The 701 Articles of American Music: A Quantitative Study of Forty Years of Scholarship

Abstract

The journal American Music stands as an expanding body of permanent scholarship widely available in libraries and online. This corpus—up to but not including this, the 160th issue—encompasses forty volumes divided into 159 issues containing a total of 701 articles authored by 740 scholars.1 Only thirtyone articles in the history of the journal—a mere 4 percent—credit more than one author. This statistic precisely expresses in quantitative terms the predominance of singleauthor scholarship in the music disciplines. This multiauthored study, written by the current editor and editorial assistants, gathers and analyzes data on each of the 701 articles in American Music. The goal is to consider larger trends in American music studies across the last forty years, a period when scholars of American music—a growing cohort in the academy in these decades—worked to consolidate what stands today as a strong position for the topic in the music disciplines, especially historical musicology. As the oldest journal devoted to the topic, American Music provides the longest evenly distributed record of trends in the production and content of permanent scholarship in this area. For each article, authors Daniel Fister and Rachel Jones, with help from Andrew Tubbs, gathered uniform data about article author(s) and content. Data collected about authors includes gender, race, and professional