Welcome, New Editors!

Happy 2014, fellow ethnomusicologists! My name is Alex W. Rodriguez, and it is with great pleasure that I am stepping into the position of Editor In Chief for Volume 19 of Ethnomusicology Review, in our 30th year of publication.

With the new year well underway, production for this year's edition is off to a great start. The Sounding Board is publishing new reviews, features, and editorials. (If you haven't seen new SEM President Beverly Diamond's take on today's job market, I highly recommend it!) Also, the Journal Volume, which will go to press in November, is currently accepting submissions. The deadline to submit is just a month away, so please send us your work for consideration.

This year, the journal's production is being managed by a team of nine editors. You can read a little more about me at my user page or my blog; allow me to introduce the others here, as well. The first four are continuing their work that they began with us last year:

Mike D'Errico is our Technical Editor. He is a PhD student in the UCLA Department of Musicology and the Digital Humanities Graduate Certificate Program. His research interests and performance activities include hip-hop and electronic dance music, video games and generative media, and sound studies. Current projects include ethnographies on hip-hop and electronic dance music communities in Los Angeles (Low End Theory, Team Supreme, Brainfeeder), sound design for the RomeLab virtual world project, and ongoing research on convergence media and interactive audio in contemporary digital audio production. He is also currently the web editor and social media manager for the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, as well as Echo: a music-centered journal.

Alyssa Mathias is the Managing Editor for the Journal Volume. She is PhD student in ethnomusicology at UCLA, where her research focuses on music of the Armenian diaspora. She received her MA from UCLA and a BA from the University of Chicago. A violinist and singer, Alyssa performs a wide variety of music from Europe and the Middle East. She was also the Managing Editor for Volume 18 of Ethnomusicology Review.

Eric J. Schmidt is the Managing Editor for the Sounding Board, and a PhD student in the UCLA Department of Ethnomusicology. His research focuses on traditional and popular musics in the Sahara and Sahel regions of West Africa, particularly among Tuareg.

Darci Sprengel is our Reviews Editor. She is currently a PhD student in the UCLA Department of Ethnomusicology. She received a BMA in viola performance and BA in Middle Eastern studies from the University of Michigan in 2010. From 2010 to 2011, she spent a year working with musicians in Egypt and studying Arabic at the University of Alexandria. Her current interests include new music from the Middle East, community art projects, sound in urban spaces, and gender and feminist studies.

We are also pleased to welcome four new Associate Editors to the team this year, each of whom will manage one subsection of our Sounding Board. A little bit about each of them:

Rose Boomsma is a Wisconsin native and a graduate of Howard University. Her academic interests lie in the appropriation of indigenous music and the diverse roles that the flute plays in cultures worldwide. Currently, she is writing on the renaissance of the Native American flute as a tool for New Age music enthusiasts. She manages the Notes From the Field subsection of the Sounding Board.

Ben Doleac received his Master's degree in Ethnomusicology from the University of Alberta. A native of New Hampshire, he is currently a PhD student at UCLA. He is currently conducting research on drumming traditions and contemporary brass band music in New Orleans. He manages the Bring the Noise subsection of the Sounding Board.

AJ Kluth comes to UCLA’s ethnomusicology program (systematic musicology specialization) after having received graduate degrees in humanities and social thought (NYU) and jazz saxophone performance (DePaul University). His research interests include contemporary philosophical interpretive strategies of musical meaning, aesthetics, philosophy of mind, cognitive psychology, ethnomusicology, and jazz studies. He currently manages the Space is the Place subsection of the Sounding Board.

Kristina Nielsen completed her B.M. in piano performance at Western Washington University and studied for an additional year at the Native American Language and Cultures program at Copenhagen University. She is currently a doctoral student at UCLA with an interest in pre-Columbian instruments and modern reinterpretations of pre-Columbian music. She founded and now manages the Historical Perspectives subsection of the Sounding Board.

I sincerely hope that you enjoy the work that these eight outstanding scholars put together with Ethnomusicology Review this year. Finally, I'd like to close with a heartfelt appreciation for the tremendous work of outgoing Editor in Chief Scott Linford, whose skillful leadership set the table for us this year. Thank you, Scott!