Essays in Honor of Michael Beckerman

Artefactum, Czech Academy of Sciences, 2026
The University of Chicago Press, 2026
543pp

Cross Cultural Dialogues is the second Freundschrift under my editorship, a series dedicated to bringing an exceptional group of international, and interdisciplinary scholars into conversation with each other while expanding the traditional boundaries of the genre.  Building on the model of Music Preferred, this volume raises the bar for contemporary intellectual exchange. The core objective of this editorial lineage is to honour scholars and composers who are as exceptionally generous as they are brilliant, through imaginative frameworks that actively advance their artistic and intellectual visions. Our collaboration with the Czech Academy of Sciences and the University of Chicago Press serves as an open invitation for other academies and academic presses to reevaluate their historical hesitation toward well-curated Festschriften and recognize their potential as landmark publications and important contributions to scholarship in every sense.

This essay collection is written in celebration of a remarkable academic leader and scholar whose writing on Czech and Eastern European music has made an outstanding contribution to the field. Unafraid to be controversial, Michael Beckerman’s approach represents a number of vital challenges to musicology. These range from an interrogation of the way in which we write about music history and how we consider widely diverse fields of meaning as we approach musical works, especially problematic ones.

An exceptional speaker, Beckerman’s career as an academic – which includes his countless acts of scholarly service to hundreds of students and early-career researchers across the world – has been conducted alongside a distinguished career as a public musicologist tirelessly promoting Czech Culture. The collegial nature of his leadership not only speaks to exceptional service in and beyond the Academy, but exemplifies the power of scholarship infused with professional generosity. He is not only one of the best-loved musicologists at work in the world, he is also a phenomenally influential scholar. Taken as a whole, his formidable body of scholarship represents a lifetime of continual giving and engagement.