EDITORIAL

After many weeks of stress-fuelled grant writing, I received support from Indiana University's Racial Justice Research Fund to establish a research laboratory, entitled ‘Creating Real Change’. Within art history, Giles Knox’ recent book Sense Knowledge and the Challenge of Italian Renaissance Art: El Greco, Velázquez, Rembrandt (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019) questions the centrality of Italian traditions in early-modern and eighteenth-century historiography. Since I am a historian of Italian opera who teaches courses on baroque music, I am very cognizant of how the prevalence of documents from the Florentine Camerata and the Medici court have led us to tell a history of the baroque that begins with Italy and is rooted in citations of ancient Greek materials; this narrative is evident in many of the textbooks on baroque music written in English. The origin myth uses the terms of Enlightenment philosophy to define ‘Western civilization’ in a hierarchical position through constructed dualities, usually positioning ancient Greek or Roman progenitors as representatives of values such as ‘victory’, ‘laws’, ‘reason’, ‘rationality’, ‘power’, ‘duty’; as receivers of ‘gifts’, ‘love’, ‘land’, ‘riches’; as dominators of ‘nature’, ‘landscape’, ‘beauty’; or rejectors of ‘madness’ or other non-normative conditions.