I am delighted to present the inaugural issue of the Journal of the Society for American Music. Launching SAM has been an exciting and labor-intensive undertaking to which many hands have contributed. We look forward to working with Cambridge University Press, which publishes an outstanding line of music journals. I am grateful to SAM's President Michael Broyles and Executive Director Mariana Whitmer for their helpful responses to my countless questions over the past months; Past President Carol J. Oja and Vice President Judith Tick for their inspired ideas about the journal's potential directions; the Editorial Board, Assistant Editor Benjamin Piekut, and Reviews Editors Ron Pen, Charles Hiroshi Garrett, and Daniel Goldmark for their excellent and invaluable work; our many contributors for their patience during the transition of editorial homes and publishers; and—not the least!—SAM's members for their continued vigorous support of our Society's journal. On behalf of SAM, I would also like to thank Columbia University's Department of Music for graciously housing the journal during the term of my editorship, and Kip Lornell, David Patterson, Howard Pollack, and Catherine Parsons Smith, the outgoing Editorial Advisory Board members for American Music, SAM's former journal.

In selecting SAM's cover, a journal subcommittee explored an array of potential background images. We considered a notated score, a sound wave image, a violin, vibrating guitar strings, and a cymbal, but ultimately decided that no single image could represent American music in all its diversity. The photograph on the cover will change with each issue and will be keyed to one of the featured articles. In leaving the background open, the journal invites a variety of areas, approaches, and repertories to its pages.

We are proud to feature four distinguished articles in this inaugural issue. The journal opens with Christopher Reynolds's important study of the influence of Berg's Wozzeck on Gershwin's Porgy and Bess. Denise Von Glahn and Michael Broyles's groundbreaking article argues that music and especially Leo Ornstein were active participants in the thriving modernist arts tradition as early as 1915. George E. Lewis moves the conversation into the present with a fascinating examination of the composer/performer/sound artist Pamela Z. Suzanne Robinson provides a fresh look at the reception of John Cage in New York City from 1942 to 1958 in relation to published criticism and the efforts of composer-critic Virgil Thomson.

SAM welcomes contributions of all kinds. We very much hope that the journal will showcase the finest scholarship in American music studies from the eighteenth century to the present, and that the submissions we receive will span a wide range of topics and perspectives. We would like to consider work that examines American music through transdisciplinary and transnational lenses, explores the diaspora of American music across the globe, and studies the effects of the migration of ethnic musics to the Americas. In 2008, SAM will feature a special issue on Technology and Black Music in the Americas, to be guest edited by George E. Lewis—the Call for Submissions appears after page 160. Please join SAM in our mission to offer innovative and exciting scholarship on American music by sending us your best work.