Current Musicology 97 (Spring 2014) © 2014 by the Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York 5 Editor’s Note The Acknowledgment—in which this note is, at least in part, an exer- cise—is a tricky genre: there are always too many people to thank but too few words fit for the task. A game presents itself: to avoid where possible repetitions of the golden word—the T–word—and its few synonyms; in other words, no thanks, no gratitude. Keith Richards (2010, 549), in his autobiography Life, has a tidy solution: a single “my thanks to . . .” and then two sober columns of alphabetically ordered names. Similarly, in one of the more moving exemplars, Roger Parker (2006, xi–xii) follows “thanks to . . .” with a sentence almost two pages long, where he honors each addressee with a personalized vignette held between semicolons. With tongue presumably in cheek, Tamara Levitz (2012, xvii) interrupts the steady toll of T–words when, rather than thank her proofreaders, she “thinks” them. This note is no place to reinvent the genre, so I will borrow a little from (at least the first two of) these examples by thanking, in one fell swoop, all who have contributed in any way to this issue. Surrounding the names mentioned below (not to mention nor forget those that I may have forgotten to mention), please imagine bouquets of grateful expressions. I thank all the participants for their work and dedication, of course, but also for their patience as this issue inched towards comple- tion; I also appreciate their forbearance with my occasionally neurotic editorial interventions—even as I write, some e–mail chains continue to creep into unrepeatable figures. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to work closely with the writers included here; these collaborations have populated the sometimes lonely road of scholarly life. The impetus behind this issue came when Cornell graduate students Evan Cortens and Caroline Waight wrote to me to suggest we publish proceedings from their conference, Music: Cognition, Technology, Society, which took place over the weekend of May 11–13, 2012.1 Although I did not take up their offer exactly, a few papers caught my eye; Cortens and Waight generously shared whatever contact information I requested. Three articles—those by Murray Dineen (former editor of this journal; welcome back!), Jonathan De Souza, and Carmel Raz—arrived via this route; however, after a lot of back and forth, only Dineen’s retains its original Cornell title. 6 Current Musicology In that article—“The Historical Soundscape of Monophonic Hi– Fidelity”—Dineen examines a key moment in the history of sound record- ing, one in which the emerging figure of the audiophile finds himself (and it is usually a he) caught between the pleasure and anxiety produced by the pursuit of fidelity and optimal performance where (sonic) reproduc- tive equipment is concerned. Warning: double entendres abound. With an impressive range of reference, Jonathan De Souza, in his “Voice and Instrument at the Origins of Music,” engages histories and philosophies of technology, paleoanthropology, and psychology to revisit perennial speculations surrounding the prehistorical precedence of the voice over the instrument. With the concept of musical “technics,” De Souza thinks through the complex of interrelationships between technique, technology, and vocality. Carmel Raz, in “The Lost Movements of Ernst Toch’s Gesprochene Musik,” introduces us to “a forgotten milestone in the history of electronic music,” Austrian composer Ernst Toch’s “Geographical Fugue” from 1930 (37). Raz provides both an in–depth history of the work and its (only) per- formance as well as a close analysis of its two “lost” movements, “O–a” and “Ta–tam.” Scores of these movements, edited by Christopher Caines—who, in addition to his notes, has submitted a delightful preface—are published here for the first time. I am especially excited to have been able to facilitate this publication, and I hope that the triptych of Toch items—the scholar’s article; the editor’s preface; the critical edition—will be a useful resource for musicologists and musicians of different stripes. The two remaining articles in this volume are unrelated to the Cornell conference. Gavin Steingo reignites the discussion around Lydia Goehr’s work–concept thesis in “The Musical Work Reconsidered, in Hindsight.” Through an illuminating analogy with the history and philosophy of money, Steingo sidesteps the common (and hotly disputed) question of when the work concept, once and for all, appeared; instead, he explores “various types of related [work] concepts and practices” and shifts the narrative to the “transition or even inversion of ‘where’ music is located” (82). In “Images of Time and Timelessness: A Musical Reading of Death in Venice,” Marlies De Munck takes Thomas Mann’s famously musicological novel, along with Luchino Visconti’s adaptation of the work, as the point of departure for an insightful meditation on her leading question “how to represent time in its fleetingness without halting, appropriating, objectify- ing, or transcending it?” (113). The book–reviews section, expertly edited by Joshua Navon, is an ex- clusively in–house product: all contributors (including the section editor) are graduate students in the music department at Columbia. The authors of 7 Thomas Fogg these incisive and stylish reviews are historical musicologists Paula Harper, Anne Levitsky, and Ralph Whyte, and ethnomusicologist Andrés García Molina. Under scrutiny are three significant books on twentieth–century media studies: Carol Vernallis’s Unruly Media: YouTube, Music Video, and the New Digital Cinema (Harper); David Novak’s Japanoise: Music at the Edge of Circulation (Molina); and The Sounds of Capitalism: Advertising, Music, and the Conquest of Culture (Whyte). Levitsky reviews Sarah Kay’s Parrots and Nightingales: Troubadour Quotation and the Development of European Poetry. The journal’s editorial board has been a great resource during the editing and proofreading of this issue; Didier Sylvain and Thomas Smith deserve a special mention in this regard, but I must insist on taking the blame for any undetected errors. I welcome Smith as the next editor–in–chief of the journal and look forward to his work as Current Musicology celebrates its 50th year in 2015. As my time as editor comes to an end, as I return my keys to the office, and as I wind down this note, I realize that I have painted myself into a corner: how can I end this Acknowledgment without writing, once more, a thank you? That game is, I suppose, up. Thomas Fogg Notes 1. Along with Cortens and Waight, the conference was organized by Taylan Cihan and Eric Nathan. References Richards, Keith. 2010. Life. New York: Little Brown and Company. Parker, Roger. 2008. Remaking the Song: Operatic Visions and Revisions from Handel to Berio. Berkeley: University of California Press. Levitz, Tamara. 2012. Modernist Mysteries: Perséphone. New York: Oxford University Press.