David Beard is Lecturer in Music at Cardiff University. His research centres on post-war British music and opera. His work on Harrison Birtwistle has been published by this journal, Cambridge Opera Journal, Music Analysis, and The Musical Times. He is currently preparing a monograph entitled Harrison Birtwistle's Operas and Music Theatre for Cambridge University Press, which draws on sketch material held at the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel. He has recently contributed chapters to Maxwell Davies Studies (on Taverner), Ancient Drama in Music for the Modern Stage (on Peter Hall's Oresteia and Oedipus Plays), and Music and Gender (on Judith Weir's Blond Eckbert). He is co-author of Musicology: The Key Concepts (Routledge, 2005).

Aaron Berkowitz completed a PhD in Music at Harvard University in 2009. His research on the neurobiological basis of improvisation has been published in the journal NeuroImage and was awarded their Editor's Choice Award for Systems Neuroscience in 2008. A book on cognition in improvisation is forthcoming in the Psychology of Music series published by Oxford University Press. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in music and a Bachelor of Science in biology from George Washington University, as well as a certificate in piano performance from the Conservatoire Russe de Paris-Scriabine and is an active composer, pianist, and fortepianist. His compositions have been performed in the United States (including Carnegie Hall) and Europe, and he has given solo and chamber music recitals in the United States and Europe as well. He is currently completing his MD at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Ruth Dockwray completed her PhD, ‘Deconstructing the Rock Anthem: Textual Form, Participation and Collectivity’, at the Institute of Popular Music, University of Liverpool, in 2005. From 2006 to 2009 she worked with Professor Allan Moore on two AHRC-funded projects at the University of Surrey and a project on transferable skills in higher education for NAMHE. She has presented papers at international conferences, including the International Association for the Study of Popular Music biennial conferences, and contributed to the BBC Radio 4 documentary ‘A Three Minute Education’. She was appointed Senior Lecturer in Popular Music at Southampton Solent University in 2009.

Byron Dueck is University Fellow in Music at the Open University. He studied ethnomusicology at the University of Chicago, where he received his PhD in 2005. His doctoral research focused on public performances of First Nations and Métis music and dance in the western Canadian city of Winnipeg. His research interests include indigenous music and dance in Canada; musical intimacies and publics; rhythm, metre, motion, and collective experience; musical representations of multiculturalism; public festivity and national imaginaries; and metapragmatic approaches to music.

Sophie Fuller works as a freelance musicologist and teaches at Trinity College of Music, London. Her research interests include many different aspects of music, gender, and sexuality but focus in particular on musical life in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain. She is the author of The Pandora Guide to Women Composers: Britain and the United States, 1629–present (Pandora, 1994) and co-editor of two collections of essays: with Lloyd Whitesell, Queer Episodes in Music and Modern Identity (University of Illinois Press, 2002) and The Idea of Music in Victorian Fiction (Ashgate, 2004) with Nicky Losseff. She is currently working on musical salons in England at the turn of the nineteenth century and, with Jenny Doctor, on an edition of the correspondence between Elizabeth Maconchy and Grace Williams.

Allan Moore is Professor of Popular Music at the University of Surrey and has published widely. He was a founding co-editor of twentieth-century music and is particularly interested in the hermeneutics of popular song.

Scott Murphy is an Associate Professor of Music Theory at the University of Kansas, with particular interest in music from the nineteenth century to the present.

Caroline Polk O'Meara received her PhD in Musicology from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2006. She is currently working on a book project, a study of how place and space mark twentieth-century American music. Her research interests also include popular music, avant-garde music, American experimentalism, music and technology, and music and gender. She has published her research in Popular Music and American Music, and she has presented papers at national conferences including the American Musicological Society, the Society of American Music, and the International Association of Popular Music.

Denise Von Glahn is Professor of Musicology and Director of the Center for Music of the Americas at The College of Music, Florida State University. Her articles and essays have appeared in numerous scholarly journals and collections. Her first book, The Sounds of Place: Music and the American Cultural Landscape (Northeastern University Press, 2003), won an ASCAP- Deems Taylor Award in 2004, and her most recent book, Leo Ornstein: Modernist Dilemmas, Personal Choices (Indiana University Press, 2007), co-authored with Michael Broyles, won the 2009 Irving Lowens Book Award for distinguished scholarship in American music from the Society for American Music. Her current project, “Skilful Listeners”: American Women Composers and Nature, is under contract with Indiana University Press.