from Rich Crawford
Chair, Committee for the Publication of American Music

inaugurating OPUS in 2004

Tonight we celebrate the kick-off of OPUS: “Opening Paths to Unlimited Scholarship.” Here's proof that, as of the year 2004, the proposition of musical equality has been tested and found compatible with the AMS's long-time attachment to the Western canon. Indeed, tonight's banquet music, all by the way performed by card-carrying musicologists, reflects that compatibility. All the selections—art songs, popular songs, and a recreation of improvised jazz selections—have been chosen from volumes in the society's national series of scholarly editions, Music of the United States of America (MUSA), which is dedicated to representing the whole of American music. As I see it, the field of American music studies, testing the proposition of musical equality, has played a key role in confirming the attitude that brings us to an occasion like tonight's, and our campaign to raise funds in the name of Unlimited Scholarship.

Let's affirm too that “American music studies” takes in all of North America and territories to the south as well. Eurocentrism, after all, is not entirely free of provincial tendencies, and a cosmopolitan outlook has always been a strong suit of the AMS. Today, I believe, the musicological community seems ready to embrace the spirit of Article 2 of our By-Laws (which which commits the AMS to “the advancement of research in the various fields of music as a branch of learning and scholarship”), convinced that, in the twenty-first century, scholarly cosmopolitanism begins at home.

from ELAINE SISMAN
from JAMES LADEWIG | RICH CRAWFORD
from LOIS ROSOW & ANDREW DELL'ANTONIO | DAVID GRAMIT
from GREG BLOCH | SARAH EYERLY
from our student co-chairs:
ANA ALONSO-MINUTTI, ERICKA HONISCH, ROB PEARSON