Editor’s Note

Lawrence Kramer was editor of 19th-Century Music for over three decades, jointly for the first twelve years with James Hepokoski. No other author has published as much in this journal: not only nine articles (a tie with Maynard Solomon), but also reviews, viewpoints (one a “counterpoint”) as well as five special issues with introduction, prelude, or afterword. Kramer’s first article for the journal appeared in 1981 (“The Mirror of Tonality”) and the most recent one in 2024 (“Mahler’s Contralto Voice”). Over the last forty years, he also authored sixteen monographs, winning the 2017 ASCAP Foundation Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award for Outstanding Music Criticism for The Thought of Music (University of California Press, 2016). His latest, Experiencing Sound (also from California), was published in October 2024. Appointed in an English Department (Fordham University), Kramer came to musicology as a scholar of literature, a critic, and a composer. He was never a card-carrying musicologist, yet his influence on the field has been profound. By demonstrating how musical meaning emerges from “expressive doublings” that open “hermeneutic windows” on music as a cultural practice, Kramer has shaped musicological practice.The current issue is the last one he curated. History rhymes. The cover of Kramer’s first book, Music and Poetry: The Nineteenth Century and After (1984), shows a reproduction of Caspar David Friedrich’s 1818 painting Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer—a paragon and paradigm of the Romantic nexus of music and landscape: as distance, longing, ineffability, transcendence. In this issue, Emily Shyr returns to the iconic painting to explore its subliminal affinity with Schubert’s “Der Leiermann.” Her interplay of speculative thought and close reading follows Kramer’s signature approach of searching for musical meaning in the experience of a specific work. Not surprisingly, one of his genres of choice has been art song, featured prominently in his 1998 book Franz Schubert: Sexuality, Subjectivity, Song—a sequel of sorts to the first (special) issue Kramer edited for the journal in 1993. Schubert: Music, Sexuality, Culture, volume 17, no. 1, shows how 19th-Century Music drove disciplinary change at the time, in both method and subject matter. Kramer’s editorship helped catalyze musicology’s engagement with the institutional and ideological reorientation of the humanities which had begun in the 1960s and 70s. This is part of his legacy.Times are different now. The institutional environment and disciplinary foundations of the humanities are shifting again in the wake of socioeconomic and geopolitical changes that are turbo-charged by technological developments and the climate crisis. As incoming editor, I asked Kramer for a final “Viewpoint.” He graciously obliged. It’s not a closing farewell but an opening to consider the stakes. Moving toward the journal’s fiftieth anniversary, we will do so.