Welcome to the 150th volume of JRMA! Our anniversary occurs a year later than that of the scholarly community we represent, the Royal Musical Association. The history of both the RMA and its journals has been expertly chronicled in Leanne Langley’s book The Royal Musical Association: Creating Scholars, Advancing Research (Boydell Press, 2024). Here, we would like to thank the authors and editorial teams who have contributed to JRMA for one and a half centuries. In particular, it is our pleasure to thank Freya Jarman for an exceptional seven-year period of editorial leadership through to the end of 2024, which has notably enhanced the journal’s authorial reach, its breadth of topics, and its variety of formats, including video. The colours of the rainbow on the website are now becoming visible across the printed issues: from red in 2020 through to indigo in 2025.
The expansion of JRMA editorship to include two scholars working collaboratively began in 2024 with the appointment of Deborah Mawer, reflecting both the high volume of submissions and a need for wider disciplinary expertise in steering the RMA’s flagship journal. Hettie Malcomson joined the editorial team in late 2024, and since the start of 2025, Deborah and Hettie have been working together as editors, with Amanda Hsieh continuing as Reviews Editor, Claire Taylor-Jay as Assistant Editor, and Glennis Starling as proofreader. The editorial team is most appreciative of the service given by members of the journal’s international Editorial Board, which was first set up in this form in 2019. A few years on, it is fitting for there to be another partial refresh and reset, which will happen in the coming months. The team is also very pleased to have been supported by Cambridge University Press since 2020.
As editors, we continue to welcome wide-ranging research articles across music studies, including cultural and historical musicology, music education, ethnomusicology, theory and analysis, popular music, sound studies, jazz studies, audiovisual, media, and practice-led research. Shorter, experimental, and co-authored pieces are encouraged, as well as the extended, specialized articles that nevertheless speak to a broad readership. As in recent years, these will be supplemented on a regular basis by topical round table contributions and by thought-provoking review articles. The coverage of RMA medals and prizes that are reported on in the spring issue of each volume is being extended to include the Jerome Roche Prize for early career scholars, the Practice Research Prize, and the Tippett Medal, in addition to the Dent Medal. We also aim to expand the JRMA Collections online, where contributors ‘collect’ and critique articles selected from the large archive of previous journal issues, grouped around a chosen concept or theme.
This first issue of volume 150 showcases a range of stimulating current research: from a creative realization of Satie’s Uspud, jazz as revolutionary rhythm in Hanns Eisler’s music, and a study of improvisation and democracy in 1970/80s London, to the roles of pianists in early nineteenth-century Germany and in the Soviet Union of the early 1960s, as well as analysis of sonata form in Scriabin. Also featured are nineteenth-century Oxford music degrees, silenced voices in the early eighteenth-century Cancuc uprising, and a fifteenth-century Polish manuscript. The two review articles of this issue concern phonograph recording, as a means of control but also as material trace and a part of the cultural imaginary.
In sum, we are proud that JRMA is expanding its scope and invite you as writers to submit a variety of work and formats in coming issues. Finally, it remains to thank you, as readers and our musicological community, for your ongoing support of the journal’s work.
