I made a huge list of all the music journals in print and online that I could find.
Most of them sucked but about a tenth were interesting and political.
Then I decided to only read those good ones but it was boring. I liked going through the journals because I liked seeing how many journals just exist to prop up some kind of prestigious magical past, or let people know that some such country is in the American sphere of influence now, and therefore they have journals that don’t talk about class.
I liked the snark, and also the big picture of reading lots of abstracts without having to talk about the merits of any one paper.
I looked back at the journals and my comments about them. Actually the ones I don’t like I don’t like for very good reasons… it still might be fun to summarize articles to see if I’m right about them.
There are 711 journals, which have on average probably 2 or 3 issues per year. Some have 5 articles in them. Some have 15. 14,000 articles per year, even just the abstracts is too many.
If I throw out the music pedagogy ones, the ones that aren’t current, the ones primarily about something else… like culture or anthropology in general, or too specific, like geared toward only choral conductors or band teachers…
I don’t want to insult individuals doing their best to do research… and it doesn’t have to be that snarky… i think just being about to say I read through the abstracts of this journal and it had a paper on Bach, and another paper on Bach, and neither of them had any kind of interesting angle, and that’s why this journal is C tier…
Adrian Coburn 