Diego Alonso is a Senior Researcher (Ramón y Cajal) at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. He received his PhD with a thesis on Schoenberg's influence on Gerhard's music. He has been a visiting scholar at Humboldt University (Berlin), University of Cambridge, Goldsmiths, University of London, and the Staatliches Institut für Musikforschung (Berlin). From 2018 to 2022 he headed the research project Hanns Eisler in Republican Spain at Humboldt University. He is founder and leader of the research group Deutsch-Ibero-Amerikanische Musikbeziehungen of the German Musicological Society. He has published in leading journals including Acta musicologica, Twentieth-Century Music, Music Analysis, Die Musikforschung, Journal of War and Culture Studies, and Musicologica Austriaca (Best Paper Award 2019).
Gregor Herzfeld is Professor of Musicology at Universität Regensburg, Germany where he researches and teaches music in the context of US history, historical perspectives on musical aesthetics, and the role of music in different art and media forms such as literature, film, and video games. He has been Assistant Professor at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, Freie Universität Berlin, and Universität Wien, and has conducted research at Yale and Johns Hopkins universities. Before joining the Regensburg faculty in 2022, he held appointments as Privatdozent at Universität Basel and as visiting professor in Stuttgart, Munich, and Regensburg. His first book, Time as Process and Epiphany: From Charles Ives to La Monte Young (Franz Steiner Verlag, 2007), explores ways of modelling time according to different theoretical conceptions in US experimental music. His second book, Poe in Music: A Versatile Alliance (Waxmann Verlag, 2013), is the first and only monograph on the musical reception of Edgar Allan Poe.
Sarah Kirby is a research fellow at the Grainger Museum, University of Melbourne. A recent doctoral graduate of the Melbourne Conservatorium, her PhD research explored music at international exhibitions in the British Empire throughout the 1880s. She has published on Australian music history, women in music, and music and museum culture, and her first monograph, Exhibitions, Music and the British Empire, is out now with Boydell & Brewer. She is associate editor of Musicology Australia, and was the 2022 Nancy Keesing Fellow at the State Library of NSW. She is also the recipient of the 2023 McCredie Musicological Award from the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
Edmund Mendelssohn is a Lecturer in Music at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on music and philosophy in Europe and the United States from 1800 to the present, with particular emphasis on modernism and French poststructuralism. His first book, White Musical Mythologies: Sonic Presence in Modernism (Stanford University Press, 2023), is a study of four twentieth-century composers (Satie, Varèse, Boulez, and Cage) alongside contemporaneous philosophies of ‘presence’ from Bergson to Derrida. His current research project examines the theme of presence in a different milieu, re-listening to jazz improvisation in New York and Paris during the mid- to late twentieth century (with specific focus on Mary Lou Williams and Miles Davis).
Sam Ridout is a writer based in London. His research is concerned with the ways in which experimental electronic music places pressure on theoretical accounts of music. His current research is concerned with the ambivalent cultural positioning of electroacoustic music in France between the 1940s and the 1970s, attending to its various engagements with mass culture, counterculture, and avant-garde theoretical and artistic production. In 2021 he completed a PhD on Pierre Schaeffer and musique concrète at the University of Leeds, supervised by Martin Iddon and Scott McLaughlin.
Ed Katrak Spencer is Assistant Professor of Screen and Music Cultures at Utrecht University. His research concerns electronic dance music in the social media era, the political weaponization of music via audiovisual web content, and music-related online conspiracy theories. Together with Joana Freitas, Steven Gamble, Maria Perevedentseva, and Jenessa Williams he is co-founder of the Music and Online Cultures Research Network (www.mocren.org).
Mikkel Vad is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Copenhagen and specializes in transnational jazz history, popular music studies, and twentieth-century music. His research and publications focus on questions of race, cultural memory, media, and cultural belonging. He teaches problem-based courses on cultural theory, historiography, media studies, and music where students learn to think critically about music and the arts across genres, time periods, and cultures. The article published in this issue is the first part of a larger project focusing on discourses of colour blindness, ‘reverse racism’, and racialized listening in sound media and music culture.
Ulrik Volgsten is Professor of Musicology at Örebro University, Sweden. His research is concerned with the conceptual history of music aesthetics (composer, work, listener), and how factors such as copyright law and recording and playback technology has influenced the Western concept of music. He has also published articles on affect attunement and resonance.
