Letter from the Editor

I find it a humbling, even a daunting, honor to write this, my first page as Women and Music's editor in chief. It is an honor to have been entrusted with three years of this journal's life, and it is both humbling and daunting to succeed Women and Music's first editor in chief, Cathy Pickar. All of us who care deeply about the kind of scholarship that finds its home in these pages owe Cathy a deep debt of gratitude. She has worked with tireless, tactful, and always gracious energy to weave the ideas and scholarly work of our community into North America's first scholarly journal devoted entirely to issues of gender and sexuality in relation to music. In my opinion we cannot thank Cathy enough (although I would encourage everyone who reads these pages to thank her directly). Nor can I thank her enough, personally, for her generosity in agreeing to continue as managing editor and as a matchless mentor to me. I also want to thank the International Alliance of Women in Music (IAWM), whose vision and nurturing support, both financial and otherwise, have enabled the journal's continued existence.

On our collective behalf I would also like to thank retiring book review editor Fred Maus. Fred has shown rare (if characteristic) imagination and vision, both in the materials he has thought it pertinent for this journal to review and in his choice of reviewers. Although we will miss Fred's particular sensibility and scholarly acumen, I welcome our new book review editor, Martha Mockus, with great anticipation and pleasure. A graduate of the University of Minnesota's interdisciplinary program Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society and winner of the Philip Brett Award for her dissertation on Pauline Oliveros, Martha teaches gender and sexuality studies at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Readers of Martha's review in this issue will soon discover that she brings a different, equally acute scholarly and political sensibility to the gathering of reviews for the journal.

Cathy, Martha, and I mean to reaffirm Women and Music's commitment to publish the very best scholarship on gender and sexuality in relation to music and the journal's commitment to publish scholarship from the widest possible range of perspectives. Although our title may have sometimes seemed to imply otherwise, we do not mean to limit our content to scholarship focused exclusively on women's music making. On the contrary, we mean explicitly to welcome scholarship on masculinities and music as well as scholarship that contemplates the ways in which experiences across the full range of LGBTQ sensibilities touch and interact with musical experiences. Moreover, we hope that Women and Music will both document and advance the collective conversation about gender, culture, and music in which you, our readers, continue to engage.

As part of our interest in advancing that conversation we introduce in this volume a new section entitled "Theorizing Gender, Culture, and Music." We mean to solicit for this section essays and reviews that address the theoretical premises that enable (or sometimes impede) our work, and we mean to highlight new ideas about

music, gender, and sexuality that come from scholars who do not identify themselves as musicians. Thus, in this volume this section presents two very different perspectives on feminist political philosopher Adriana Cavarero's book-length essay A più voci (Feltrinelli, 2003), scheduled to be released in English translation a few days after this volume goes to press as For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression (Stanford University Press, 2005). Italian musicologist (trained in philosophy) Annamaria Cecconi offers a rich, politically astute reading of Cavarero's work as it resonates with the distinctive voices of Italian feminist theory, while musicologist Mary Ann Smart reads Cavarero's work as it might resonate with current North American scholarship on opera and voice. Although we could not have foreseen this when we began gathering material for this volume, both these essays complement the articles they follow, for all address issues of womanhood in scholarly, performative, or represented negotiation with the concept of voice...