From the Editor

The first time I heard a scholarly paper about Madonna was in May 1991. It was one of a fleet of papers read at the "American Studies Connecting with Religion" conference at UCLA and ignited a lot of discussion between the paper's author and me concerning Madonna's cultural weight as a singer/songwriter/dancer and entrepreneur of her own exotic image. That event came to mind this week, which, as I write, is the week after Michael Jackson died and left musicologists in the same sort of colloquy as I had with that Madonna scholar eighteen years ago. But all these discussions about pop artists' suitability for musicological attention carry my mind back further, to the late 1960s, when Lennon and McCartney, previously dismissed as "mere" rock 'n' rollers, began to be regarded as compositional craftsmen worthy of scrutiny by intellectuals. Among "legit" composers, Bernstein and Rorem were among the Beatles' more prominent admirers. Meanwhile, Wilfrid Mellers, in his Twilight of the Gods: The Music of the Beatles, provided one of the first sustained academic treatments of that group's work as part of the western tradition of "serious" music.¹

I never met Mellers (1914–2008), but I remember him vividly from his three-minute appearance in the brilliant 1987 television documentary It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, where he moans through the Beatles' "She's Leaving Home" at the piano, then fervently explains the emotive meaning of the coda's V/V to IV motion—a very common harmonic idiom in Beatles songs, whose import I've taught to hundreds of students in the last twenty-two years, channeling the insight I got from Mellers in that film.²

Mellers, like the Beatles, deeply admired American music, as one can feel in his nearly forgotten Music in a New Found World: Themes and Developments in the History of American Music, a history marked by his characteristically high-spirited eloquence, kaleidoscopic wit, and dramatic shifts in tone, all of which arguably reflect Americanism itself.³ I leave for others to judge whether or not Mellers was a pioneer in American musical historiography. But he certainly helped pioneer something we now take for granted: erudite and zealous British scholarship on the music of the United States. If you want to taste a bit of Mellers's scholarly flavor, read his interview with Walter Piston in this issue's Historians' Corner.