As someone who likes to celebrate and nurture the rich diversity of fragile and exotic local cultures against the depredations of an increasingly hegemonic world, I do hope none of these loud, robust Europeans with their long lists of abusive adjectives and the red-blooded rough-and-tumble of their shouty musicological articles are going to impose their Eurocentral-centric 'world-view' on a harmless and gentle people whose historical unfolding happens to have taken a different but no less valid path? These things never work, you know, when dominant political entities attempt to impose them from outside. They must be allowed to develop in their own way, if at all, from within. "English solutions for English problems".

Anyone for a second muffin?


Oh, yes, quite right. Never one to pass up on a R3OK recommendation, I've just been reading the latest quarterly issue of "This England" .  Interesting anniversary articles on Edward Elgar and William Wilberforce. As far as I could tell (before I was rather rudely moved on by a W H Smith's employee) they seemed to be broadly in favour of both. Interesting small ads at the back for services I didn't even know existed.

I think This England also produced CDs of vintage light music, from original 78rpm recordings, the Evergreen label rings a bell, but now it seems to be known as Yesterday's Music and just one light music CD in the on-line catalogue??

http://www.yesterdaysmusic.net/

Hmmm, the navigation of the Yesterdays Music site is a bit challenging, I;ve just found they have several light music CD's there, Coates, Ketelby, Farnon. Also a couple of names I know from dance band arrangements, Peter Yorke and Louis Levy, though some while back I had an article submitted by the editor of a British Film Music reference who says Levy wrote nothing!! 

http://www.jabw.demon.co.uk/levyref.htm

Why not? - he's worth it.

I felt and still feel that the people running Contact got the balance of all the things it was supposed to be doing about right, bridging the gap between mass-market journalism and academic specialisation, and therefore attractive to interested parties who didn't yet know very much, as I was when I started reading it. (They also allowed a 24-year-old with no academic background or previous publications to thank his composition teacher for three years of lessons by writing an article about his work.)

I'm sure I and many others would be. The advantage these days is that it isn't necessary to spend money on producing a physical magazine and distributing it. These people, for example,

http://www.paristransatlantic.com/magazine/main/home.html

get along very well without all those appurtenances.

Perhaps The Wire or Signal to Noise come the closest, these days?  It's often not terribly detailed or especially insightful, but both often at least give good introductory surveys on contemporary music/musicians ... and I actually quite like that this is happening in magazines that aren't specifically catering to the 'new music' (and academic) audience/inside crowd.

And, as RB points out, there are increasing numbers of online journals that attempt this sort of thing, though my experience has been that the shelf life for such e-magazines is pretty short.

It's still happening, as far as I know.  Last he & I spoke, it was all moving forward & he's started soliciting articles, though I haven't heard anything in the last month or so.

And no, it surely will be neither "light" nor "non-academic," knowing those two.