Each year at its annual meeting, the Society for Music Theory recognizes significant contributions to music theory, analysis, or history of theory with its Outstanding Publication Awards. The awards include honors for scholarly articles, books, emerging authors/scholars, and multi-author volumes.
This year, the 2020 award for Outstanding Multi-Author Collection for the Society for Music Theory has been awarded to The Oxford Handbook for Critical Concepts in Music Theory, edited by Associate Professor Steven Rings and Alexander Rehding. The edited volume Singing in Signs: Semiotic Explorations of Opera, including the essay "The Romanesca as a Spiritual Sign in the Operas of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven" by Assistant Instructional Professor Olga Sánchez-Kisielewska, is also the recipient of a Citation of Special Merit.
Oxford Handbook of Critical Concepts in Music Theory, co-edited by Steven Rings, receives SMT Outstanding Publication Award
From the Society for Music Theory: "The volume selected for this year’s Outstanding Multi-Author Collection award honors a collection of no fewer than twenty-six unvaryingly outstanding essays offering a critical scrutiny of concepts in music theory ranging from 'pitch' to 'musical grammar' that at first glance may seem fundamental, yet despite their ubiquity in analytical, theoretical, and pedagogical contexts, these and other first principles of Anglo-American theory are revealed through renewed critical inquiry to be fluid, not concrete. The eloquent essays gathered together in this volume reflect the unique insights of the contributors as well as the coalescence of a shared vision of its editors. With uniform excellence in depth and clarity, the essays demonstrate that, if we understand and teach these so-called fundamentals as immutable entities, we bypass essential disciplinary questions. This year’s award for Outstanding Multi-Author Collection goes to The Oxford Handbook of Critical Concepts in Music Theory, edited by Alexander Rehding and Steven Rings, published by Oxford University Press"
Congratulations, Steve!
Edited volume "Singing in Signs," including essay by Olga Sánchez-Kisielewska, receives Citation of Special Merit
The edited volume Singing in Signs: Semiotic Explorations of Opera, including the essay "The Romanesca as a Spiritual Sign in the Operas of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven" by Assistant Instructional Professor Olga Sánchez-Kisielewska, is the recipient of a Citation of Special Merit from the Society of Music Theory. Though not awarded in every year, the Citation of Special Merit recognizes editions, translations, reference works, edited volumes, and other types of publications that are of extraordinary value to the discipline.
From the Society for Music Theory: "The volume selected for the Citation of Special Merit applies a variety of methodological approaches to a genre that music theorists have tended to overlook. Serial techniques, Schenkerian theory, Formenlehre, Rezeptionsgeschichte, intellectual history, and narrative theory, all have a part to play. Despite its eclecticism, this volume hangs together as a collection, not only because of its focus on a single genre but also because each of its dozen essays is concerned with showing more or less explicitly how elements of the genre can be interpreted within systems of signs. The volume therefore is valuable both as a record of the state of the art for analytical approaches to this specific genre and as a guide to how music analysts are currently applying semiotic theory."
Congratulations Olga!