From the Editors
Unlike the day after a big party, this year’s publication of volume 15 is even more momentous than the last. In the previous volume, PRE took a look back at our twenty-five year history, but this year is all about looking forward. Like many in the discipline at large, PRE’s editors, authors, and contributors grapple with a variety of pressing questions. In what direction should the discipline of ethnomusicology proceed? What function will academic journals have in the future, and how will they be relevant to society as a whole? Finally, how will emerging scholars push the boundaries of the field without forsaking the achievements of the past? These questions and others are addressed by Steven Loza in a candid interview, forming this year’s “Sounding Board” column.
Continuing PRE’s commitment to expand the field through publications in languages other than English, volume 15 features an article in Portuguese by Ewelter Rocha of the Universidade Estadual do Ceará. Most significantly for this year, Pacific Review of Ethnomusicology is augmenting the “review” aspect of its name. In an effort to take a multi-regional “pulse” of ethnomusicological scholarship, PRE has published the prize-winning papers from the 2010 annual meetings of the Northern California, New England, and Southern Plains chapters of SEM. These papers have been published largely as read, undergoing few editorial changes.
It is our hope that supplementing the traditional scholarly journal in the ways mentioned above will give our readers a broader and timelier picture of current scholarship across regions and languages. Many more changes are in store for PRE in the near future as we strive to make academic publishing and scholarship more open and representative of the diverse voices, questions, topics, and intellectual approaches that constitute our field.