Over the past year, while preparing to step into my role as editor of JSAM, I have witnessed how the journal draws its strength not only from the leadership and staff members at the Society for American Music and Cambridge University Press, but also from both the general membership of SAM and the broader interdisciplinary world of American music studies. I am grateful to former editor Karen Ahlquist, whose mentorship has been invaluable and whose shoes will be a challenge to fill; editorial associate Mark Davidson, whose wisdom and guidance has been essential; and Jason Michalek, who helped to assure a smooth transition by working closely with Holly Roberts, JSAM’s new assistant editor. Thank you.

In July 1922, the New York Times reported that the “encouraging little film” Danse Macabre was screening at the Rialto Theater in New York City. Directed by filmmaker Dudley Murphy, it starred dancers Adolph Bolm and Ruth Page in a visual interpretation of Saint-Saëns's Danse Macabre that synchronized perfectly with live performances of the composition. While film scholars have occasionally cited Danse Macabre and Murphy's other shorts from this period as examples of early avant-garde filmmaking in the United States, discussions of the films are mired in misunderstanding. In this article, I use advertisements, reviews, and other archival materials to trace the production, exhibition, and reception of Murphy's Visual Symphony project. These films, I argue, were not Murphy's alone: rather, they were a collaborative endeavor guided as heavily by musician and film exhibitor Hugo Riesenfeld as by Murphy himself. Recast in this way, the Visual Symphony project highlights evolving approaches to sound–image synchronization in the 1920s, the centrality of theater conductors and musicians to filmmaking in this period, and the various ways in which filmmakers, performers, and exhibitors conceptualized the relationship between music and film, and the live and the mediated, in the final decade of the silent era.

Through a broad analysis of musical, textual, and dramatic similarities between the framing and framed shows in Cole Porter's Kiss Me, Kate and a more specific analysis of “So in Love” and “Were Thine That Special Face,” this article identifies an overall musical/dramatic structure with three formal rotations, cutting across the show's two acts. In tying the sometimes-masked song resemblances to the show's overall dramatic arch, Kiss Me, Kate's narrative structure is ultimately portrayed as united rather than bifurcated. As a springboard, this article scrutinizes Knapp's (2006) reading of “doubles” in the show.

In its inaugural 2007 press release, New York–based New Amsterdam Records announced its mission to “foster a sense of connection among musicians and fans in this ‘indie classical’ scene.” New Amsterdam's publicity apparatus brought “indie classical” into widespread media circulation, but by 2013 the label had ceased using the term. In the intervening years, the meaning of indie classical had been hotly contested by the community of musicians it was meant to champion. Drawing on more than fifty interviews, archival research, and reception history from traditional publications and new online sources, I recreate the rise and fall of indie classical as it transpired over a decade. Tracing the background of the composers and performers who first labeled themselves as indie classical, unveiling the origins of the term and how it was disseminated, and examining the debates that surrounded it and its subsequent decline reveals how the aesthetic discourse of new music is constructed in the twenty-first century.