From the Editor

I have a problem: I'm not sure if I'm a musicologist masquerading as a composer or a composer masquerading as a musicologist. I have a doctorate in composition, I head the composition division of a major university, and, yes, I write music that sometimes gets played. I even have the good fortune of being referred to in Taruskin's Oxford History of Western Music as a "composer." But I actually don't compose much at all. And maybe more to the point, I lack the qualifications laid out by Schoenberg in his 1938 tribute to George Gershwin, whom he calls a composer, "that is, a man who lives in music and expresses everything, serious or not, sound or superficial by means of music, because it is his native language." That's not me. Besides, almost everywhere I go, I'm introduced as a "musicologist." But for that I have no credentials—no degrees, no faculty position in music history, only a few books and articles and, of course, this editorial assignment, in which I generally feel like a chauffeur without a license.