With this special issue on Sentimental Songs, Theresa Nink and Florian Heesch continue with the European Journal of Musicology’s engagement with music, sound, and performance as cultural practices deeply embedded in social and political life. The contributions they have gathered approach sentimentality not as a peripheral or merely aesthetic phenomenon, but as a historically and culturally situated mode of expression through which questions of gender, race, vulnerability, nostalgia, empathy, and political solidarity are articulated and negotiated. In doing so, the issue also reconsiders disciplinary hierarchies that have long devalued sentimental forms on account of their emotional intensity and broad popularity.
The studies underscore that sentimentality is not a fixed musical quality, but a culturally variable practice whose meanings emerge in specific social, medial, and historical contexts. We are also excited to see that the contributions span music history, popular music studies, and cultural analysis, encompassing topics ranging from earlier song cultures to hip hop, power ballads, Iranian popular music, Original Pilipino Music, and Swedish popular traditions, speaking to the journal’s commitment to methodological openness and to perspectives that cross disciplinary, historical, and geographical boundaries.
For the journal, this focus is especially resonant because it highlights the transformative capacities of music, sound, and performance. Sentimental songs can connect individual feeling with collective memory, identification, and belonging, and show how intimate forms of expression can be understood as political events.
The editors of the journal, Britta Sweers and Katrin Losleben, would like to thank Theresa Nink and Florian Heesch for publishing this exciting collection of articles with the EJM, and Angela Wohleser for her organised, detailed and visionary handling of the publication process.