2025 Otto Mayer-Serra Competition Results Announced

Walter Aaron Clark, Director of the Center for Iberian and Latin American Music at the University of California, Riverside (CILAM), is pleased to announce the results of the 2025 Otto Mayer-Serra competition, for the best unpublished essay(s) on Iberian and Latin American Music, in either historical musicology or ethnomusicology. This annual competition honors the memory of the Spanish-Mexican musicologist Otto Mayer-Serra (1904–68) and seeks to continue his legacy of groundbreaking research. The OMS competition accepts submissions in Spanish or Portuguese. The first-prize award is for $1500, and second prize, $750. Both prize-winning articles are published in the peer-reviewed online journal Diagonal: An Ibero-American Music Review. Information about the 2026 competition will be available this coming summer.

The Center for Iberian and Latin American Music is grateful to the scholars who submitted essays to this year’s competition and looks forward to future contributions. It especially wishes to thank the distinguished members of the jury who reviewed the submissions:

Fernando Rios (Chair), University of Maryland

María-Teresa Ferrer Ballester, Universidad Internacional de Valencia

Cristina Fernandes, Universidade Nova de Lisboa

First Prize:

“Ouvir sem possuir: economia do acesso e práticas de escuta da música gravada em São Paulo (1900–1930)”

Juliana Pérez González, Universidade de Aveiro

Second Prize:

“‘Deutschland über alles… na música’: o discurso sobre a música sinfónica em Lisboa no tempo da Primeira República”

Luís M. Santos, Universidade Nova de Lisboa

Honorable Mention:

“Tangos Cultos en la Región Mediterránea: Albéniz, Puccini, Milhaud y Ranieri (c.1889-2002)”

Mauricio Pitich, Universidad Nacional del Litoral