Alfred Einstein Award

Jacob Olley

“Evliya’s Song: Listening to the Early Modern Ottoman Court,”
Journal of the American Musicological Society (2023) 76:3.

"Jacob Olley’s ‘Evliya’s Song: Listening to the Early Modern Ottomon Court’ is ground-breaking in its ethnographic approach to the historical archive. Olley provides a virtuosic close-reading and thick contextualization of a passage in Evliya Çelebi’s Seyahatnâme, a ten-volume book of travels in which a singer chronicles his experiences of the Ottoman Empire in the mid-seventeenth century. Through this reading, Olley explores the fallibility of historical sources, hierarchies of genre, and the ways in which Ottoman writers and listeners thought about their own sonic experiences. Olley reveals how music, sound, and textuality were deeply entangled in Ottoman culture, but also demonstrates how present-day music scholars, through the analysis of historical texts, can learn to listen more attentively and productively, even across broad stretches of time and space.”

AMS Teaching Award

Sara Haefeli

Teaching Music History with Cases: A Teacher's Guide (Routledge, 2023).

“...In her agile Teacher’s Guide, Sara Haefeli convincingly argues for a case study approach to teaching music history, offering a flexible model that can be applied to any subject area and diverse institutional milieus. This model is supported by the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), promotes engagement and inclusion, and has the potential to transform our field’s pedagogy. Employing a process that decenters the teacher, students work in small groups to engage a specific musical topic, work, or context through critical questions such as ‘What do we mean when we talk about style?’ or ‘How did colonialism shape music making?’ Haefeli’s step-by-step guide includes up-to-date assessment practices, and emphasizes open access resources. She not only provides instructors with the means to build their own cases, but also adds guidance on fostering healthy student groups. In its praiseworthy integration of theory and practice, Haefeli’s accessible guide gives further incentive to the paradigm-shifting momentum of music history pedagogy away from lecture-coverage models toward critical student-led inquiry.”

Claude V. Palisca Award

Joel Galand, ed.

Love Life: A Vaudeville in Two Parts (Kurt Weill Foundation, 2023).

“...This superb edition of a little-known work by Kurt Weill executes a monumental editorial task with enormous skill on a corpus of materials in considerable need of such help and worthy of it as well. This extensive two-volume edition (of over 1000 pages followed by a critical report of over 200 pages) forms a solid foundation for assessing the reception of Love Life at the time of its premiere in 1948 and its place in the history of the American musical.  Love Life traces the evolution of marriage in America from the Industrial Revolution onward. Unusual for its time, Love Life anticipates the concept musicals that would begin to appear on Broadway in the 1960's. This edition provides a solid basis for evaluating Love Life’s aesthetic importance. The introduction (which includes color facsimiles of manuscripts and black and white photos of performances) narrates the various twists and turns involved in conceiving the musical and then mounting it. It should provide fascinating reading for the general reading public.”

Early Music Award

Emily Zazulia

Where Sight Meets Sound: The Poetics of Late-Medieval Music Writing
(Oxford University Press, 2021).

“...At a moment when music (thanks to the internet and Spotify) seems to have been thoroughly dematerialized, Where Sight Meets Sound reminds us of the ways it has always been dependent on mediation, and for most of its history in the West, upon inscription. The book traces the history of late medieval European works that are built upon transformed repetitions of musical material, magisterially combining close readings of myriad musical and music-theoretical sources with critical consideration of the semiotics and ontology of musical notation. Zazulia shows us how systems of notation were never simply neutral channels of the musical events they prescribe: they were instead ways of thinking that helped to shape musical discourse. This book is not only for specialists of tenor motets and canon, but is of relevance to everyone working on the history of music encoding throughout the Western tradition.”

H. Colin Slim Award

"Race, Gender, and the Colonial Orchestral Body at the New Zealand International Exhibition, 1906,” Journal of the American Musicological Society (2023) 76:2.

“...Van Rij’s article is an outstanding synthesis of women's history, institutional history, performance studies, music analysis, and postcolonial studies, and it makes a major contribution to our understanding of how European art-music practices intersected with colonial power in the early 20th century. Building on archival and ethnographic sources as well as historical literature on the colonization of New Zealand, the article offers a rich interpretation of performances of a composition, Alfred Hill's Exhibition Ode, at the 1906 International Exhibition. Written in a lively and nuanced style, it complicates familiar narratives of colonial appropriation—very much present in Hill’s composition—by reconstructing the performance event in detail and focusing on the embodied experiences of women playing in the orchestra, whose sympathies with the Pāhekā and Māori populations would have been pulled in conflicting directions.”

H. Robert Cohen / RIPM Award

Christina Fuhrmann & Alison Mero, eds.

“...Together, the essays in this volume illuminate how opera – ‘a living, performative art’ – was brought to life and into the homes of thousands through the “static” medium of newspapers and periodicals, librettos and scores, playbills and many other forms of print culture. Each of the book’s twelve chapters contributes significantly to the scholarship of nineteenth-century opera, highlighting a series of interactions between opera and print including how performers and impresario leveraged an array of publications to shape their public personas; how opera became intertwined with literature, serving as sources of inspiration and points of contention in literary circles; and how issues of nationalism, class, and gender permeated various forms of writing about opera composers, music, and performances.”

Judy Tsou Critical Race Studies Award

Emily Wilbourne

Voice, Slavery, and Race in Seventeenth-Century Florence (Oxford University Press, 2023).

“...Deeply interdisciplinary and beautifully written, Emily Wilbourne’s Voice, Slavery & Race in Seventeenth-Century Florence puts new historical subjects center stage during a key time and place in the development of European music. The book exemplifies old-fashioned archival digging applied to current and urgent questions. Building on intrepid research into the lived experience of enslaved and racially marked musicians and others in Florence, Wilbourne offers a trove of new evidence and draws confident and brave conclusions consistently informed by well-articulated appeals to a range of theoretical perspectives (including critical race theory). The resulting richly drawn, sonorous panorama of seventeenth-century Florence takes on foundational moments and sites for musicology and broadens to afford a critique of the history of our field. In her introduction, Wilbourne imagines the book as useful to a wide range of readers—from experts on the topic to those with no knowledge of music history to ‘others, unimagined at the point of writing.’ This is future-thinking scholarship that models the power of taking racial categories seriously for all historians of culture.”

Lewis Lockwood Award

Fanny Gribenski

Tuning the World: The Rise of 440 Hertz in Music, Science & Politics, 1859–1955
(University of Chicago Press, 2023).

Music in American Culture Award

Benjamin J. Harbert

Instrument of the State: A Century of Music in Louisiana’s Angola Prison
(Oxford University Press, 2023).

“...Instrument of the State is a remarkable study covering both music making and musical consumption at the largest and most brutal maximum-security prison in the United States. From the well-known story of Ledbelly and Lomax, to the social politics of jazz, to the boundary probing avant-garde, to recent fieldwork on evangelical and popular music, Harbert’s sophisticated but accessible prose tells a rich story that is both historical and contemporary. His is a scholarship of discovery. Harbert draws from historical documents, media accounts, institutional and government archives, and personal interviews. He then explains this material through an impressive array of theoretical tools and perspectives. By placing familiar stories in new contexts, we come to understand the powerful role(s) music can play in an oppressive system. Instrument of the State matters in ways subtle and profound. It challenges us to rethink old myths about the authenticity of Black music and it brings us face to face with the abomination of justice that is the American prison system.”

Noah Greenberg Award

Mark Ferraguto (& The Eybler Quartet)

Project Title: The Other “Razumovsky” Quartets: Editing, Performing, and Recording Franz Weiss's Opus 8 (1813)

Otto Kinkeldey Award

Bettina Varwig

“...Music in the Flesh: An Early Modern Physiology challenges the representational aesthetics underpinning present-day notions of Affektenlehre by developing a historically grounded account of music’s incitement and enticement of the body, soul, and spirit.  Moving deftly between Italian, French, English, and German sources but focusing primarily on German music from the late sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth century, Varwig marshals a dazzling array of testimony to paint a variegated picture of music’s peculiar efficacy and the physiological channels by which it was thought to act on listeners.  Over the course of thirty succinct chapters whose subjects range from melisma, affect, and memory to pulse, contagion, and liquefaction, Varwig weaves a uniquely readable narrative out of early modern religious, medical, and musical literature; incisive and imaginative analyses of musical scores and recordings; and observations drawn from contemporary musicology and the biological sciences.  Throughout, Varwig asks readers to listen to the music of composers such as Monteverdi, Strozzi, Buxtehude, Telemann, and Bach in surprisingly novel ways, revealing the embodied impact of music often taken to be serenely depictive.  In sum, Varwig’s beautiful, crystal-clear prose and lively panorama of ideas will make her revisionist approach to the period’s aesthetic and musical discourses an enjoyable read for musicologists and cultural historians working in a broad range of historical and theoretical fields.”

Philip Brett Award 

Lisa Barg

Queer Arrangements: Billy Strayhorn and Midcentury Jazz Collaboration
(Wesleyan University Press, 2023).

“Ten years after receiving the Philip Brett Award for her early article-length study of composer, arranger, and pianist Billy Strayhorn, Lisa Barg impresses with a rich culmination of this work in Queer Arrangements: Billy Strayhorn and Midcentury Jazz Collaboration. Barg's study of Strayhorn through the intersection of jazz and Black queer histories brilliantly weaves together fluent writing and vigorous interdisciplinary scholarship to situate the artist as a dynamic site of queer collaboration within modernist networks. In a thoughtful and graceful presentation of deep archival knowledge and thorough original research, Queer Arrangements demonstrates how music studies, queer theory, archival studies, and media studies can be in genuine and productive conversation, particularly as lenses for queering jazz historiography.”

Robert M. Stevenson Award 

Ana Alonso-Minutti

Mario Lavista: Mirrors of Sounds (Oxford University Press, 2023).

“This tour-de-force combines thorough, wide-ranging research about different aspects of a major composer presented in a rich cultural context, while shedding new light on the recent history of music in Mexico and beyond. Alonso-Minutti presents an innovative biographical approach encompassing archival documentation, interviews, and a personal subjective position that allows for an immersive exploration of Lavista’s work, illustrating the relationships between literature and sound in his creative process. She highlights modernist avant-garde trends with late-medieval and Renaissance techniques, offering a nuanced panorama of the composer’s meticulous attention to timbre, texture, and motivic transformation. The author’s framing of Lavista’s music as a ‘mirror of sounds,’ in which she borrows concepts from sound studies and cultural theory, feminist studies and decolonial scholarship, is as elegant as it is nimble, spotlighting the Mexican composer’s creation of ‘social space’ through sound.”

Roland Jackson Award

Joseph W. Mason

“Trouver Et Partir: The Meaning of Structure in the Old French Jeu-Parti,” in Early Music History (2022) 40.

“Jeu-parti was a key genre among the French trouvères of the 12th and 13th centuries, a phenomenally creative period of French cultural history. It was conceived as a musico-poetic contest designed to showcase the ability of two performers who alternated with each other in improvising song with wit and subtlety, showcasing their tight control of form and rhetoric. The genre of jeu-parti provides the testing ground for tackling the key and long-debated question informing this study, namely, Does trouvère melody express poetic meaning? The article answers that question cogently in the affirmative through masterful cultural-historical and music-analytic arguments. It shows that the melodies of jeux-partis used clever means not just to deliver the structure of the poetic text and the relative weight of individual keywords such as trouver and partir, but also to flesh out in musical sound the meaning of those structures and keywords in the ears of their listeners, with notable self-awareness and even a measure of rhetorical sprezzatura.
The committee was impressed by the article’s insightful analyses of trouvère songs, theoretically grounded in widespread medieval conceptions of memory, rhetoric, and creativity. With critical acumen and erudition, and in engaging prose, this study points to new ways of understanding the musical rendition of trouvère poetry as a key aspect of its meaning and communicative import. Last, but certainly not least, although the article focuses on the jeu-parti, it presents analytical methodologies that could be applied to other genres of medieval monophonic song as well.”

Ruth A. Solie Award

Elizabeth H. Margulis, Psyche Loui, & Deirdre Loughridge, eds.

The Science-Music Borderlands: Reckoning with the Past and Imagining the Future
(MIT Press, 2023).

“A conceptually ambitious yet clearheaded meditation on transdisciplinary methodology, the 2024 Solie Award winners redraw the coordinates of The Science-Music Borderlands. To transcend siloed humanistic and scientific approaches to musical inquiry, the editors nimbly guide an international array of musicologists, cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, and musicians to a strikingly unified voice. By asking humanistically informed scientific questions and challenging longstanding presumptions about the validity of scientific methodology in music studies, the book invites readers and researchers alike to meet at the traditional disciplinary boundaries, to explore the epistemological gaps, and to bridge the humanities-science divide.”

Thomas Hampson Fund

Morton Wan

Project Title: Chao Yuen Ren's Art of Songs