A discipline defines itself by its pedagogy. In established fields, standard curricula provide a basis of shared knowledge, organize, classify, and categorize that knowledge, and tell the story of the discipline, its classic results, and its canonical figures. Mathematical music theory, as the present volume attests, is a field of study that is relatively new, even while being at the same time ancient. Many of the contributions testify to how mathematical music theory traces its origins back to the musica speculativa tradition of the middle ages and its roots in Classical thought. After Boethius, however, our shared intellectual forebears seem to skip ahead some generations to the trailblazers of the later twentieth century, with Milton Babbitt, David Lewin, and especially John Clough, standing out as those who shaped an emerging area of study. Institutionally, mathematical music theory is quite young, with the present journal now in its eighth year and the Society for Mathematics and Computation in Music between its fourth and fifth biennial meetings. This youth is revealed in this special issue also, with many of the authors asking the essential questions of an emerging field: Where is our place in the academic institutions of the twenty-first century? How do we teach our subject, and in what contexts? How do we advertise what we do to the general population? What are our canonical results? This special issue coalesced out of two recent events. The first was the panel discussion “Mathematical Music Theory in Academia: Its Presence, Role, and Objectives in Departments of Mathematics, Music, and Computer Science” organized by Mariana Montiel at the Fourth International Conference for Mathematics and Computation in Music, June 2013, in Montreal. Many of the practical and existential issues confronting this intrinsically multidisciplinary field were addressed in the comments of panelists Guerino Mazzola, David Clampitt, Thomas Noll, Thomas Fiore, Emmanuel Amiot, and Anja Volk, a group representative of the field’s diversity of disciplinary backgrounds and professional affiliations. The second, more direct catalyst was a panel discussion hosted by the Mathematics of Music Analysis interest group at the October 2013 meeting of the Society for Music Theory (SMT). The panelists Jonathan Kochavi, Timothy Johnson, and Mariana Montiel discussed mathematical music theory in the pedagogy of music and mathematics. Jonathan Kochavi’s paper here is adapted from his talk at the SMT meeting, while Mariana Montiel’s and Francisco Gómez’s contribution is partially based on her presentation. The idea for the session originally came from Robert Peck, whose work also appears in this issue. In addition to the invited papers of Kochavi, Montiel–Gómez, and Peck, we also solicited reflections, reports, and pedagogical essays from music theorist Thomas Noll and mathematicians Rachel Hall and James Hughes. co 2014 Taylor & Francis