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It is both exciting and humbling to take the reigns of the Journal of Research in Music Education as its 10th editor. My nine predecessors have positioned the journal as one of the world’s leading music research publications and I look forward to continuing this tradition of vision and stewardship. The present health and scholarly prominence of the JRME is a testament to the outstanding leadership provided by Wendy Sims for the past eight years. Aside from her exceptional skills as an editor, she has been a generous and patient mentor to me over my past two years as Associate Editor. For this I am endlessly grateful.

Much gratitude is also to be expressed for the outgoing members of the editorial board: Robert Gillespie, Joyce Gromko, Michael Hewitt, Sondra Howe, Steven Kelly, Joanne Rutkowski, and Robert Woody. In turn, I am happy to welcome new board members Randall Allsup, William Bauer, Kenneth Elpus, Lisa Koops, Andreas Lehmann, Kelly Parkes, and Brian Silvey. These distinguished individuals devote many hours to their duties, a commitment of time and expertise clearly evident in every issue of the journal.

As Peter Webster describes in his Senior Researcher Address that leads off this issue, these are exciting times for the field of music teaching and learning. Many of the developments and challenges faced by the profession at large are evident in the microcosm of the JRME and surely will figure prominently in its continued maturation. In particular, I note Prof. Webster’s reflections on the growth of and ever-growing attention to inter- and intradisciplinarity and globalization in music education research. In the case of the latter, digital publication and platforms such as SAGE have made research that may have once circulated among a more limited and regional audience easily available to readers around the world. As such, it becomes increasingly incumbent on authors to be responsive to the global music education community by clearly contextualizing their research questions and settings, by drawing on the wealth of extant international scholarship, and by suggesting connections with and applications to music teaching practices outside the local prevailing norms.

Similarly, just as scholarship needs to speak to and be representative of a global profession, it must also acknowledge, be responsive to and make a meaningful addition to the body of research within the broad field of music and across disciplines with which music intersects. While research in music education comfortably addresses issues related to the practice of music teaching, its impact is also predicated on connections with the larger fields of psychology, sociology, anthropology, kinesiology, and many others. Indeed, the recent emergence of quantitative measures of research and journal prestige—still a hotly debated practice, it must be acknowledged—is, in part, intended to reflect how relevant and useful research is found to be by other scholars.

Speculating on the future landscape of scholarly inquiry, one must conclude that the best research will speak to a globally and intellectually diverse readership. In this way, our work as researchers will continue to inform the big picture of human musicality and, truly, human nature. I look forward, over the next six years, to supporting the JRME’s role as a leading voice in the study of, in Peter Webster’s words, “this profound field of music teaching and learning.”