I am delighted to present the inaugural issue of the Journal of the Society for American Music. Launching SAM has been an exciting and labor-intensive undertaking to which many hands have contributed. We look forward to working with Cambridge University Press, which publishes an outstanding line of music journals. I am grateful to SAM's President Michael Broyles and Executive Director Mariana Whitmer for their helpful responses to my countless questions over the past months; Past President Carol J. Oja and Vice President Judith Tick for their inspired ideas about the journal's potential directions; the Editorial Board, Assistant Editor Benjamin Piekut, and Reviews Editors Ron Pen, Charles Hiroshi Garrett, and Daniel Goldmark for their excellent and invaluable work; our many contributors for their patience during the transition of editorial homes and publishers; and—not the least!—SAM's members for their continued vigorous support of our Society's journal. On behalf of SAM, I would also like to thank Columbia University's Department of Music for graciously housing the journal during the term of my editorship, and Kip Lornell, David Patterson, Howard Pollack, and Catherine Parsons Smith, the outgoing Editorial Advisory Board members for American Music, SAM's former journal.

It is with great pleasure that the Society for American Music and Cambridge University Press jointly launch a new journal devoted to the study of American music. Only a few decades ago, American music topics were ignored, or if acknowledged, appeared as the unexpected article in more mainline journals or were relegated to the corners of conference programs. Within the past three decades, American music's status has changed dramatically. It has grown in size and its presence is secure and stable; what had been activity on the periphery is now squarely in the center. As someone who came of age in the 1960s, I have been able to share in the challenge and the excitement of this burgeoning field. Today it is especially gratifying to witness sophisticated American music scholarship emerging from many continents. Dissertations, books, articles, and papers are being written on American music by scholars throughout the world.

George Gershwin greatly admired Alban Berg and his opera Wozzeck. He visited Berg in Vienna; the score he owned of Wozzeck was reputedly one of his prize possessions; and he traveled to Philadelphia in 1931 to attend the American premiere. This study argues that Gershwin's Porgy and Bess is heavily indebted to Berg's Wozzeck. The debts primarily involve structural processes—understanding structure as patterns of discrete events shared by the two operas. Motives and chords play a small role in the discussion, taking their place alongside musical events that range from the large—a fugue or a lullaby—to the small—a pedal, an ostinato, or some detail of counterpoint. Beyond the presence in both operas of a lullaby, a fugue, a mock sermon, and an upright piano, the greater relevance of these parallels and others is to be found in the ways in which Gershwin situated them in comparable musical contexts. Evidence, in the form of an overlooked interview and a previously unknown recollection by one of Gershwin's friends, supports this argument and leads to questions about how we are to understand Gershwin's use of Wozzeck.

Musical modernism was born kicking and screaming in 1922 in New York, fathered by Edgard Varése and his International Composers' Guild; the French émigré saved the nation from its own backward-looking ways. Or so the story goes. But this reading ignores numerous and widespread musical activities that were well under way seven years prior to the founding of the ICG. As early as autumn 1914, members of Alfred Stieglitz's artistic circle, including Paul Rosenfeld and Waldo Frank as well as Claire Reis and A. Walter Kramer among others, were engaged in organized efforts to promote musical modernism, with Leo Ornstein as their front man. The initial result was a series of concerts in January, February, and March 1915 that Ornstein performed at the Bandbox Theatre; the programs consisted of entirely modernist music. These concerts catapulted Ornstein to fame, but he was not the isolated figure that he has been portrayed to be. Rosenfeld, Reis, and Kramer continued to promote both Ornstein and modernism with ideas for new societies, and Ornstein himself developed close ties not only to literary figures but also to artists, including Leon Kroll, William Zorach, and John Marin. Music, far from being isolated from other artistic efforts, was part of a burgeoning modernist scene that was securely in place by 1915, and Leo Ornstein was at its center.

Pamela Z is an American composer-performer and audio artist whose use of extended vocal technique and live, body-controlled electronic processing takes place in events ranging in scale from solo events in galleries to large-scale works that combine video, audio, and live musicians, singers, and actors. Her work raises important issues regarding transnationalism, Afrodiasporicism, and identity; acoustic ecologies; the articulation of race and ethnicity; and the place of women in technological media. The essay discusses several of Z's works from the late 1990s and early 2000s, in articulation with cybertheory; the aesthetics of popular and avant-garde music, voice, language, and poetics; intermedia and performance art; and contemporary technological practices.

This article surveys the reception of concert performances in Manhattan of music by John Cage, from his arrival in 1942 until his gala retrospective held in Town Hall in 1958, in particular comparing responses from composer-critics such as Virgil Thomson, stabled at the New York Herald Tribune, with that of music journalists based at the New York Times and other local dailies. Close reading of reviews and of an array of archival sources suggests that Cage's personal and professional relationships with composer-critics ensured that the reception of his music was uniquely well informed, and that his prepared piano works and early experiments with chance were treated with a remarkable degree of affirmation. Much of Cage's critical identity can be attributed to the aegis of Thomson, who, if he denied acting as “hired plugger” for Cage, nonetheless sympathetically construed him as Americanist, Francophile, post-Schoenbergian, and ultramodernist. Thomson's resignation from the Tribune in 1954 coincided with a pronounced deterioration in Manhattan critics' appreciation of Cage. I argue that the reasons for this lie as much with the demise of the composer-critic—and a reversal of Cage's own attitude to criticism—as with conservative disaffection with new forms of experimentalism.