Editorial

It would be an understatement of fact to say that the topics in this issue of Discourses in Music are diverse. They range from medieval song to 18^th century pastoral opera and electronic dance music. The variety of subject matters notwithstanding, however, this issue fully embraces the journal's signal value of academic discourse. It is in this spirit that Sarah Carleton and Luis Garcia were solicited to write reviews of the same CD recording, Hughes de Courson’s Lux Obscura (EMI/Virgin Classics, 2003). Approaching the recording from the perspectives of a medievalist and an electronic dance music specialist, respectively, Carleton and Garcia derive compelling, yet divergent conclusions about the aesthetic and cultural value of a musical product that declares itself an "electro-medieval project." Continuing in the spirit of critical discourse, Sandy Thorburn's review of Leslie Kinton's "How We Got Out of Analysis and How to Get Back In: A Polemical Re-Appraisal of Joseph Kerman", which appeared in the previous issue of Discourses engages the reader in a critical re-appraisal of its own, acknowledging the compelling aspects of the arguments set forth by Kinton while firmly contesting their particulars.

The two lead articles for this edition are likewise divergent in both their topics and academic approaches. Brian Macmillan examines the validity and significance of Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark as a work that merits the title "musical" or even "anti-musical" in "Complicitous Critique: Dancer in the Dark as Postmodern Musical." Drawing on the same body of knowledge as Garcia in his review of Lux Obscura, MacMillan offers additional perspective in examining the status of Dancer in the Dark within the parameters of postmodern art. Tim Neufeldt's "Italian Pastoral Opera and Pastoral Politics in England, 1705-1712," on the other hand, is a detailed historical inquiry into the genres of opera and pastoral within the framework of political and cultural class-consciousness in the early eighteenth century. Exploring the at times bitter cultural and economic conflicts between purveyors of English and and Italian aesthetic values, Neufeldt brings to light the social circumstanances of the period as they were manifested in its most popular and prominent musical incarnations.

As always, Discourses in Music invites responses to everything that we publish as well as submissions, from young scholars of all disciplines, related to music in all of its aspects.

-Jamie Younkin, Guest Editor