Welcome to Volume 16 (2013)
of STM-Online

Dear readers,

the breaking of barriers, be they aesthetic, social, or linguistic is a theme common to all three articles of this years volume of STM-online.

In the article by Johanna Ethnersson Pontara, the concept of neo-baroque is introduced in the discussion of Lars Johan Werle’s and Lars Runsten’s opera Die Reise (premiered in Hamburg 1969), otherwise exclusively focused on postmodernist pluralism. The author argues that the excesses in style and expression of the work, in accordance with neo-baroque aesthetics, are to be viewed as means for achieving an overwhelming audience experience.

By way of approaching music as process rather than as product, Ingrid Åkesson has studied performances of traditional music at small festivals and workshops in Sweden and Scotland. These performances show how dichotomies such as professional–amateur or artist–audience might be irrelevant in practice. Different configurations of roles depending on context are discussed, and some distinctions in terms of ‘cultural capital’ are suggested.

Anders Edling’s article is a survey of the early reception of Debussy in the newspapers of the Swedish capital, Stockholm, giving hints of its French and German backgrounds. The text is a translated version with minor revisions of an article published as ‘La réception de Debussy en Suède jusqu’en 1926’ in a special issue of Cahiers Debussy entitled La réception de l’œuvre de Debussy dans les pays Nordiques (n° 24, 2000). We are grateful for the permission to publish the article in English for a non-Francophone readership.

We wish you good reading.

Deadline for submitting articles for Volume 17 (2014) is April 15, 2014.

Jacob Derkert and Erik Wallrup, editors