Marta María Rodríguez Cuervo
Universidad Complutense de Madrid

“For her contributions to musicology and service to the discipline at an international level. She is a musicologist, pianist, and Director of the orchestra of the Faculty of Geography and History of the Universidad Complutense of Madrid. Her work on contemporary music and composers from Cuba and Latin America has been foundational as well as groundbreaking, not only as a researcher, but as a public musicologist and conductor. She has taught several generations of musicians and musicologists in Cuba and Spain, leaving an enduring legacy not only in Ibero-American music scholarship, but also in musicology at a global scale. After graduating with degrees in musicology from the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA, High Art Institute) in Havana, Cuba, the Tchaikovsky Higher Conservatory of Moscow in 1990, and the Universidad Complutense of Madrid in 2002, she held positions at the ISA, the Professional Conservatory of Music of Getafe (Madrid), and the Carlos III University of Madrid (1997 to 2002).  Since December 2003 she has been the Director of the orchestra at UCM, which participates in concerts and academic events held in various faculties of the Universidad Complutense and in the ‘Rafael Orozco’ Superior Music Conservatory (Córdoba), and the ‘Victoria de los Ángeles’ Professional Music Conservatory (Madrid), Museum of America, Auditorium de las Rozas, Conde Duque Auditorium and in The Night of Books. Rodríguez Cuervo was awarded the 2010 Cubadisco Prize for Musicological Notes for ‘Leo Brouwer 1939. Integral Cuartetos de Cuerda.’ As a musicologist she has participated in several grant-funded research projects and is the author of various articles, program notes, and commentaries on works by contemporary composers. Together with Victoria Eli she wrote Leo Brouwer: Caminos de la Creación (Ediciones y Publicaciones Author, 2009) on Leo Brouwer’s career and compositions. She was selected for the ‘100 Latinos Madrid’ in the 2008 edition, an award given by the FUSIONARTE Association and sponsored by Casa de América, Madrid. In December 2003 Rodríguez Cuervo founded the Orchestra of the Faculty of Geography and History of the UCM and has served as its conductor since.”

Walter M. Frisch
Columbia University, Professor of Music

“For an extraordinary record as a scholar and many years of substantial service to the AMS. Frisch is H. Harold Gumm/Harry and Albert von Tilzer Professor of Music at Columbia University. He has taught at Columbia since 1982, and has served as chair of the music department, director of graduate studies, and director of undergraduate studies. Frisch has written many books and articles on subjects ranging from Austro-German music of the 19th and 20th centuries to American popular music of the 20th century. His writings have won several prominent awards, including the AMS Roland Jackson Award and the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for Outstanding Book on Music (twice), and have been translated into French, German, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, and Chinese. He has also been the recipient of many prestigious fellowships, including from the National Endowment of the Humanities and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Frisch’s service to the discipline of musicology has been extensive. He has been the editor of the journal 19th-Century Music and a founder of the American Brahms Society. He has served the AMS as Vice President, member of the Board of Directors, and chair of the Publications Committee. He has also been a member of the editorial board of JAMS, the AMS Annual Meeting Program Committee, and the H. Colin Slim Award Committee. Frisch has made notable contributions to public musicology: in addition to an AMS/Library of Congress lecture, he has given numerous pre-concert talks and is the author of a review in the Boston Globe as well as four articles in the New York Times Sunday Arts & Leisure section.”

Ellie M. Hisama
University of Toronto, Dean of the Faculty of Music and Professor of Music; Columbia University, Professor Emerita of Music

“For her contributions to musicology, her distinguished teaching career, and her commitment to creating a more diverse, inclusive, and ethical profession. Equally at home in the fields of music theory and musicology, Hisama’s writings on the role of gender, sexuality, and race in musical modernity cover subjects ranging from twentieth-century modernists to hip hop. She is the author of Gendering Musical Modernism and numerous articles in publications as diverse as Music Theory Spectrum, Journal of the American Musicological Society, Jazz & Culture, and Popular Music, and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. She has worked with communities in and around her institutions to create new archives of music and art in initiatives including Future Sound 6ix at the University of Toronto and For the Daughters of Harlem at Columbia University. She has worked with numerous regional and international bodies dedicated to anti-racist agendas in the arts and in the academy, including Atlantic Fellows for Racial Equity and Engaging Music, Race, & Gender. Her exceptional relationship with tenure-track and mid-career faculty earned her Columbia’s inaugural Faculty Mentoring Award. The recipient of numerous fellowships, she is currently the Edward T. Cone Member in Music Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, where she is working on a book about Julius Eastman.."

Photo Credit:
Andrea Kane

Steven R. Swayne
Dartmouth College, Jacob H. Strauss 1922 Professor of Music

“For for his contributions to the field of musicology, his service to the AMS, and performance career. He served as President of the AMS from 2020 to 2022 during the difficult pandemic years, leading the AMS with energy and precision. His research interests range across time and place, with interests especially in American music. He has published in many journals, including The Sondheim Review, the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, American Music, Studies in Musical Theatre, the Indiana Theory Review, and The Musical Quarterly, and has published two books: How Sondheim Found His Sound (University of Michigan Press, 2005) and Orpheus in Manhattan: William Schuman and the Shaping of America's Musical Life (Oxford University Press, 2011), the latter winning the 2012 ASCAP Nicolas Slonimsky Award for Outstanding Musical Biography. Swayne has also been the recipient of several awards and fellowships, including from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and he held the John W. Kluge Chair in Modern Culture at the Library of Congress in 2022. In addition to his current post at Dartmouth, he has taught at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, the University of California, Berkeley, and Quest University. A native of Los Angeles, California, Swayne graduated from John Muir High School and Occidental College and holds degrees from Fuller Theological Seminary (M.Div.) and the University of California, Berkeley (MA, Ph.D.). He is also a concert pianist with a longstanding performance career, which includes playing with the San Francisco Symphony under the direction of Michael Tilson Thomas. Swayne has released a Christmas album titled Holiday Twists (1997) as well as a compilation of piano works titled Preludes by Chopin, Fauré & Gershwin (1997).”

Nancy Yunhwa Rao
Rutgers University, Distinguished Professor of Music, Head of Music Theory

“For her contributions to musicology, in particular her achievements in fostering cross-cultural dialogue between Anglophone music studies and music research in Chinese-speaking lands, as well as her efforts to bridge the divide between musicology and her home discipline of music theory. Rao’s distinguished career, especially her groundbreaking work on the history of Chinese opera in North America, was recently recognized by election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Rao’s prodigious scholarship has spanned a broad range of topics and methodologies: gender and music; musical modernism, especially the music of Elliott Carter, Henry Cowell, and Chinese modernist composers; racial representation in music; the role of cultural fusion in music; and the history of music by Chinese Americans. Her research has long had a distinctively global outlook, as reflected not only in the topics she has focused on, but also in her bilingual publication record in both English and Chinese. Rao’s 2017 monograph, Chinatown Opera Theater in North America (University of Illinois Press), recently published in Chinese translation, has been recognized by book awards from the AMS, the Society of American Music, and the Association for Asian American Studies. Her article on Ruth Crawford received the 2007 Lowens Article Award from SAM, and her essay on Chen Yi’s Second Symphony was part of an edited volume that won a 2017 book prize from SMT. She currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of American Music and is a co-editor for the University of Chicago Press “Big Issues in Music” book series. At her home institution of Rutgers University, where she is a highly respected colleague and teacher, she has been honored with appointment as Distinguished Professor, and the Board of Trustees Award for Excellence in Research.”