30 Years of Leonardo Music Journal

you hold in your hands—or, more likely, are reading on a screen—the thirtieth and final volume of Leonardo Music Journal. I am writing in September 2020 from a workspace carved out of a corner of my dining room in Oakland, California. We are in our sixth month of social distancing made necessary by the COVID-19 virus. In the United States, we are in the midst of an intense presidential election season. Massive wildfires are raging all along the West Coast. Locally, nationally and internationally, people are rising up in a reinvigorated civil rights movement fighting for racial justice.

We are living in a strange, disconcerting and turbulent time in which it seems like everything is changing all at once, and not to acknowledge it would be to only tell part of this story. For what we are learning through the chaos brought by pandemic, environmental devastation, racial reckonings and divisive politics is that the connections, communication and collaboration that are central to Leonardo's mission are the most critical values to nurture and uphold.

When longtime LMJ Editor-in-Chief Nic Collins retired from his position in 2017, I had only recently joined the Leonardo organization. Nic's leadership and vision had driven the music journal for 20 years. In the Leonardo Publications Committee along with Executive Editor Roger Malina and Chair Darlene Tong, we deliberated: Do we find a new EIC? Do we return to a strategy in which each volume of LMJ is edited by a different member of the editorial board? Do we retire the journal and, with that, dissemination of music and sound art? None of these ideas felt right.

The impending thirtieth volume of LMJ gave us a deadline of sorts—if we were to retire the title, 30 is a nice round number to land on. In the spirit of Leonardo's fearless boundary-breaking and dismantling of silos, the answer became clear: There is no meaningful reason that music and sound art need to be differentiated from the visual art and practice published in the flagship Leonardo journal. And so, in keeping with our mission of transcending disciplines, I am pleased to announce that the type of innovation and groundbreaking work that we have featured in LMJ for 30 years will now have greater visibility through yearlong inclusion in Leonardo journal, which, in 2021, will expand its publication from five to six issues annually.

In this space, I acknowledge and give gratitude to the many people who have contributed their time and talent to the success of this journal: Nic Collins, for 20 years of stewardship; founding editor Larry Polansky; former Leonardo director and managing editor Patricia Bentson; Tom Erbe, for mastering and engineering each year's Audio Companion; and every artist, writer, staff editor, guest editor, editorial board member, peer reviewer, researcher, academic and curator who contributed to this journal's success. And you, dear reader.

This is a year of radical transformation in the way we work, live, love and make our way through our world. When we went into quarantine and the doors to our institutions closed, we felt cut off from our communities. But we have learned new ways of living and loving, connecting and collaborating. And so it is with LMJ—this final issue is not a closure. It is an opportunity to transcend disciplines, increase dissemination of interdisciplinary excellence and participate in the radical transformations of art, science, technology and humanity.