Searching

Search is a new online open access "Journal for New Music and Culture." The editorial staff and authors in the first issue come -- without apologies -- from the complexier corners of Newmusicland. I'm pretty much a foreigner in those parts of our little republic, but from what I've read here and elsewhere, as much as the content interests me, I have to register some disappointment that the prose style common in those corners tends to slip into an acceptable dialect of current academic English, with well-made essays and all the essential emblematic phrases, instead of venturing even a bit of the formal experimentation that one finds in the music itself. In other words, it bores before it has a chance to provoke and it ought to be the other way around. So, to the gents (and the ed board and writers in the first issue happen all to be male) of Search: I wish you well, but I hope that you will take some opportunity to apply the same compositional courage summoned up by your music to the words you choose to accompany the music.