTO subscribers should be aware of a new service available on the SMT Web site, the Research Profile Database (RPD). Individuals register with the RPD by providing input on a Web form: name, institutional affliation, email address, home page URL, one or more pre-defined general categories of reserch, list of composers under investigation, and keywords (chosen freely or from a hyperlinked keyword thesaurus). The main feature of the RPD is a search utility, which people can use to search the RPD based on keywords or names. Simple Boolean searches are possible. Results of a search are displayed instantly (or nearly so) in the user's browser. The search result shows the information for each registrant whose database record contains the user-specifed search term(s). The email address and home page URL are displayed as hyperlinks to facilitate contact between scholars.The RPD will allow scholars to identify others who are working on topics they are interested in, and will hopefully facilitate contact and foster dialog among scholars with similar interests. The RPD may help graduate students (though not only) avoid duplicating research. It may also help in identifying appropriate participants for a topical session or panel that someone is thinking of proposing for a scholarly conference (e.g. SMT annual meeting or regional music theory society).
An RPD registration is password protected. Users specify a password on registration, and must enter it when modifying or removing their record from the database, the two main utilities of the RPD other than registration and searching.
The steady growth in the field of music theory worldwide makes it ever harder to find research topics that do not overlap with or duplicate work in progress in planning by others. The RPD should help to avoid, or at least minimize, duplicate research, and will perhaps stimulate scholars to identify new research areas or "angles." Further, the RPD will put people in contact who are working on similar and may promote collaborative projects.
The RPD is potentially an important research tool because it indexes research in progress. It picks up where standard bibliographic resources leave off (RILM, Dissertation Abstracts, Music Index), since they index completed and published research. Further, as a user-updatable index, the RPD should remain current. Finally, unlike published bibliographic indexes the RPD provides a means for scholars easily to contact one another, and perhaps to collaborate, on topics of mutual interest.
The more RPD registrants, the more valuable is the service. So please take a few moments to look at it and register your profile. A link for the RPD is located near the top of the SMT home page (http://societymusictheory.org/). The URL for the RPD is http://societymusictheory.org/smt-list/profiles.html.
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
Updated
03 July 2013
Brent Yorgason
