Dear colleagues, members, and friends,
by now you have all received the First Circular from Axel Englund and the WMA team in Stockholm giving details of our exciting 11th International Conference, to be held between 9 and 12 August later this year. We all appreciate the extra effort that has gone into the planning for this, as Stockholm was not the original venue for this conference, as many of you may recall. With the opening reception and inaugural concert on Wednesday, 9 August we will begin in our unique words and music way to share our experiences and growth of the past two years, meet new friends, and enjoy the great beauty of a Scandinavian summer. I have also learned that further details and instructions for booking a place at the conference dinner on 11th August will be included in the Second Circular later this year.
I encourage you to book your tickets – airplane, hotel, and if you are planning to attend, a seat for the opera at Drottningholm on Friday, 11 August – as soon as possible. For what it is worth, I looked at hotel rates on a Saturday, and then made my booking on the following Tuesday, by which time they had gone up!
We are also fortunate that this year our conference and its preparation can benefit from the revitalized website for WMA. This is not just for conferences, but also should be a forum for members. One of the things we have done in the last year is to finally add to our site several papers from the London and New York conferences (and we thank the authors for their patience).
A further thing that we can do to share research and findings, as well as to advertise our organization to visitors to the site, is to post information about your recent publications in the field of word and music studies (no more than three items since 2014). This should only take you a few minutes, and an email to me (odresel@gmail.com) with the details will be sent right on to Graz, where our webmaster is waiting. It is also helpful for us to get more clicks from different users, as it speeds up our search engine profile, so please check our website from time to time.
Sincerely,DavidMarch 2017David Francis UrrowsSecretary, WMA
Dear Friends and Colleagues of WMA and WMAF
It is a thrill for me to be able to write to you in my first Secretary’s Message, and the first such communication in several years. Now that our new website is up and running we can in a sense return to normal life. Nothing has illustrated how utterly reliant we all now are on cyberspace and its amenities for recognition, contact, information sharing, and sheer legitimacy more than the absence of a platform for an internet-based presentation of WMA. Many thanks to Walter Bernhart and the team at Graz for getting us back online. This was not an easy process.
Not everything will appear at once here: it is going to take some little time for us to fully restock the website with everything worth salvaging from the old site. But we do want it to be a dynamic place, not a static place, and so I am interested in all ideas about how we could make it better and more relevant for our members, as well as for those very welcome visitors who are interested in who we are and what we do. If you have suggestions about the website, please send them to me so that we can discuss improving out presentation.
Several of the items I as Secretary am particularly interested in getting are:
reports of recent publications by members (a maximum of three since 2014). Please send these directly to me at odresel@gmail.com
announcements relevant to WMA members (such as forthcoming conferences, references to institutions, major publication avisoes ...)
photos taken at WMA conferences (to be sent to our President at walter.bernhart@uni-graz.at)
If in any doubt about what kind of information we would like to upload about our members, just send it to me and I will have a look before discussing any questions with members.
Things which I will be responsible for include: a page for introducing new members; collecting announcements; and the revival of WMA Online, the selective publication of Shorter Papers from WMA conferences. We will upload our first new online paper here very shortly, and we thank our contributors for their saintly patience while we prepared for the new site.
The other major and important communication posted to the new website is, of course, the Call for Papers for our 11th biennial conference, to be held, as I hope everyone is now aware after reading the President’s message, at Stockholm University, and not in Graz (for logistic reasons), during August 9–12, 2017. Please see the home page of the website for further details, and the Call for Papers under "Events".
David Francis Urrows, Hong Kong July 2016