Alfred Einstein Award

Zhuqing (Lester) S. Hu

"Chinese Ears, Delicate or Dull? Toward a Decolonial Comparativism," JAMS Society (2021) 74:3.

"...By writing with, and not about Amiot’s positionality, Hu develops a novel methodology: ‘decolonial comparativism.’ The committee noted that Hu’s study is extraordinarily rich, wide-ranging, and inventive and that it demonstrates an astonishing command of multilingual sources and sharp analytical skills. Subtle, yet complex, Hu’s writing is lucid, witty, and even hopeful, and his comparative methodology offers us a sophisticated and much-needed framework for ‘global musicologies.’ Offering a new analytical paradigm to current musicological research, Hu proposes that decolonial comparativism has the potential to enable a ‘turning away’ from extractivist ideologies that insist on a transcendent imperial ear and toward building ‘new houses.’"

AMS Teaching Award

Travis Stimeling & Kayla Tokar

"Narratives of Musical Resilience and the Perpetuation of Whiteness in the Music History Classroom," JMHP (2020) 10:1.

“. . .The article’s treatment of the Stono Rebellion and its aftermath is critical in two respects: it offers new teaching materials that decenter traditional, Euro-centric histories of 18th-century music, and it models an anti-racist pedagogy in its attentiveness to power dynamics in music historiography. Doing so collaboratively and crossgenerationally - Stimeling is a professor and Tokar an undergraduate - ensures that diverse perspectives and learning experiences inform pedagogical innovation within musicology... Stimeling and Tokar are to be commended for expanding the music historical narratives available to teachers and students, and for reflecting so candidly on the challenges and rewards of addressing difficult histories in the classroom.”

Claude V. Palisca Award

Norm Cohen, Carson Cohen, & Anne Dhu McLucas

An American Singing Heritage: Songs from the British-Irish-American Oral Tradition as Recorded in the Early Twentieth Century (MUSA32, A-R Editions, 2021).

“. . .The stated ‘aim of this edition is to bring together representative examples of one hundred folksongs and ballads in the British-Irish-American tradition,’ although it also ‘includes songs created on American soil from a mixture of peoples, including African Americans.’

The project is impressive in blending music editing, performance practice and knowledge of the history of recording technology. The edition is thorough, well-researched, and well-documented. The introduction reviews the historiography of the repertoire. Appendices clarify how this edition relates to earlier editions and catalogues of folksongs and ballads.”

Early Music Award

Dwight F. Reynolds

The Musical Heritage of al-Andalus (Routledge, 2020).

“. . .The twelve chapters of The Musical Heritage of al-Andalus track the pernicious politics of “influence”; interreligious and intercultural negotiations beyond the traditional, narrow tripartition of Muslims, Christians, and Jews; gender roles and sexual identities; the development of “revolutionary” Arabic and Hebrew lyric genres in Iberia; and the complex intertwining of social status, ethnicity, enslavement, and music professionalization (alongside much more). . .Reynolds makes accessible a rich body of work that may be unfamiliar to the wider readership that the book invites and offers compelling new arguments for specialized readers. This magisterial monograph promises to invigorate new generations of scholars and scholarship on the music of al-Andalus.”

H. Colin Slim Award

"A Rudder for The Ship of Fools?: Bosch's Franciscans as Jongleurs of God," Speculum (2021) 96:4.

“...The winner is both highly original and impressive in its skillful engagement with a breathtaking range of materials, sources, methods, and languages. The author reevaluates a beloved work of visual art, situating its depictions of everyday musicmaking in a rich network of musical traditions within which early modern men and women collaboratively composed clever contrafacta without the aid of musical notation. His argument offers a striking new way of viewing a prized artwork, upending, through musical detective work, the conventional wisdom of more than a century of art historical and literary scholarship. The article vividly demonstrates the interpretive value that musicological skills offer to humanistic inquiries conducted in other disciplines.”

H. Robert Cohen / RIPM Award

Jennifer Walker

Sacred Sounds, Secular Spaces: Transforming Catholicism Through the Music of Third-Republic Paris (Oxford University Press, 2021). 

“...Upon a careful review of this year’s nominations, the committee has chosen to honor a book that combines archival research, reception history, and music analysis. From a series of case studies set in a motley collection of late-nineteenth-century Parisian venues, ranging from the opera house to the puppet theater, from parish churches to lively cabarets, we learn how opposing ideological factions of composers and critics all used music to produce a form of Frenchness constructed on the dual foundations of secular republicanism and Roman Catholicism, world views long assumed to be sharply opposed. This fascinating and surprising story has been beautifully told in Jennifer Walker’s monograph Sacred Sounds, Secular Spaces: Transforming Catholicism through the Music of Third-Republic Paris (Oxford University Press).”

Judy Tsou Critical Race Studies Award

Kira Thurman 

Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms (Cornell University Press, 2021).

“. . .This extraordinary book situates the struggles and triumphs of African-American Liedersingers in Germany and the world in the dual context of the challenges these singers posed to entrenched iconographies of African Americans that had long been in circulation in Europe, juxtaposed with the deep and abiding engagement with classical music by African American creative artists, intellectuals, and everyday folks. Thurman’s sensitive treatment of oft-hidden histories of the German-speaking world’s relationship with Blackness deploys a new approach to scholarship in both musicology and Germanic studies that affirms the mosaic, diasporan identity of classical music.”

Lewis Lockwood Award

Braxton Shelley

Healing for the Soul: Richard Smallwood, the Vamp, and the Gospel Imagination (AMS Studies in Music, Oxford University Press, 2021).

“The Lewis Lockwood Award Committee for 2022 gives the Lockwood award this year to Braxton D. Shelley for his outstanding book Healing for the Soul: Richard Smallwood, the Vamp, and the Gospel Imagination (Oxford University Press).

The Lockwood Award Committee unanimously agrees that Braxton D. Shelley’s book Healing for the Soul: Richard Smallwood, the Vamp, and the Gospel Imagination (Oxford University Press) makes a significant and original contribution to musical scholarship.”

Music in American Culture Award

Daphne A. Brooks

Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound (Harvard University Press, 2021).

“...In this lushly written, expansive tome, the author centers the lives and art of Black women musicians and critics, the ‘remarkable sisters’ of modern popular music culture, which Brooks argues would simply ‘cease to exist’ without them (p. 2) ...Dr. Brooks presents with both rigor and love individual case studies of famous and lesser-known Black women performers, critics, and archivists, imaginatively querying their lives and careers to offer new insights about their talents and contributions. In doing so, she rightfully restores these Black creators to their richly deserved place of celebration, while both recentering and grounding further critical conversation and contemplation of the shaping and reshaping of the American popular music landscape.”

Noah Greenberg Award

Cesar Favila & Paul Feller

Project Title: Convent Music from New Spain.

Otto Kinkeldey Award

Peter J. Schmelz

Sonic Overload: Alfred Schnittke, Valentin Silvestrov, and Polystylism in the Late USSR (Oxford University Press, 2021).

“. . .Schmelz moves beyond the common understanding of polystylism in Schnittke’s and Silvestrov’s works circa 1960-80 by unveiling other key concepts such as eschatology, ghosts and shadow sounds. The guiding concept of polystylism is wielded with great critical sophistication, providing a genuinely fresh perspective on the music of Schnittke and Silvestrov as well as its broader significance. He shows deep mastery of its material, a mesmerizing blend of source materials, and a thorough knowledge of the relevant repertoire, artistic and political scenes, and cultural stakes. The book brings this music, the era, and its attendant ambivalences and confusions alive. In summary, Schmelz brings a deep sense of the historiographical implications of the work, always keeping his reader aware of the larger implications of the argument.”

Paul A. Pisk Prize

Sophie Brady

Presentation: "From the Living Room to the Concert Hall: Francis Bebey's Experimental Collaborations."

“Sophie Brady’s paper, “From the Living Room to the Concert Hall: Francis Bebey’s Experimental Collaborations,” re-envisions the history of the mid-century musical avant-garde through the lens of colonialism.Taking as its locus Radio France’s Studio-École (an institution charged with maintaining French soft power in Africa) where Pierre Schaeffer was a leader and Cameroonian-French composer Francis Bebey was a student, this paper exposes the colonial entailments of Schaeffer’s musique concrète and highlights Bebey’s creative processes, techniques, and aesthetics as a hitherto overlooked aspect of the history of experimental music. The Pisk Prize Committee was particularly struck by Brady’s effective use of documentary evidence to provide a belated and urgent anti-colonial intervention to preexisting musicological narratives... Brady’s contribution thereby spurs us to rethink the conventional theoretical frameworks that we use to study experimental music.”

Philip Brett Award

Elliott H. Powell

Sounds from the Other Side: Afro-South Asian Collaborations in Black Popular Music (University of Minnesota Press, 2020). 

“Elliott H. Powell’s Sounds from the Other Side: Afro-South Asian Collaborations in Black Popular Music is a captivating study of Black and South Asian sonic relationalities and collaborative music making practices, which provide the foundation and conditions of possibility for an imaginative creative praxis invested in Black queer aesthetics, feminist sociality, and Afro–South Asian political solidarity... Through wide-ranging analyses of works by John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Rick James, OutKast, Timbaland, Missy Elliott, and Beyoncé, Powell shows how these musical practices index the ‘the braided histories, overlapping presents, and connected futures of the African and South Asian diasporas.’ Powell’s writing is dazzling—engaging and creative, it reflects the dynamic sensibilities of the musical collaborations he examines.”

Robert M. Stevenson Award 

Alejandro Vera (auth.); Julianne Graper (trans.)

The Sweet Penance of Music: Musical Life in Colonial Santiago de Chile (Oxford University Press, 2020).

“The committee for the Robert M. Stevenson Award read about a dozen books and articles on music in Iberia and Latin America this year and found its greatest enthusiasm for an old-style study of a great city and its music, an impressive example of solid and wide-ranging research, both archival and analytical, compellingly written and elegantly translated. We are pleased to give the 2022 Stevenson Award to The Sweet Penance of Music: Musical Life in Colonial Santiago de Chile, by Alejandro Vera, translated by Julianne Graper (Oxford University Press, 2020).”

Roland Jackson Award

Truman See

"Hear My Desire: Rachmaninov's Orphic Voice and Musicology's Trouble with Eurydice" 19th-Century Music (2021) 44:3.

“This year’s winner of the Roland Jackson Award focuses on Sergei Rachmaninov's Isle of the Dead, a symphonic poem inspired by a painting by Arnold Böcklin, as an opportunity to reflect on musicology’s relationship with its surprisingly evanescent object of desire – music. . .The author’s dense argument comes together in exemplary fashion in the musical analysis of Rachmaninov’s orchestral work, seamlessly and compellingly blending musical form, narrativity, and critical theory from Adorno to Žižek. The result is a phenomenally rich, versatile, and well-integrated study on so many different levels, a must-read for anyone engaged with the disciplinary debate on the nature and limits of musical discourse and on modern music’s unique strategies for staging desire – ever elicited, never fully satisfied.”

Ruth A. Solie Award

Emily I. Dolan & Alexander Rehding (eds.)

The Oxford Handbook of Timbre (Oxford University Press, 2021). 

“This exceptionally well-organized, superbly edited collection of essays engages squarely with the idea of timbre that has long been neglected within the field of musicology. Rather than simply offering a summative snapshot of the current state of scholarship on timbre, this volume is exploratory in a way that both revises typical expectations for the “handbook” genre and invites future research. It attempts to recover the history of the concept of timbre and proposes highly original, and novel ways of engaging with the elusive concept... ‘For the longest time,’ notes the introduction to the volume, ‘musicology treated timbre as an afterthought.’ No longer. By affirming the importance of thinking about timbre in our discipline, this imaginatively curated collection of essays promises to be field-changing.”

H. Robert Cohen /RIPM Award

Kwami Coleman

"Free Jazz and the 'New Thing': Aesthetics, Identity, and Texture, 1960-1966," Journal of Musicology (2021) 38:3.

“The Committee also wishes to recognize a fascinating article-length study of Ornette Coleman’s avant-garde LP Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation (1961). This comprehensive account combines a thoughtful reading of the contentious early reception of this project in the pages of Downbeat (where it merited five stars from one reviewer and zero stars from another), together with the presentation of a new analytical framework for making sense of the “bewildering” music. Deeply researched and beautifully written, Kwami Coleman’s “Free Jazz and the ‘New Thing’: Aesthetics, Identity, and Texture, 1960–1966” (Journal of Musicology) is richly deserving of an Honorable Mention.”