In the fall of 2015, a collection of faculty at liberal arts colleges began a conversation about the challenges we faced as instructors: Why were there so few course materials accessible to undergraduates and lay readers that reflected current scholarly debate? How can we convey the relevance of studying music history to current and future generations of students? And how might we represent and reflect the myriad, often conflicting perspectives, positions, and identities that make up both music’s history and the writers of history?

Here we offer one response to those questions. Open Access Musicology is a collection of essays, written in an accessible style and with a focus on modes of inquiry rather than content coverage. Our authors draw from their experience as scholars but also as teachers. They have been asked to describe why they became musicologists in the first place and how their individual paths led to the topics they explore and the questions they pose. Like most scholarly literature, the essays have all been reviewed by experts in the field. Unlike all scholarly literature, the essays have also been reviewed by students at a variety of institutions for clarity and relevance.

These essays are intended for undergraduates, graduate students, and interested readers without any particular expertise. They can be incorporated into courses on a range of topics as standalone readings or used to supplement textbooks. The topics introduce and explore a variety of subjects, practices, and methods but, above all, seek to stimulate classroom discussion on music history’s relevance to performers, listeners, and citizens.

Daniel Barolsky is Professor of Music at Beloit College where he teaches courses on music historiography, sound studies, music psychology, and the history of recording technologies, topics about which he periodically writes. Most recently he is exploring the most alliterative of issues, the mediation of musicking. His co-founding of Open Access Musicology was inspired, in part, by the opportunity to completely redesign the college’s music curriculum and to create programming and pedagogies that empowered and challenged students to make their studies relevant to their own lived experiences. 

Louis Epstein is Associate Professor of Music at St. Olaf College. His research ranges from early twentieth-century French music to digital mapping to the science of teaching and learning. His book, The Creative Labor of Music Patronage in Interwar France (The Boydell Press, 2022), reveals how collaborations between a variety of patrons and composers informed the distinctive sounds of French classical music between the world wars. Louis currently serves as Co-Director of St. Olaf's Center for Innovation in the Liberal Arts and as Chair of the American Musicological Society's Pedagogy Study Group. With his wife, Maggie, he co-chairs his family (two kids and a dog) and in his spare time he performs and records family music as one half of Louis and Dan and the Invisible Band.