Keeping Track of Writing Projects -- End of 2025

The Scholar and His Books (1641), by Gerbrand van den Eeckhout, courtesy Wikimedia Commons

An update to keep track of my writing projects has become an annual event. Since my last update, on Dec. 30, 2024, which writing projects have progressed, which have been published, and which have seemingly stagnated? On my academia.edu page and also in my twitter (now X) @jefftoddtiton and bluesky @jefftoddtiton.bsky.social profiles I suggest that readers who want to know the answer to the question “What research and writing are you working on?” come to this blog to find out. So far nothing new has been published in 2025, but see #1 below.

     1. In January of 2023 Ross Cole invited me to contribute a chapter on “Observing and Collecting” for The Cambridge Companion to Folk Music. I completed a draft in November, 2023. According to the Cambridge University Press website, publication is scheduled for December 31, 2025.

     2. In January of 2024, Portia Maultsby invited me to contribute a chapter on blues to the 3rd edition of the textbook, African American Music: An Introduction, edited by Maultsby and Cheryl Keyes. I completed the chapter shortly before Christmas, 2024 and sent it to the book's editors. About nine months later they replied saying that the chapter was in fine shape. I imagine they may still be waiting for other contributors to complete their chapters, because mine hasn't gone into copyediting yet. It would seem that the book could be published sometime in 2026 or 2027.

     3. Late in the spring of 2024 a Cengage editor wrote to ask for a 7th edition of the introductory ethnomusicology textbook, Worlds of Music, for which I am both general editor (now co-editor with Tim Cooley) and a contributor. Cengage is eager to bring out the new edition and wants us to finish the revisions by the end of 2025. We will do our best, but I've warned Cengage that this would be an unusually quick manuscript completion time, given that the past revisions have taken from two to three years, and given that we will have two fully new chapters to replace two of the current ones. As I write at the end of December, 2025, we now have four of the eleven chapters written; three have gone through copyediting. It's possible that in this, the final week of 2025, one or more additional chapters will come in; but it's almost certain that we won't make Cengage's initial deadline, as I'd predicted. It's hard for me to predict when the book will be published but I would guess either 2026 or 2027.

     4. In the fall of 2024 I accepted an invitation from Sabine Feisst to write a chapter for The Oxford Handbook of Ecomusicology, which in her words "brings together (ethno)musicologists, music theorists, and sound scholars to critically examine the interrelationships between music, sound, and human and more-than-human environments. It aims to consolidate existing knowledge about ecomusicology and significantly broaden the scope of ecocritical studies of music. The handbook also seeks to decenter the Western music canon and expand the geographical scope of ecocritical music studies." I promised her I'd have it to her by the end of this calendar year. This past autumn I started writing the chapter; a few days ago I finished up and am letting it marinate, so to speak, for a few more days before sending it to Sabine. In the chapter I've tried to integrate my idea of the sound commons into my sound ecology framework. It will, I think, be markedly different from the other chapters in the book, which chapters will be much more directly concerned with music; but we shall see. I can't predict when this book will be published; it depends on how far along the other authors are with their chapters.

     5. In the fall of 2025 I accepted an invitation from Esther Morgan-Ellis to write a short chapter for the Oxford Handbook of Participatory Music-Making. My subject will be, chiefly, old-time music jam sessions, which I've written about several times before as participatory music, but not in a sustained way. I imagine that I will also touch on other participatory musics that I've been involved with, and that I will continue with the phenomenological approach to old-time music jams that I began in my chapter, "Knowing Fieldwork," published in Shadows in the Field, edited by Greg Barz and Tim Cooley (Oxford U. Press, 1997), and continued in my article for Folklore Forum on the banjo as a mediating instrument.

     6. I would like to get back to the book project that's been on the back burner for more than ten years now, my book on a sound ecology. I have many parts written but need to do more research especially with recent publications on sonic experience and sound communciation in the nonhuman world.