The 701 Articles of <i>American Music</i>: A Quantitative Study of Forty Years of Scholarship

The journal American Music stands as an expanding body of permanent scholarship widely available in libraries and online. This corpus—up to but not including this, the 160th issue—encompasses forty volumes divided into 159 issues containing a total of 701 articles authored by 740 scholars.1 Only thirty-one articles in the history of the journal—a mere 4 percent—credit more than one author. This statistic precisely expresses in quantitative terms the predominance of single-author scholarship in the music disciplines.This multiauthored study, written by the current editor and editorial assistants, gathers and analyzes data on each of the 701 articles in American Music. The goal is to consider larger trends in American music studies across the last forty years, a period when scholars of American music—a growing cohort in the academy in these decades—worked to consolidate what stands today as a strong position for the topic in the music disciplines, especially historical musicology. As the oldest journal devoted to the topic, American Music provides the longest evenly distributed record of trends in the production and content of permanent scholarship in this area.For each article, authors Daniel Fister and Rachel Jones, with help from Andrew Tubbs, gathered uniform data about article author(s) and content. Data collected about authors includes gender, race, and professional location and rank at the time of the article's publication. Author data draws on both the author biographies published with the articles and internet research and relies on our own respectful guesses as to individual scholars’ gender and racial and ethnic identities.2 Collecting data on article topics and content proved challenging given the journal's practice of not including abstracts. We did not read every article but instead used article titles and introductions and conclusions to quickly identify the following content areas for each article: time period and geographic region(s) covered, styles of music discussed, and the gender and race of the musical agents (composers, performers, etc.) at the center of the article.We parse this data in two ways: (1) the totality of the forty issues and (2) by volumes in groups of ten to show change over time. The journal commenced publication in 1983 as an official organ of the Society for American Music (then the Sonneck Society).3 Thus, volumes one through ten are dated 1983 through 1992—more or less the 1980s. Each subsequent decade of the journal nearly maps onto the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s. Conducting quantitative analysis by breaking down the data by decade in this way allows us to track larger changes in the field.Data on the gender of article authors, when parsed by decade, shows a clear trajectory. As shown by the solid lines in Figure 1, by decade 4 the balance between men and women authors is just about—but not quite yet—equal. However, the weight of the past endures: the dotted lines show the forty-year average for the journal: two of three authors are men.Better than nine of ten authors are White. Only 7 percent are scholars of color. This gross imbalance remains across all four decades. For comparison, consider that 8 percent of authors are graduate students.Ninety-one percent of authors were based in the United States at time of publication.Analysis of the 740 authors by rank tells a data-driven story of the place of American music studies in the academy. (To reiterate, this data reflects rank at the time of each article's publication with individual authors counted as many times as they published in the journal.) Figure 2 divides the data into six categories: tenured faculty (including emeritus), tenure-track faculty (assistant professors), students, independent scholars, composers, and a combined group of academic positions adjacent to the permanent faculty, such as contingent faculty, librarians, and postdocs.4 Noteworthy trends in this data include: After dominating the journal in decades 1 and 2, the contribution of tenured authors levels off in decades 3 and 4 to about a third of all authors.Student authors represent 8 percent of all authors and have never risen above 11 percent in any decade. Of the fifty-nine student authors, only one was an undergraduate.The journal's historic role documenting classical composition and composers, often in interview formats and through contributions by writers from outside the academy, comes to a definitive close in decade 4 when composers cease to appear among the authors.Authors on the tenure track show a marked rise across decades 2 and 3, then decline somewhat in decade 4. Indeed, by decade 4 the assistant professors and the mixed group of mostly contingent academics reach parity. The role of the journal in advancing scholarly careers along the tenure track (or not) is illuminated by a more fine-grained view of the data as seen in Figure 3.Figure 3 selects out the 397 authors in tenure or tenure-track positions and sorts this subgroup by rank (assistant, associate, full). In decade 1, the journal was mostly an outlet for full professors: we speculate most professors publishing on American music in these years had earned tenure based on work outside American music. Decade 2 (roughly the 1990s) sees the start of a two-decade rise in assistant professor authors. The career prospects for a new professor working on American topics seems evident here, and with it the very notion of a tenure-line position focused on American music. This reading is supported by the rise in associate professor authors in decade 4 (roughly the 2010s), an echo of the rising participation of assistant professor authors in the previous two decades. If we treat each decade as more or less a generation of scholars, then the data suggest a trajectory of institutionalizing American music studies as reflected in the need for tenure-track professors to use publication in a peer-reviewed journal to support their tenure dossiers. The role of American Music as the first such journal in this area of study is thus reflected in the changing mix of ranks among its authors.In this light, the slight decline in assistant professor authors and the rise of non-faculty and contingent faculty authors in decade 4 (see Figure 2 where these groups converge) provides cause for concern. In the last ten years, the odds are equal—one in four—that an American Music author will be in either of these two groups. And yet, of course, both groups demand the investment of time and money in the achievement of a PhD, virtually always in the topic of American music studies.The individuals named in the pages of American Music have, quite literally, made history. Their names will endure—and none more so than the 378 individuals who are named in the 701 article titles. As one might expect, composers and performers dominate but non-musical historical figures, such as several U.S. presidents, also appear. The gender balance of this group is extremely lopsided: 90.5 percent are men; 9.5 percent are women. Of course, quantifying gender in article content in this way shows a bias towards scholarship that elevates named individuals as historical agents. It may be the case that research on amateur women in music or methods drawn from ethnomusicology intentionally avoids such naming of historical subjects in the title.Parsing article topics by decade quantifies a significant ebb and flow of scholarly interests in American music studies. Figure 4 sorts the articles into five groups: pre-nineteenth century, nineteenth century, twentieth century pre-World War II, twentieth century post-World War II, and twenty-first century.5 Two significant trends are evident: a decline in articles on the nineteenth century and an accelerating bias toward scholarship on what might be called the rolling recent past. In decade 1, nearly half of all articles dealt with music in the nineteenth century. By decade 3, this fell to just over 10 percent and remained so into decade 4. (Articles on pre-nineteenth century topics show a similar decline: from 10 percent in decades 1 and 2 to near zero in decades 3 and 4. Only three articles on pre-nineteenth century topics have been published in the journal since 2000.)Historical periods on the rise in this data show a pattern: scholars published in American Music in decades 2, 3, and 4 consistently wrote about more recent musics than did the authors of decade 1. And the definition of “more recent” tightens over time. To see this dynamic at work, consider the categories twentieth-century post-World War II and twenty-first century in Figure 4. The former rises to nearly half of all articles in decade 3 (an almost exact inverse trajectory to the decline of the nineteenth century). The twenty-first century category—impossible until the twenty-first century begins!—charts a dramatic rise in decade 4, reaching near parity with the post-war twentieth century category, which declines substantially. The data suggest that in the case of American music studies (as found in this journal), any customary chronological buffer between a scholarly topic and the date of scholarly publication on said topic has shrunk to near zero.In his 2001 book America's Musical Life, Richard Crawford—author of the first article in the first issue of this journal—sorted American music into three large categories: classical, popular, and folk.6 Following Crawford's rubric, we placed each of the 701 articles into one of these categories. The task proved generally straightforward: the category crossover (needed, for example, for articles on the use of folk tunes by classical composers) proved statistically insignificant.7Figure 5 shows style data by decade. Striking here is the consistent marginality of folk music, registering between 11 percent and 18 percent. Classical (or art and concert music) topics have dominated, with their lead over popular (or commercial music) topics changing over the decades.We also collected data on the racial and ethnic identities of the musical agents studied in each article. The overwhelming whiteness of the musical subjects treated in these pages is evident across the decades. Only in decade 4 does the category White drop below half of all articles (48 percent). In decades 1 through 3, White musical subjects average well over two-thirds. Of note is the relatively minor place of scholarship on Black subjects in the journal: just 11 percent on average across the forty years. Indeed, in decades 1, 3, and 4, articles treating non-White, not-Black subjects—for example, Asian American, Latinx, and multiracial subjects—exceed those on Black subjects.The above data allows for the definition of a statistically typical American Music article as to musical style and gender and race of musical subjects discussed. Over the forty-year history of the journal, almost one-third (30.5 percent) of all articles have been about a White man in classical music. Forty-six percent of articles have been about White men.How United States-centric is the scholarship appearing in the first forty years of American Music? To answer this question, we tagged each article with a geopolitical entity: the United States, Canada, or Latin America (including the Caribbean). As shown in Figure 6a, articles dealing with music in the United States make up the overwhelming majority: some 84 percent. Articles on Canada and Latin America fall well below a full 1 percent, respectively. (Eduardo Herrera's article in this issue deals directly with the content of scholarship on Latin American musics in the journal.) The 104 (15 percent) articles that deal with more than one region were categorized under the term transnational.Closer analysis of the transnational category only adds to the U.S. slant of the journal while also underlining the persistence of whiteness in these pages. We assumed (correctly) that any article in the journal must deal with at least one American region: United States, Canada, or Latin America. The other region dealt with in transnational articles could, of course, be outside the Americas. And so, for each transnational article, we tagged two regions: one in the Americas (region A), and a second region either in the Americas or beyond (region B). As seen in Figure 6b, the vast majority (83 percent) of transnational articles take the United States as their region A, repeating the slant towards the United States found in the full corpus. To gather region B data, we expanded our geopolitical categories to include Asia, Africa, continental Europe, and the British Isles. Figure 7 charts region B within the eighty-six transnational articles with the United States as their region A. By far the most common region B has been continental Europe and the British Isles. By this measure, transnational scholarship in American Music has more often than not been a matter of musical interchange between political regions dominated by White Europeans and, by extension, musically dominated by the Western canon.Having shown data relating to the maleness, whiteness, and United States-centric nature of most of the scholarship published in these pages, we close with a look at one strategy that has demonstrably diversified the content and authors of American Music: special issues. Special issues feature thematically or topically related articles that are accepted as a group. There are twenty-eight special issues (about 18 percent of all issues). Usually, a guest editor or editors assemble the related articles (which typically fill an entire issue) and often also write a short introduction. Of the 701 articles published in the journal, 144 have appeared in special issues. A comparison of article and author data between these 144 special issue articles and the remaining 557 articles (accepted individually) reveals the important role of special issues in bringing a diversity of topics and authors into the pages of American Music. Articles about twenty-first-century music, popular music, transnational topics, and media are 10 percent to 14 percent more likely to appear in special issues. Among the topics that are less likely to appear in special issues are composers (−15 percent), White people (−17 percent), and men (−30 percent). More significantly, women authors are almost at parity with men in special issues, compared to all volumes where men outnumber women two to one. Typically, special issue authors approach the journal editor with an idea and a list of contributors. If readers of the journal want to see a particular topic covered in American Music, one way to spur such publication and amplify the impact on this body of scholarship is to propose and deliver a special issue.

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.