Ode to a Magazine – Melisma's Past, Present, and Future
I remember the exact moment this article first took root in my mind: September 5th, 2019, during a trip to the late, great Allston venue Great Scott (may she rest in peace). I was a sophomore at the time; then-senior editor Katie Fielding and I had somehow both been approved to photograph and review Hatchie’s show there. During the ride over, I asked her about Melisma’s history: when it was established, how it had changed over time, whether there was any record of its past, etc. The magazine’s past was murky and unclear, she told me, and we left it at that.
But, as I dove deeper into the club’s affairs over my 5 years here, poring over old emails from the noughties, unearthing long-forgotten or outright deleted webpages, blogs, & social media profiles, those questions continued to bounce around in the back of my mind. I’ll keep the rest of this preamble short and just say this magazine defined my college experience, but it wouldn’t have done so were it not for the work of the past generations of Melisma staff. Thus, this article is my effort to consolidate Melisma's 18-year history and to honor the efforts of those who came before me. Admittedly, nobody asked for the story of a widely unknown, niche-at-best student publication at a small liberal arts college in the Northeast to be documented so extensively. In a way then, this article is a selfish endeavor; it is simply the document that I wished existed all those years ago.
THE BEGINNING (2004 - 2007)
The cover of the very first issue of Melisma.
Before we continue, it is crucial to recognize the cultural background against which Melisma was founded. The sounds and spirit of underground music had yet to cross over to the mainstream to the extent that they have today, meaning the cultural divide between the two was much starker. “We clearly were all in on the more ‘righteous side’,” Andrew Chira (EIC '04-'06, A '06) remarked of himself and the magazine’s writers.
Melisma was the brainchild of Chira and Gordon Cieplak (EIC '04-'06, A '06), two friends who also happened to be avid readers of Pitchfork. “[We] fancied ourselves musical tastemakers because we were fans of Pitchfork and thought the rest of the student body would benefit from some diverse musical suggestions. We [also] each had friends with interesting music tastes as well as deeper interests in writing as a career, so it seemed like a good idea to play the organizational role and get those friends to write,” Cieplak recalled. The pair subsequently formed Melisma during their junior year, publishing the magazine’s debut issue in December 2004. In addition to album and concert reviews (not exclusively of shows in Boston, mind you), some gems from the first issue of Melisma include a thought-piece on the future of digital music downloads, an interview with then-upstarts Dr. Dog, and even a rundown of Funeral-era Arcade Fire’s fabled performance at Hotung.
While Melisma began as a journal highlighting indie music and music culture beyond the mainstream, it soon expanded its lens to all types of alternative music, culture, and media, going by the title “Tufts’ Journal of Independent Music & Culture” for the first time in its Spring 2006 issue. “We were sort of – for lack of a better term – the campus weirdos,” Meredith Turits (EIC '06-'07, A '09) noted. “One thing that was really important to me was that [Melisma] wasn't just album reviews. [Melisma] was meant to be a collective reflection on indie and DIY culture, because what brought us together was an interest in how culture and music intersected.” To that end, it isn’t uncommon for earlier issues to include book & graphic novel reviews, features on trends such as hookahs, and deep-dives into subcultures as obscure as alternative porn in addition to the magazine’s standard musical fare.
As one might expect from a publication that drew inspiration from early Pitchfork, Melisma's first staff roster adopted a cheeky know-it-all energy that was reflected in the editorial character of the magazine. “Gordon and I were both kind of elitist music snobs who enjoyed being snarky, and I think the tone of the magazine reflected that,” Chira recounted. Regardless, it wasn’t long before the pretension was eschewed in favor of a sincerity that emphasized each writer’s personality and tastes. “We wanted pieces to have the voice of the writer – [since] Melisma was inextricably linked to your relationship with music, I really wanted people to feel like they had personal investment in the pieces,” Turits explained.
Melisma’s first roster of staff and contributors consisted of friends from Chira and Cieplak’s circles, but soon expanded by attracting students who were seeking out a space to discuss their unconventional music tastes. The magazine subsequently began operating on a freelance model, with contributors sending in articles and content for a core team to edit, lay out, and assemble in the MAB. “[Melisma] mostly operated in a distributed way, hitting deadlines by collaborating over email and in shared docs... It was the kind of thing where you’d pass by a fellow [Melisma member] on campus and just give each other the nod,” Devin Ivy (EIC '11-12, A '12) wrote via email.
As a publication produced by young people for young people during the early 2000s, Melisma established a web presence from the get-go. Unfortunately, the manner in which these webpages were launched is painfully emblematic of the growing pains fledgling college groups experience, as no fewer than three completely different versions of early Melisma websites existed concurrently. Continuity and the logistics necessary for a leadership transition often fall through the cracks as senior members understandably deal with the realities of post-college life, leaving the future of their groups up in the air. Melisma’s was certainly in question after Chira and Cieplak graduated, until Turits stepped into the EIC position, taking on the challenge of running the magazine with the same scrappy, communal, DIY spirit that came to define the publication. “It was just so fun!” she exclaimed with a smile. “We were doing this thing for ourselves. [Melisma] didn’t have any of the pressures [associated with higher-profile campus publications] because it was totally a passion project.”
THE INEVITABLE ROUGH PATCH (2008 - 2013)
The cover of Melisma’s Fall 2012 issue.
While Melisma had always been niche by nature, its tendency to operate as a self-contained publication managed by small groups of friends resulted in dwindling membership. “I got the sense there were one or two small friend groups that worked on the magazine together, but for the most part it was a series of goofy email exchanges that made it all tick,” Ivy remarked of the cohort preceding him. “Participation fluctuated [and] trended smaller and smaller over my four years. I studied abroad [during the] Fall semester of my junior year, and when I came back I was bummed to find a smaller Melisma than when I left. I think it was just bad luck, you know – people graduating, studying abroad, having the rest of their lives to tend to, etc.”
Mitch Mosk (EIC '13-'14, A '14), encountered a similar issue when he joined Melisma a few years later, “it was [5-10] folks who had their own connection to the indie scene who were kind of their own entity unto themselves.” When Mosk joined, the magazine was so small that he was the only non-senior, leaving him as the sole member of the publication entering Fall 2013.
I say this not to discount the efforts of the staffers at the time, nor to imply they did not care deeply about Melisma. “I was the editor-in-chief for my last year at Tufts and I really gave it a proper go trying to bolster Melisma up from a bit of a slump it had landed in,” Ivy recalled. The magazine was still lovingly assembled and published twice a year, and even made ambitiously experimental strides along the way. Ivy described the magazine’s expansion beyond its preferred mediums of written word and concert photography, stating that “covering music motivated a bunch of collaborators of course, but visual artists – especially photographers – were definitely in the mix too.” Photo spreads, collages, and visual art displays unrelated to music became regular fixtures on the magazine’s pages, and Melisma continued to draw attention to independent culture at large – for instance, Fall 2012’s issue contains a 6 page feature on the local craft brewery scene. The publication continued to be a labor of love, reflecting the interests and identities of its staffers. “[Melisma] had a great vibe, and was produced with minimal pretense of being hip: it was just organically pretty damn cool,” Ivy reminisced.
Crucially, the staffers had begun to build relationships with publicists and managers, leveling up the magazine’s concert reviews by sporadically tapping into the concert press ecosystem to score complimentary or discounted media tickets. While free tickets weren’t a heavily emphasized perk of the publication at the time, they would eventually prove to be one of Melisma’s main marketing draws, and also served as the club’s first encounter with the logistical side of the music industry.
REINVENTION AND REJUVENATION (2014 - 2021)
As Mosk was the only senior member of Melisma entering Fall 2013, he inherited the role of EIC from the small group of A '13 seniors who preceded him. Additionally, the magazine’s e-board had decided at some point around this period – it is unclear exactly when this took place and who initiated it – to differentiate themselves from other publications at Tufts by focusing the magazine’s attention entirely on music, cutting out coverage of other aspects of underground culture. Mosk also took Melisma’s title as Tufts’ Journal of Music to heart, re-emphasizing the magazine’s duty to document the Tufts music scene. “What was really fun was being able to capture the Tufts music scene for Tufts students because they were the ones who weren't getting covered anywhere else… as Tufts’ Music Magazine [that] it was important for us to represent the community.”
The cover of Melisma’s Summer 2014 issue
Most importantly, around this point, Melisma properly entered the internet age. “We created an online web presence, and as a result of that we were able to not just have two print versions [a year], but be able to publish things in between,” said Mosk. While the magazine operated a Blogger site from 2007 through 2010, the posts were made sparingly and were inconsistent in both tone and content. Armed with a new website and a stand-alone domain name – both of which are still in use today – Melisma’s staffers began producing and posting interviews (notable interviewees include Flume and Odesza), concert reviews, track and album reviews, and even Melisma-exclusive sessions with Tufts bands, unencumbered by the chronological confines of the biannual print issues. Mosk explained the rationale behind Melisma’s new blog-style approach: “if you can continue to contribute throughout the year… you can also kind of get more reps in terms of actually writing and learning how to review music… it was [also] so much more fun and engaging to be able to go out to shows and then be able to write about it the next week so that people could [read about shows they hadn’t heard of otherwise.]”
After Mosk graduated, Grant Fox (EIC '15-'16, A '17), Jordan Rosenthal-Kay (EIC '14-'16, A '17), Jessica Mow (EIC '14, A '16), and Rebecca Sinai (EIC '15-'16, A '16) saw more ways to radically reinvent the magazine, and took multiple steps to realize its potential once they assumed leadership. Rather than try to emulate conventional music publications, Melisma began to play to the strengths of its status as a college publication. “Grant and I were thinking through what the comparative advantage of college students in writing music stuff was, and it’s that we have time to do longer-form pieces, have access to professors & resources, and can interview people,” Rosenthal-Kay explained. Gone were the concert reviews and touring artist interviews (now to only be published online) and album reviews (which were axed entirely) that had comprised at least 50% of the content of past issues, as the magazine’s focus subsequently shifted entirely to features, editorials, interviews with Tufts acts, and op-eds, bolstered by the adoption of a more structured and academic tone. “My approach to Melisma was always informed by the fact that writing about music is really hard to get right. And so we wanted to move towards music writing that was easier for people like us – college students – to get right,” Fox reasoned. “We wanted stuff that was less about how the music sounded and more about what the music meant.”
By Rosenthal-Kay and Fox’s own admission, their desire for Melisma to highlight more outlandish music and music culture, as well as their strict editorial standards, did not make for a particularly welcoming environment. They ran a tight ship, and increased communication by instituting weekly meetings and starting a Slack channel for the magazine. “It was a lot of Jordan and I lecturing about really obscure stuff that we thought was cool, [which went] over people's heads… they just wanted to write about pop music,” Grant remarked. Jordan chuckled, adding that the pair “were also explicitly told that [they] were scary as EICs.” “We also had this detrimental strategy where someone would submit a piece, I'd get out the red pen, cross out stuff, and then have a one on one with them where I went through the edits. The pieces were so heavily marked up in red ink to adhere to Grant and I’s vision of the magazine, so on several occasions I made people cry,” he added. Although Rosenthal-Kay and Fox’s no-nonsense approach may have been harsh, it crucially laid the framework for the focused editorial tone that continues to persist in the magazine’s writing today.
Their successors successfully married the investigative and analytical style established by Rosenthal-Kay and Fox with a more casual & accessible approach to student music journalism. Whereas Melisma’s editorial team had previously solicited and culled article pitches from prospective writers, the editor-in-chiefs decided to lift that barrier entirely. “If a writer could articulate what they wanted to write, then why not let them write it?” Charlie Billings (EIC '18, A '20) reasoned. Melisma also became far more lighthearted, embracing humor & occasional absurdity in both tone and design. “Did you ever read those letters from the EICs? That was the tone we wanted to set – just as stupid and silly as possible,” he laughed. “We were just like ‘we could add color and fun little drawings and doodles and do whatever!’ We wanted people to feel like they could do what they wanted, and make the magazine what they wanted it to be rather than trying to fit different components into [pre-existing] boxes,” Katie Fielding (EIC '18, A '20) exclaimed. A perfect example of Melisma’s newly realized goofiness was the introduction of quizzes to the final page of each issue, a tradition that is observed to this day. “[My biggest contribution to Melisma] was starting the quizzes,” Diana Hernandez (EIC '18, A '20) giggled. “I had the most fun with that.”
The cover of Melisma’s Fall 2018 Issue
Recognizing that Melisma had historically been somewhat inaccessible, partially due to the perception that underground media & culture often feels gatekept, the magazine’s executives also focused their efforts on recruitment by actively making the club less intimidating for newcomers. “I was very vibe-attentive at meetings,” Siddharth Jejurikar (EIC '19 , A '20) explained. “If the conversation was leading somewhere where a lot of people thought ‘oh, I can't relate to this topic,’ [I would] bookmark it [for later]... and then make the meeting move on to something else, so that it never felt like people were losing track of the conversation.” This change in attitude successfully changed the course of the magazine, attracting an influx of underclassmen who revitalized the magazine with their energy and passion for music. “Once [people] felt welcome in the space, the ideas just kind of happened,” Jejurikar added. Melisma also began to feel more like a club, with meetings serving as a social space in addition to a place where a magazine was produced. “It’s another reason why people kept coming back, because they just got an hour to chat with their friends about things they thought were really interesting,” Fielding remarked. “We didn't really do much outside of meetings when we were freshmen, so we tried to start doing bondings,” she added, an action that extended community among Melisma’s staffers.
Underground cultural spheres – which are already inherently exclusionary – have long been dominated by White men, a trend that was reflected by Melisma’s membership for years. “Tufts and music spaces in general are just very White to begin with,” Hernandez noted. Speaking of her experience when she first joined Melisma, she added that the magazine “felt very White when we entered. I think it slowly became more [POC-friendly], but it always felt like POC were not as present.” The e-board’s efforts to make the club more welcoming and inclusionary paid off, as it both solved the long-standing issue of member retention and broadened Melisma’s journalistic coverage. “When we came in it was a boy’s club,” said Fielding. “[As more women joined] we started to have a more representative group of members, and that naturally lent to [reporting] that is more representative of what the [musical] landscape looks like.”
While the content and tone of Melisma had undergone significant changes, similarly transformative improvements to the magazine’s layout and design had yet to materialize. “Every other magazine on campus got to do whatever they wanted while Melisma fell behind everything,” Fielding complained. Recalling her frustrations with the magazine’s visual direction, she explained that “one of my biggest issues was that our magazine was printed in B&W. We had no color other than the front cover.” Melisma had been a (mostly) B&W publication for over a decade at this point, prompting its leadership to secure additional funding to make the jump to full color, starting with the Fall 2018 issue. Newly equipped with the possibilities of the CMYK spectrum and several notably outdated computers in the MAB, Hernandez and Fielding spearheaded a visual overhaul, a move that also attracted design-oriented underclassmen.
In the midst of its reinvention, Melisma’s staff continued to take advantage of its music press connections, frequently interviewing touring musicians. The increase in concert coverage warranted the purchase of the club’s first two communal cameras, one of which promptly went missing. Reviews of non-Tufts concerts still remained a tertiary priority from 2014-2017, but that changed under Billing, Hernandez, and Fielding’s leadership. “[When I was a freshman], it seemed like a homework assignment instead of a fun thing you got to do,” Hernandez remarked. “I don't know why someone wouldn't sell the free concert tickets as a perk of joining Melisma, because that's how we easily got people in the door. After that they would get excited about the culture and the articles,” Jejurikar added. It definitely worked, because that was exactly what drew me into Melisma as a freshman.
The cover of Melisma’s Winter 2021 issue.
At long last we have finally reached recent history, aka the part of this article where I can finally use the word “I” again. I joined Lola Nedic (EIC '18-'21, A '22) and Laura Wolfe (EIC '19-20, A '21,) becoming EIC in January 2020 during my sophomore year. A mere month and a half after I took on the position, the world began to shut down as a certain pandemic began to unfold, an unfortunate side effect of which was bringing Melisma to a screeching halt. My reign as EIC was thereby mostly defined by how we adapted to remote operations. As it turns out, both morale and membership drops when you can’t meet in person. Nedic, Wolfe, and I tried our best to keep our weekly virtual meetings as (if not even more) light-hearted and comical as they had been before the pandemic, but keeping people engaged in a virtual environment for 3 semesters quickly proved to be a tall task. Assembling the Spring 2020 issue wasn’t too hard since it had been in the works prior to our campus evacuation, but putting together our Winter 2020 issue was an absolute slog, even with several passionate freshmen contributing their work. The situation was so dire that we had to pad our 24 pages with memes from the Melisma Slack channel and an AOTY section. It was clear that nobody had the energy or willpower to go through the motions of writing full-length articles for the Spring 2021 issue, which is why we instead produced a one-off zine in which club members wrote short articles in response to one prompt: “what is an album that you think is a 10/10?”
As vaccines began to roll out, Nedic and I were lucky enough to experience one last “normal” semester as EICs. With in-person meetings resuming, we witnessed the magazine’s vitality return almost immediately, with former members who had left during the online-semesters rejoining our ranks, the rebooting of concert coverage and press privileges, and even a few bondings here and there (including Melisma’s long-delayed inaugural karaoke session.) And during the following semester – my last as an undergraduate – underclassmen membership quickly swelled, marking a full return to form for the club. I also migrated Melisma’s website from WordPress to its current home on Squarespace and procured two new cameras which were better suited for concert photography.
THE FUTURE (2022 - present)
As a result of enrolling in a 4+1 degree program at the last possible moment, I was put in the peculiar position of getting to see my organization continue to work without me, a privilege typically reserved for former big shot CEOs who retire to chairman-of-the-board-status. And you know what? It’s been nothing short of an absolute delight. The current class of Melisma members have come up with and successfully executed ideas that would have been completely unimaginable to my underclassmen self. There have been experiments with new types of content such as our street interview “What are you listening to?” series, new bonding activities in the form of new-or-historical-album listening parties, a migration from Slack to Discord that has bolstered the club’s social aspect, and even the formation of a dedicated visual design team (“that makes me ridiculously happy,” Fielding beamed.) They even redesigned our logo (the new version’s debut is in this very issue) for the first time in the magazine’s history. To top it all off, the club is the largest it has ever been – so large, in fact, that our weekly meetings are no longer held in the MAB.
Attracting and retaining underclassmen is the lifeblood of any student organization, and I truly don’t see that being an issue for Melisma ever again. Every year I’ve been a part of the magazine, I’ve thought to myself, “will any of the incoming freshmen actually stick around?” and every year, my doubts are proven incredibly wrong. We can chalk part of our increased retention up to increased access to music discourse, thanks to the modern nature of fandom and various strands of underground music entering the mainstream, but the fact remains that Melisma is, at its core, a fundamentally interesting and wonderful thing to be a part of.
Melisma is a gem in the world of student-run culture journals. To have this kind of longevity – to not only survive for 18 years, but to thrive – is a rare thing indeed. I’ve looked into our counterparts at other universities, and most of them just don’t make it past the first few years. For every Observer or Daily there are tens of failed student publications that disappeared just as quickly as they arrived. The nature of the four year undergraduate cycle inadvertently excels at preventing the transfer of intergenerational knowledge, ensuring that countless student organizations get washed away as student leadership graduates without leaving anybody skilled (or even willing) enough to succeed them. Melisma has admittedly had several such close calls, but people – and in some cases, even just one person – have continually stepped up the plate out of a deep-rooted love for this tiny publication and what it could be, unafraid to reinvent it to make it their own.
During the process of conducting research for this article, I noticed a few constants while interviewing past EICs and staff about their time in Melisma. How they lit up as they reminisced about the bygone hours they spent in the MAB. How a smile crept onto their faces when I asked them to reflect on how this magazine impacted the rest of their lives. How grateful they were to learn that Melisma continues to exist and is doing well. In a funny sort of way, I saw myself in all of them.
Special thanks to Gordon Cieplak (A '06), Andrew Chira (A '06), Meredith Turits (A '09), Devin Ivy (A '12), Mitch Mosk (A '14), Jordan Rosenthal-Kay (A '17), Grant Fox (A '17), Katie Fielding (A '20), Charlie Billings (A '20), Siddharth Jejurikar (A '20), and Diana Hernandez (A '20) for their assistance in writing this article.