Loose Radicals

The first issue of a new journal, Radical Musicology, is online here. In the end musicologists, however radicalized, are just going to do musicology and it's tough for me to see exactly how this project will distinguish itself from the current cultural studies turn of plain vanilla musicology. But skepticism aside, there are a few readable items here. I like the framing "Fifth Column" by Ian Biddle (insisting that he's not writing that which elsewhere would be called an editorial):

And yet, musicology since Guido Adler has aimed squarely at wresting the study of music from the amateur, from that ‘lover’ of music, the hopeless enthusiast: in this sense, a least, the advent of musicology was not a moment of liberation or radicalisation but an intense institutionalisation...