Greetings to all:

   Michael Bertrand has asked the various members of the editorial board
to introduce themselves to the list, so I avail myself of the
opportunity. But first I wish to more publicly recognize Michael's
continued hard work and evangelical zeal that has gotten this list off
the drawing boards and into your email boxes. It is in fact one of
the modern world's more delirious wonders that I can sit in my office in
Kyoto and develop friendships and meet colleagues who are 7,000 miles
away. Thanks Michael.

   I came to my interest in music first through the arena of
performance. During a miserably unproductive three semesters at the
University of Kentucky (after which I dropped out of college) I was
majoring in organ performance. I loved practicing and performing; it
was all the other classes that got me in trouble. When I finally went
back to college two years later I had become fascinated by Southern
history and had a difficult choice to make whether to major in history
or music. Several friends and teachers suggested some kind of melding of
those topics and though I thought their suggestions were too cute by
half at the time, I did eventually steer my interests in precisely this
direction. In graduate school I wrote about shape-note music for my
Master's thesis, and then about slave spirituals, old time fiddling, and
opera for the dissertation. In the meantime, I became the music editor
for the journal _Southern Cultures_ and have written a number of
short essays for them on such topics such as Janis Joplin, Roland Hayes,
Britney Spears, and Senator Henry Clay's campaign songs.

   Right now I'm finishing an essay for them on the Christmas festival
among slaves called "John Kuner." Last year I published a book with UNC
Press titled _Music and the Making of a New South_,
(http://uncpress.unc.edu/books/T-5458.html -- I need money; please use
it for your classes!!) which examined the ways in which audiences in
Atlanta took selected forms of music and with them tried to envision
their own idea of a New South. The book explores the multiple ways that
audiences arrive at conflicting social meanings for the music they hear.
I am now working on the Virginia composer and white supremacist John
Powell (1882-1963) and the interest he shared with a large swath of
composers keen on writing an "American" style of concert music in the
period roughly from 1893 (the premier of Dvork's "New World Symphony")
to around 1930.

    In all my work I continue to be fascinated by the ways in which
music "works" within a society. My emphasis has been, therefore, not
on performers and composers but rather on what happens to the
music -- how it "means" -- once it gets out into the public.  That is, I
am continually fascinated by the ways in which the experience of
listening to music quickly spirals out to engage a number of issues far
removed from the place of performance. Thus I'm fascinated by John
Powell, for instance, because he understood, as did all of his
contemporaries, that the issue of "American" music engaged political
issues of importance to people far outside the concert world.  The
question of who was "American," the importance of defining and
categorizing an American "folk," and the intense belief that
compositions were not just aesthetic exercises but could profoundly
affect the nation's future, each of these touches on areas of
intellectual inquiry that interest me. Moreover, I hope that my work
on John Powell will remind us to not only remember the banjo pickers,
fiddlers and guitarists who have made the South ring with their tunes,
but also the very large number of Southerners who felt no conflict
balancing their attachment to the region with an equally strong
attachment to concert music.

   Well, I've gone on too long.  I do look forward to the issues that
this list will create and I appreciate everyone's willingness to
participate.

Best wishes,
Gavin James Campbell

Associate Professor
Graduate School of American Studies
Doshisha University
Kyoto, 602-8580
JAPAN
http://www.ameken-doshisha.info/english/index.htm

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