2025 AMS Paul A. Pisk Prize

Paper Title: Sounding Sovereignty: Occasional Motets in the Early Modern Transition

“This paper offers a new perspective on a long-discussed repertory, pushing against the notion of ‘state’ or ‘occasional motet’ as the primary generic marker for a body of works associated with the French court prior to 1535. By drawing on an impressive array of musical, iconographic, and archival sources, Frisch re-examines widely accepted assumptions about the performance contexts of three case studies (by Jean Mouton, Jean Richafort, and Mathieu Gascogne), convincingly arguing that these motets were conceived for devotional and semi-private settings rather than for civic rituals.”

Simon Frisch is a music historian of late medieval and early modern France currently pursuing a PhD at Stanford University. His dissertation traces the movement of royal polyphony into French civic and ecclesiastical spheres in the early sixteenth century, as crises over jurisdiction and heresy reconfigured the urban media conditions of a nascent ancien régime. He has forthcoming chapters with Classiques Garnier and Brepols, and his work has been profiled on Radio France. A sometime composer and performer, Simon has been commissioned by ensembles including The New Consort and the New Juilliard Ensemble, and he has appeared with Cut Circle and the Schola de la Sainte-Chapelle. He held a 2021–22 Fulbright for research in Paris and received the 2023 Richard F. French Dissertation Prize from The Juilliard School, where he earned a DMA in composition.

Paper Title: Where “Songs Old Men Have Sung” Were Sung: Robert W. Gordon and the Origins of California Folk Song

“The paper provides a compelling and wide-ranging historiographical contribution on the discursive construction of the idea of the ‘American Folksong.’ By examining Robert W. Gordon’s overlooked collection of folksongs and how it is steeped in a fundamentally multicultural conception of the American ‘folk,’ this study is an exercise in de-essentializing the very notion of ‘folk song,’ skillfully blending local (Californian) and global perspectives to deconstruct the Eurocentric conceptual lineage that, from Johann Gottfried Herder to Antonín Dvořák and Francis Child, has overpowered alternative narratives of the genre.”

Matthew Gilbert is a historical ethnomusicologist specializing in twentieth-century American folk music. He received his B.A. in Musicology from UCLA and is currently a PhD candidate in Ethnomusicology at Stanford University, where he holds a dissertation fellowship at Stanford’s Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. His dissertation, “Blow for Californi-o: Histories of Folk Music in the American West,” charts an alternative history of American folk music that reclaims California and the Southwest as central ideological linchpins in a series of transformations that birthed an American folksong canon, the discipline of ethnomusicology, and the 1960s folk revival.