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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 April 2010
Twenty years of Cambridge Opera Journal: in view of the journal's place in the discipline, the occasion seemed worth marking. When Roger Parker and Arthur Groos founded Cambridge Opera Journal in 1989, it offered the first forum to the musical community for serious opera criticism that took into account changing orientations in literary studies and seriously engaged with ideology, reception history, and representations of race, class and gender. Subsequent editors – Mary Hunter, Mary Ann Smart, and Emanuele Senici – continued to foster this wide intellectual perspective and to engage with an extraordinary variety of methodologies. For the current issue, we gave carte blanche to authors who contributed in the first two years of publication to reflect on their past work, or on opera studies, or on the journal, either informally as an opinion piece or through new scholarship – and so to measure time by developments in the discipline itself.
1 ‘Constructions of Gender in Monteverdi's Dramatic Music’, this journal, 1 (1989), 203–23.
2 ‘The Blasphemy of Talking Politics during Bach Year’, in Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception, ed. Richard Leppert and Susan McClary (Cambridge, 1987), 52n44.
3 Catherine Clément, Opera, or the Undoing of Women, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis, 1988). For a recent reflection on the contributions and reception of Clément, see Joseph Kerman, ‘Verdi and the Undoing of Women’, this journal, 18 (2006), 21–31.
4 Lawrence Levine, High Brow/Low Brow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA, 1990).
5 To put this in some disciplinary perspective, recall that the journal 19th Century Music had blazed more or less the same path only slightly earlier in the late 1970s and early 1980s: the standard repertory of the symphony orchestra also seemed to need no scholarly attention. My teachers in graduate school were aghast at Leonard Bernstein's revival of Gustav Mahler, whose music they regarded as tacky.
6 Philip Gossett, ‘History and Works That Have No History: Reviving Rossini's Neapolitan Operas’, in Disciplining Music: Musicology and its Canons, ed. Katherine Bergeron and Philip V. Bohlman (Chicago, 1996), 95–115.
7 William Ashbrook and Harold Powers, Puccini's Turandot: The End of the Great Tradition (Princeton, 1991). The late Professor Powers spoke to me at length about these concerns.
8 See the review essay by Kim Kowalke, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 60 (2007), 688–714. Kowalke neglects to refer to female scholars who have become prominent in this area; see, for instance, Stacy Wolf, A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical (Ann Arbor, 2002). My colleague Raymond Knapp published the first article in this journal on musicals: see his ‘Assassins, Oklahoma! and the “shifting fringe of dark around the camp-fire”’, this journal, 16 (2004), 77–101.
9 Joseph Kerman, Contemplating Music (Cambridge, MA, 1985).
10 See Susan McClary, ‘Getting Down Off the Beanstalk’, in Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis, 1991), ch. 3.
