ICSOM Editor Mike MuszynskiPhoto credit: Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra
One of the hidden difficulties of editing any publication is how to use the same terminology, grammar, and punctuation throughout. If you have a background in writing or journalism, you may be familiar with the idea of a style guide, which describes the decisions an editor should make to remain consistent in publication. For Senza Sordino, we start with the Chicago Manual of Style, which is one such choice.
However, with a specialized publication such as ours, the starting point is often inadequate, and we need to make a decision based on our specific use case. Take, for example, the titles of individual musicians—there appears to be no accepted standard, as you might read “Second bassoon Mike Muszynski” or “Second bassoonist Mike Muszynski” depending on the publication.
Is either example wrong? Probably not. But I like to refer to myself as a bassoonist rather than a bassoon, and for that reason, I prefer the latter phrase when describing a musician. Of course, when describing a position, the instrument name works just fine (e.g. an “audition for Second Bassoon”).
This issue of Senza Sordino deals with another large aspect of style: what decisions can we make to ensure that we remain inclusive and respectful of DEI? While the choices we make are important because of this issue’s focus on DEI, they should also be applied not only in future issues of Senza Sordino but across ICSOM publications as a whole. Jessica Schmidt of Orchestrate Inclusion has been invaluable in helping to choose the best terminology for this issue, and many of her suggestions will form the basis of the DEI decisions in our style guide moving forward.
Speaking of DEI, it feels like every organization has a different acronym. Clearly, ICSOM prefers the use of DEI, but we may defer to another organization’s usage of a different acronym—see Margot Schwartz’s use of EDI on page 4.
As a final note for this issue, the vast number of web links in this issue almost necessitates reading the issue online. For the print version of this issue, many links have been removed in favor of descriptions of their content. In cases where the descriptions are not enough, the links are either presented verbatim or through QR codes. Whether these QR codes continue will depend on feedback from readers, so please let me know if you would like to see them in future issues.
