All Volumes and Issues in this Journal
HOW TO SUBMIT
We invite all authors to contribute to the special issues of Musicology Today, planned for the years 2023–2025. Please submit your articles directly to the Editorial Office at: musicology.today@uw.edu.pl
Detailed submission guidelines, including required referencing style, can be found under the tab ‘For authors’.
THEMATIC SCOPE
The 2023 Issue: Music in Popular ‘Alternative’ Outdoor Contexts
Our annual’s 2023 issue is dedicated to outdoor urban contexts in which music was performed in Central-Eastern Europe, with special focus on the cities of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, such as Vienna, Budapest, Lviv (Pol. Lwów, Germ. Lemberg), and Cracow. Musicology typically concentrates on high culture, relegating all the popular music phenomena, and those associated with entertainment or leisure pursuits in particular – to the margins of research. Everyday musical life and practice in outdoor contexts outside the philharmonic halls proves to have been especially interesting and varied in the territory of Austria-Hungary, where music of various provenance performed in urban space enjoyed extraordinary popularity. Authorities, societies, and social institutions allocated large sums of money to such performances. In the multinational Empire, outdoor music, unrestricted by any ideological limitations, was a platform for the free exchange and flow of musical forms, contents, genres, and performance styles. It constituted a kind of supranational and supra-ethnic conglomerate of ‘alternative’ musical culture.
The 2024 Issue: Music, Nature, and Sound: Musical Ecology
In 2024, our topic is the relation between music and nature, as well as between sound and the broadly conceived natural environment. Links between music and nature have traditions going back to the very beginnings of human acoustic activity, originally oriented towards communication with nature and imitation of its sounds. In our own times, this relation opens up to new forms explored by new music and new sound art. The concepts of nature, soundscape, sound art, acoustic ecology, ecological aesthetics, as well as the outputs of many composers who demonstrate their own personal approach to the relation between musical sound and the natural environment – will become the subject of detailed studies by Polish and foreign musicologists.
The 2025 Issue: Music on the Peripheries of Aesthetics
The 2025 issue of Musicology Today will be dedicated to differences between artistic music that aims to create a neutral but friendly acoustic background (such as, for instance, the works of Erik Satie), and music that directly aims to manipulate and exert impact on the listeners (elevator music or Muzak, audio marketing). These two types of music differ in the sender’s intentions. Background music is an implementation of an artistic concept or design, whereas purely functional music (that is, various kinds of music played back outside concert halls, for instance in shops, restaurants, and on public transport) aims to achieve a premeditated impact on the audience’s behaviour depending on the context in which it is listened to.
ARTICLE PROCESSING CHARGE (APC)
The periodical does not have article processing charges (APCs) or article submission charges.
OPEN ACCESS STATEMENT
The periodical is an Open Access source that offers free unlimited access to all its contents without any restrictions upon publication to all users.