A number of our graduate students received recent awards. Congratulations to all!
Ronnie Malley – Recipient of the 2023 Chamber Music America Michael Jaffee Visionary Award. Created in 2016 and renamed in 2021 to honor CMA’s visionary founder, the Michael Jaffee Visionary Award recognizes promising, creative thinkers and innovators who are challenging traditional models and have recently had—or are on the way to having—a noticeable impact on the ensemble music field.
Paul Novak – Orchestral composition longing is an aviary received two top awards: The Ellen Taaffe Zwilich Award from the BMI Composer Awards, and the Leo Kaplan Award from the ASCAP Morton Gould Composer Awards.
Melani Shahin – Recipient of Fulbright PhD Research Award to Israel.
Audrey Slote – Awarded the 2024 Music Theory Southeast Irna Priore Prize for Student Research for her paper “Democratized Form: Collage and Cohesion in the Music of Bon Iver.”
Abstract: What happens when folk music—a genre known for its constructions of authenticity—collides with collage, a compositional strategy whose hybridity destabilizes such constructions? This collision characterizes recent albums by indie-folk collective Bon Iver. The borrowed sonic materials of Bon Iver’s collages both distance the newer music from the band’s old style and coalesce into musical structures that are at once wholly coherent and richly intertextual. While collage has been extensively studied in twentieth-century art music (Burkholder 1995, Losada 2009) and in relation to explicitly intertextual popular music forms like mashups (Boone 2013), relatively little music-theoretical attention has been paid to it in other popular musics. This paper examines the multiple affordances of collage in Bon Iver’s 2016 album, 22, A Million. Centering the album’s fourth track, “33 GOD,” as a case study, I analyze how samples and quotations simultaneously underscore its formal trajectory and gesture toward a web of interrelated narrative and harmonic contexts.
Justin Weiss - Recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Charles Ives Scholarship.
Do you have awards we missed? Contact Sophia Janevic (sjanevic@uchicago.edu) with information.