Author Description

The Musical Quarterly, founded in 1915 by Oscar Sonneck, has long been cited as the premier scholarly musical journal in the United States. Over the years it has published the writings of virtually every important musicologist of this century including Aaron Copland, Arnold Schoenberg, Marc Blitzstein, Henry Cowell, and Camille Saint-Saëns. In 1993, Leon Botstein assumed editorship of The Musical Quarterly. Botstein, who is music director and principal conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra, has guest-conducted orchestras around the world and recorded new works by the American composers Meyer Kupferman, Richard Wilson, and Robert Starer. President of Bard College since 1975, he has published extensively in The New York Times, Harper's, and The New Republic, as well as The Musical Quarterly. Under his direction, MQ focuses on the merging areas in scholarship where much of the challenging new work in the study of music is being produced. Regular sections include "American Musics," "Music and Culture," "The Twentieth Century," and an "Institutions, Industries, Technologies" section which examines music and the ways it is created and consumed. In addition, a fifth section entitled "Primary Sources" features discussions on issues of biography, texts, and manuscripts; reflections on leading figures; personal statements by noted performers and composers; and essays on performances and recordings. And along with discussions of important new books, MQ publishes review essays on a wide variety of significant new music performances and recordings.