Dean's Essay Prize Award Recipients

First Prize: Marta Beszterda
Prize: $1,000.

Abstract:

This essay is the first chapter from my PhD dissertation titled: “The ‘First Lady’ and the ‘Stalinist Agent’ of Polish Music: The Musical Labour of Grażyna Bacewicz and Zofia Lissa During the Shaping of Contemporary Art Music Culture in Poland (1925–1975).” The dissertation as a whole explores the relationship between gender, identity, musical labor, and women’s agency in mid-century Poland. I focus on lives and careers of two key female figures who shaped the country’s contemporary music culture: composer Grażyna Bacewicz (1909–69) and musicologist Zofia Lissa (1905–80). Throughout their careers, Bacewicz’s and Lissa’s creative, intellectual, administrative, and care-labour depended on, challenged, and reinforced prevailing ideas about gender roles in music and academia in Polish interwar and postwar society. Simultaneously, their lives provide a case study to examine agency that women composers and musicologists exerted with changing politics of gender and national belonging.

In the awarded chapter, I analyze beliefs and practices around womanhood and work ethic shared by Bacewicz, her mother Maria Modlińska, and her teacher Nadia Boulanger. I consider the Warsaw positivism movement provenience of Modlińska’s values around work and womanhood as influential in shaping Bacewicz’s extraordinary dedication and perseverance in pursuing a composing career as a woman. Moreover, I demonstrate parallels between Boulanger’s and Bacewicz’s practices of self-fashioning as an “exceptional woman.” Previous analyses of the Bacewicz-Boulanger relationship have not gone beyond the context of Boulanger’s overall relations with her Polish students and the role that the French mentor played in Polish musical culture more broadly—in particular, how her visits to Warsaw in the fifties and sixties constituted a form of cultural diplomacy in the Cold War era (Bohlman and Pierce 2020). To date, researchers have not considered how the role that Boulanger played for Bacewicz might have differed from the experience of Bacewicz’s male colleagues. Based on my analysis of Bacewicz’s memoir and archival correspondence, I argue that the lineage between the two composers surpasses the boundaries of neoclassical style and of simply being comparably unique figures within their respective milieus. Although it encompasses both of these associations, it is also a lineage that was built on their shared strategy of cultivating “exceptionalism” to survive under the male-dominated status quo. Drawing on feminist approaches by Rachel Lumsden (2017) and Kimberly Francis (2015), this chapter is a case study on women and gender in musical modernism, interwoven with Polish mid-century debates around nation, music, and gender.

Second Prize: Jonathan Lindhorst
Prize $500

Abstarct

First codified in 1982 by queer Dutch composer Peter Schat (1935-2003) and later significantly expanded by New Zealand composer Jenny Mcleod (1941-2022), tone-clocktheory (TCT) is a largely unexplored post-tonal theory that provides a new framework forengaging with the whole of chromaticism. Both a harmonic system and chromatic ‘map,’
TCT presents twelve previously uncategorized ‘chromatic tonalities’ which are derived from the twelve possible atonal triads (Allen Forte’s trichordal set classes), labelled as ‘hours,’ and organized around a circular clock face. Using a transpositional operation called ‘steering,’ these triadic sets can then be expanded to assemble a non-repeating twelve- tone harmonic field based on its interval-class, each with its own distinct ‘harmonic flavour,’ offering innovative approaches for composition and an alternative system of harmonic analysis to
Allen Forte’s pitch-class set theory.
Despite being in existence for more than 40 years, TCT has remained obscure, with few existing texts that clearly outline its functionality while also remaining true to its unique notational nomenclature and terminology. This article seeks to solve that issue by presenting the theoretical framework of both Schat’s earlier ‘classic’ tone-clock theory, and McLeod’s later expansion in one easily digestible article, and serve as an introduction for anyone who wishes to engage with TCT at a deeper level.

Keywords: Jenny McLeod, Peter Schat, Tone-Clock, steering, intervallic prime form,
chromatic tonality, Tone Clock Pieces, Michael Norris, Erik Fernandez Ibarz, Allen Forte, pitch-class set.

First Prize: Shanti Nachtergaele
Essay: “A Performance Matrix for Double Bass Tunings”
Prize: $1,000.

My essay is a sample chapter from my dissertation, which is tentatively titled “A Sociomaterial History of the Professional Double Bassist, 1760–1890.” The dissertation as a whole explores the sociomaterial entanglement of performers and their instruments, and investigates how this entanglement shaped identities of the double bass and double bassists. The first part centers on material identities of the double bass––that is, the instruments themselves. I focus on different regional identities and their association with four common tuning variants in use in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (German, French, Italian, and Viennese), as well as on the processes through which an international standard tuning was ultimately established by c. 1900. Since the coexistence of several varieties of double bass makes it difficult to pin down the materials involved in the sociomaterial entanglement, I introduce tools from the field of behavioral archeology to help define these materials more clearly.

One of these tools is the performance matrix, which is the subject of this chapter. Performance matrices allow one to investigate competing variants of a technology by analyzing which of its features and capabilities were prioritized in the different contexts in which it was used. The performance matrix for four regional double bass tunings that I construct in this chapter highlights a shift in priorities related to the double bass’s orchestral role in the nineteenth century, and further guides an examination of the institutional influences that contributed to the gradual spread of German tuning as the international standard. My analysis draws on my own experience playing the four tunings and on historical accounts, including two documented debates on double bass tuning––the first of which unfolded between 1827 and 1832 at the Paris Conservatoire, and the second at the 1881 Congress of Italian Musicians held in Milan. Whereas existing literature provides only brief explanations for the decline of Viennese, French, and Italian tunings, my analysis yields a more nuanced discussion of the compromises and shifting priorities that were involved in this extended process.

Second Prize: Sofia Yatsyuk
Essay: “Women composers and their cities in the era of first-wave feminism: gender and the classical music canon in Britain, 1850-1950”
Prize: $500.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, discriminatory gender ideologies in Western art music paved the way for critics to attribute both merits and shortcomings of women’s compositional works to their gender. Qualities such as ‘charm’ and ‘grace’ were qualified as feminine traits, while masculine-perceived traits were considered superior, and the highest praise a music critic could offer. By depicting women’s music as inferior, critics used discriminatory gender ideologies to justify its omission from the canon. To date, limited research has been conducted on the critical evaluation carried out by female music critics. Were female music critics being employed in the era of first-wave feminism? If so, how do their reviews compare to those of their male counterparts, and did they impact the reception of women composers navigating discriminatory gender ideologies? This paper addresses the questions posed above, exploring the feminist press and how the critical establishment’s use of gendered analysis may have confined a woman composer’s creativity. I demonstrate how reviews by male critics often differed greatly from those by female critics, having highly divergent impacts on the reception of women composers in the era of first-wave feminism. As a case study, I evaluate unique, unpublished archival documents of two upper- middle class women composers, who lived in Britain during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Ethel Smyth (1858-1944), and Rebecca Clarke (1886-1979). In their day, these composers were influential pioneers in their field; now they are ghostly presences in our music histories, on the margins of the classical canon. Exploring how critics’ use of gender- coded analysis may have confined the creativity of women composers enables us to better interpret the music of these revolutionary women, enriching our understanding of their work and ensuring a brighter future for their music in our concert halls.

First Prize: Hester Bell-Jordan
Essay: “Mesdemoiselles Erard: Gender, Music Publishing, and Self-Dedication in Nineteenth-Century Paris””
Prize: $1,000.

The Erard family and their famous piano and harp company have been extensively researched (Adelson et al 2015), yet a successful musical venture undertaken by female members of the family—the publishing company M^lles Erard—has received little attention. Founded around 1800 and run by the Erard brothers’ two nieces, Marie-Françoise Bonnemaison née Marcoux (1777-1851) and Catherine-Barbe Delahante née Marcoux (1779-1813), M^lles Erard was part of a rich legacy of women-run music publishing houses in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Paris. Save for foundational work by French scholars (Milliot 1968; Devriès/Lesure 1979) and passing mentions in studies of women and music, not only M^lles Erard but the broader role of women and gender in music publishing remains underexplored. My research addresses the erasure of gender in histories of music publishing and the Erard family by considering the contributions and strategies of M^lles Erard as women music publishers.

My article investigates the sisters’ use of self-dedication in a collection of five works from between 1801 and 1817 by composers including Daniel Steibelt and Johann Baptist Cramer. The title pages of these pieces inscribe “M^lles Erard” or the sisters’ married names several times over, recording their roles as publishers and dedicatees. By accepting or eliciting dedicated pieces scored for piano or harp—feminized instruments which the sisters themselves played—they appropriated connotations of the high-status woman dedicatee. I argue that this use of the paratextual space of the dedication serves both as a means of self-fashioning for the sisters as women music publishers and as a gendered promotional strategy for selling their products (Green 2019; Garritzen 2020). Self-dedication provides a doubled endorsement of a piece and elevates the dedicatee(s) to a position of authority. Unlike their male competitors, such as Ignace Pleyel, the Marcoux sisters could not draw on public, professional authority as musicians or composers to bolster their company’s reputation. Self-dedication thus functioned as a means of asserting authority as women music publishers through an existing model of feminine power.

Second Prize: Luke Riedlinger
Essay: “Hearing beyond Jazzmasculinity in the Intra-ensemble Interaction and Reception of the John Coltrane Classic Quartet”
Prize: $500.

This paper reflects on the values associated with the John Coltrane Classic Quartet as a canonical jazz ensemble, unpacking themes of synchronicity, flexibility, and spirituality that circulate around the critical reception of this iconic group. I begin by evaluating critical narratives harnessed by jazz critics Zita Carno, Ben Ratliff, and Ashley Kahn to appraise and historicise the group. Synthesizing the Carno, Ratliff, and Kahn narratives reveals two broad themes that have been employed to explain the success of the ensemble and their resultant canonical status in the jazz tradition: the synergy narrative and the flexibility narrative. I suggest that these narrative discourses of difference (flexibility) and sameness (synergy) imply certain ways that gender was put to work in the real time collaboration of the quartet and has been used as an identity construct through which to critique and historicise the group in the years since. Stemming from Rustin-Paschal’s definition of jazzmasculinity as a ‘kind of space’ enables the performance of jazz as self-making, I propose reconfiguring jazzmasculinity as a multi-modal infrastructure in which individually gendered jazz musicians emerge through participation in a gendered ensemble. The main goal of this model is to acknowledge the ways that jazzmasculinity is not a neutral zone in which sameness is fetishized, rather it is a kind of framework that requires different techniques and aesthetics to participate in for each musician mediated through their associated instrumental trope, as well as discursive ideas circulating in and around the ensemble to which they belong. I ultimately forward the proposition that teaching jazz students to hear and negotiate gender simultaneously at the level of the individual, the instrumental trope, and the ensemble is vital component in producing graduate and professional musicians that are more reflexive about their own positionality within jazz as a gendered discourse.

First Prize: Andrew Hon
Essay: “From Passion to Compassion: The Opposites and Uniformity of David Lang’s the little match girl passion (2007)”
Prize: $1,000.

With the flourishing of the Passion genre at the turn of the twenty-first century, there also arose a trend in dechristianization of the genre, giving rise to Passion settings with narratives not centered on Christ. One of the most well-known and performed works of this new trend is David Lang’s the little match girl passion (2007), which takes influence from J. S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, but “replaces” the suffering of Jesus with that of H. C. Andersen’s little match girl. The poor girl, not unlike Jesus in the traditional Passion, is portrayed as an outcast of the society. But the allegorical character represents more than an individual in that she embodies the lower class that suffers under the capitalist system. Through a retelling of the Andersen story in a post-minimalist framework, Lang’s Passion renounces the myth of progress, challenges the status quo, and contemplates change.

The original tale by Andersen is one of many opposites: violence and love; poverty and wealth; struggle and redemption; life and death. These dualities are largely retained in the little match girl passion, mitigated by the uniformity of Lang’s hallmark post-minimalist style. This paper examines Lang’s Passion focusing on its musical dualities and uniformity. It will also illustrate how these opposing and unifying forces can elicit emotional response in the listener and create meanings, both musically and extra-musically, in light of social justice issues.

Second Prize: Thomas Posen
Essay: “From “Radical Blunders” to Compositional Solutions: A Form-Functional Perspective on Beethoven’s Early Eroica Continuity-Sketches”
Prize: $500.

In 1802, Beethoven began working on what would become one of his largest and most discussed works: the third symphony in E♭ major, "The Eroica.” Beethoven drafted his musical ideas for the work in what we now call "The Eroica Sketchbook," the most famous of all his sketchbooks. The sketches to the Eroica have fascinated scholars for nearly one and a half centuries, beginning with Gustav Nottebohm’s pioneering work in the late nineteenth century. More recently in 2013, Lewis Lockwood and Alan Gosman finished transcribing the complete sketchbook into modern legible music notation, which has led to a resurged interest in his compositional approach for the piece.

Beethoven’s compositional process to the first movement of the Eroica has long vexed scholars. Many of his early drafts have been interpreted as “failed experiments” or even “radical blunders.” In this paper, I reappraise these supposed problems by (1) reconstructing the early single-line continuity sketches to the first movement, (2) by analyzing the reconstructions with form function theory (Caplin, 1998, 2013), and (3) by performing the sketches as if they were viable pieces. I suggest, for example, that the sketches show Beethoven’s many innovative approaches for problematizing a lyrical subordinate theme in order to elevate rhetorically the arrival of a new lyrical theme late in the development. In short, by reorienting the analyst to valorize the sketches with the well-defined theory of formal functions instead of critiquing them with imprecise traditional sonata theories, this paper develops new insights into Beethoven’s compositional process for one of his most celebrated pieces.

First Prize: Shulamit Sarid
Essay: “Infinite Variety – The Collaborative Works of Yo-Yo Ma”.
Prize: $1,000.

French-born Chinese-American cellist Yo-Yo Ma is one of the preeminent cellists of our time. He remains devoted to the classical repertoire yet has often sought out musicians outside the classical sphere and collaborated with them. In 1998, Ma founded The Silk Road Ensemble, a non-profit project that assembles diverse cultures and musicians by commissioning new pieces as well as supporting education and cross-cultural artistic partnerships. This article explores Yo-Yo Ma’s intercultural collaborations in light of contemporary theories of modernism and transnationalism. Drawing upon his many interviews, lectures, and films, I survey Ma’s multicultural childhood and anthropological training, as well as analyze his most recent collaborative album Sing Me Home. Due to the transnational and political nature of Ma’s works along with their global impact, I would argue that Yo-Yo Ma is among the leading cellists who contributed to the modernization of cello playing in the second half of the twentieth century.

Second Prize: Laurence Willis
Essay: “Comprehensibility and Ben Johnston’s String Quartet No. 9”.
Prize: $500.

Between 1959 and 1995, Ben Johnston wrote ten string quartets and most use just intonation. During this period, North American microtonal music came in two varieties: extensions of equal temperament and just intonation. Although we often describe just intonation and equal temperament as categorically separate from one another, this can be somewhat illusory in practice since both may facilitate the exploration of novel sonorities. Certainly, in microtonal communities, neither category is monolithic. Although two composers may share similar aesthetic goals such as pureness and beauty, no standardized just-intonation practice exists either conceptually or notationally. For example, Tenney’s Arbor Vitae (2006) and Johnston’s “With Solemnity” from String Quartet No. 7 (1984) employs completely different methods of pitch derivation and notation. While these compositions may both be described as just-intonation works, they are otherwise relatively unalike. Johnston’s String Quartet No. 9 (1988) is different again: the quartet’s tonal pitch structures and recognizable forms expose the abnormality of its intonation.

Johnston’s just-intonation music is of startling aural variety and presents novel solutions to age-old tuning problems. In this paper, I describe the way that Johnston reoriented his compositional practice in the 1980s, as evidenced in his musical procedures. Johnston became aware of the disconnect between Western art music composers and their audiences. He therefore set about composing more accessible music that listeners could easily comprehend. His String Quartet No. 9 gives an instructive example of the negotiation between just intonation and comprehensibility as it reveals an evolution of just-intonation pitch structures. This paper provides an analytical method for exploring Johnston’s works in a way that moves beyond describing the structure of his system and into more musically tangible questions of form and process.

First Prize: Kaiya Smith Blackburn
Essay: “Black Israelites, Social Justice, and Kendrick Lamar: Meditations on a Rhetorical Branch of African American/Jewish Relations”.
Prize: $1,000.

African American communities from the eighteenth century onward have successfully interpreted the Hebrew Bible and Christian scriptures to befit their existential reality and reinforce their humanity. On the sonic landscape of the spirituals, African Americans have identified with the Torah’s themes of social justice, liberation, and equality. With songs such as “I Am Bound for the Land of Canaan,” “Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel,” and “Steal Away,” African slaves and their descendants identified directly with the suffering Children of Israel – they engaged with scripture as a living, malleable organism, and carved within it a likeness of their own experience. The reinterpretation of scripture has thus been central to the self-definition, identity-formation, and social cohesion of many African American communities from the first theological utterances of the earliest bards, to the more contemporary exaltations of black artists throughout the postmodern nation. This analysis evaluates the network of African American identifications with central stories and principles of the Torah, situating it within the overarching social sphere of African American and Jewish relations. While the earliest alignments with the enslaved Hebrews of Exodus by African Americans occurred prior to substantial contact between blacks and Jews, black theology has continued to evolve within the context of an integrated history with Jews. One particular branch, – stemming in part from interaction with Jews in America – is the Black Israelite theological phenomenon. I focus on Kendrick Lamar and his fourth studio album DAMN. (2017), which employs Black Israelite biblical rhetoric profoundly, to evaluate this cultural entanglement.

Second Prize: Kristin Franseen
Essay: “Onward to the end of the Nineteenth Century”: Edward Prime-Stevenson’s Nostalgic Musical Time Travel”
Prize: $500.

In the fourth chapter of my dissertation, I theorize the role of nostalgia and memory in Edward Prime-Stevenson’s music criticism and amateur sexology. While Prime-Stevenson had a successful career as a music critic in New York City during the 1880s and 1890s, he left the United States around the turn of the century to pursue sexological research in Italy and Switzerland. During his time in Europe, he wrote and self-published an early gay novel, Imre: A Memorandum (1906), and one of the first histories of homosexuality in English, The Intersexes (1908/1909), under the pseudonym “Xavier Mayne.” Music appears as a theme in both of these works, and The Intersexes in particular presents Prime-Stevenson’s approach to finding queer musical meaning in symphonic music and Wagnerian opera. Decades later, Prime-Stevenson revised his earlier newspaper writings in an effort to preserve his journalism in a more permanent format in Long-Haired Iopas and A Repertory of One-Hundred Symphonic Programmes (1932/1933).  

All of these books were distributed by Prime-Stevenson in extremely limited editions, and both the texts and his surviving notes suggest a deep musical and personal longing for the 1890s. They feature dedications to Prime-Stevenson’s friend and ex-lover Harry Harkness Flagler, and focus largely on repertoire that he and Flagler experienced as concertgoers in the early 1890s in New York City. The composers and works Prime-Stevenson identifies as central to the “Uranian” [homosexual] musical experience also appear in his mainstream music criticism. In Long-Haired Iopas, sexuality and the erotic appear as a primary force that can never quite be unpacked in a satisfactory manner. Prime-Stevenson alleges that recent psychological interest in sexology accounts for the widespread success of Wagner’s Parsifal, describes the diversity in the ways he claims men and women respond to and perform music, and toys with issues of forbidden love and male friendship in his biographical musings on bachelors in music history. Ultimately, however, these seemingly disparate approaches to musical-sexual knowledge all link back to his personal views on music appreciation. Prime-Stevenson’s layers of secrecy and frequent obfuscation can make it difficult to piece together his research process, although some of his claims are corroborated in writings by others, including Ethel Smyth, Edward Carpenter, Rosa Newmarch, and Magnus Hirschfeld.  More than anything, however, Prime-Stevenson attempted to construct queer music histories where none had previously existed, citing unverifiable gossip and turning to personal experience when the surviving historical record did not live up to his lofty aims. His last book, a collection of “playlists” of phonograph recordings, continues this canon-building project, and can thus be read as a kind of nostalgic communion with other listeners across time and space.

First Prize: Mylène Gioffredo
Paper: L’Exploration du Son dans Zipangu (1980) de Claude Vivier.

Considered something of a musical genius, Vivier is known at home and abroad for the originality of his musical language, the importance he attached to vibrant timbral sonorities, and the magic he achieved through formal structures often based in a fascination with the Fibonnaci series and other mathematical relationships.  This paper combined in-depth analysis with archival documentation referencing Vivier’s own compositional processes to critique and systematically “undo” past theoretical accounts.

The jury appreciated the elegance of the writing style and the way in which the tension between process and theory was revealed.  They also appreciated the sophistication and execution of Mylène's own analytical representations. 

Second Prize: Claire McLiesh
Paper: These Days: Musical Nostalgia in The Royal Tenebaums.

This paper tracks how the Tenebaum family struggles with remembering and forgetting through the themes of the Chelsea Girl title track sung by Nico on her 1967 album and that is featured throughout the film. The analysis is a well-exceuted example of film scholarship showing how Anderson’s mise-en-scène through the music gives unspoken, sometimes even unspeakable, narrative information.

The jury appreciated the organization and craft of Claire's writing style, as well as the way in which different theoretical perspectives were integrated – particularly with respect to issues surrounding genre and style.

First Prize:  Vanessa Blais-Tremblay, Ph.D., Musicology
Seminar Paper:  Gorgeous Girlies in Glittering Gyrations: Between the Bump-and-Grind and the Branlements-et-Grouillements.

Laying the groundwork for some of her thesis project, this seminar paper re-examines women’s participation in the golden age of Montreal jazz through the 1930s – 1950s, arguing that the “first take” dismissed them all too easily as a product of Mayor Drapeau’s morality raids intended to rid a increasingly urban city of values at odds with the continuing Catholicism of the Duplessis years.   The panel was intrigued by her argument that the reason for the raids, the vice, is a productive means of understanding how jazz was “materialistically and discursively” produced at the time.

Most interesting was the originality and depth of her methodology – any research on Quebec music-making involving ground-roots research and the building of an argument from the original sources itself – and the intelligent ways in which she found sources of ethnographic data from the period.  She allowed the voices from the past to speak, mixing her study of the archives, video documentaries, and previous histories about the period to, not only shed new light on the music-making, but also on our understanding of “history-making” as an imaginative act.

As an example of a seminar paper, the depth of original research was excellent.

Second Prize: Kai Siedenburg, Ph.D., Music Technology
Article: Culture Clash?  Audio Features for Timbre in Music Information Retrieval and Music Psychology.

This article, which the committee understood had not yet been submitted for publication, identifies a curious gap between the types of audio features that are used for timbre research in music information retrieval and music psychology.  Where the typical review of research that is the outcome of one’s comprehensive process or dissertation often simply documents the gap, this paper argues that the gap is not “coincidental” and arises from “differences in the two fields’ methodologies” that stem from the underlying assumptions and questions grounding the work. 

The committee appreciated the thoughtfulness of the argument and the structure through which it was articulated.  They particularly appreciated the effort to capture the attention of the audience with an engaging “introduction,” and the specificity of the final recommendations.

First Prize – Jason Noble, Ph.D. Composition
Focusing on Messaien's the Quatuor pour la fin du temps and Grisey’s Vortex Temporum, Jason argues that music as the art of time, when evoking an experience of timelessness, does not take us out of time; rather it plays on the structures of human perception to create other ways of being in time.  Through a sophisticated and musically sensitive analysis of both works from a variety of engaging perspectives, he creatively builds new theoretical relationships to conclude that despite different approaches the two works are fundamentally aligned in their common artistic endeavor.  The Committee very much appreciated the elegance of his expression and the way in which he blended structural analysis with the experiential.

Second Prize – Zoey Cochran, Ph.D. Musicology
Using case studies from early 18^th century Neopolitan opera, Zoey Cochran gives a nuanced account of the multifarious uses of Neopolitan and Tuscan in the arts. Her reinterpretation takes into account variation within the dialects, as well as the opera’s role as a form of resistance to foreign power, to present an enriched view of these works and their socio-political context. The committee was impressed with the professionalism and sophistication of her analysis. Her exploration of the Italian language and its role is a tour-de-force of the power of old-fashioned or pure historical musicology that grounds itself in archival sources.

FIRST PRIZE was awarded to Catherine Schwartz, a doctoral student in musicology, for a chapter from her dissertation entitled, “Pierre Bonnier, and Singing the Self in the Third Republic.”

While our current understanding of the voice has been framed largely as a function of performance traditions or musical analyses of operatic roles, Ms. Schwartz examines the concept of voice itself through early 20th C. accounts of what it means to sing represented in singing treatises, scientific accounts of voice and social theory (particularly Pierre Bonnier), and the experience of singing itself as a function of the learning process. She also introduces new concepts such a vocal porter, the idea of carrying the voice (or the service rendered) by a singer to an audience in order to ensure that he or she is heard and understood, together with how such sensations can be linked to an acoustical experience of sound and to the body’s awareness of vocal resonance.

SECOND PRIZE was awarded to Rachel Avery, a master's student in musicology, for her essay entitled, “The Cosmic Dance: The pop score and musical subjectivity as Life in Harold and Maude.”

Ms. Avery not only combined literary and critical perspectives from narrative studies, film theory, and music, but she also successfully made a strong case for seeing the music in the 1971 film, Harold and Maude, as an analytic space where the characters chart and discover their own subjectivity. The jury particularly appreciated the connection she made between classical and contemporary constructs, especially since classical elements are often at play in the structural forms of composer Cat Stevens’ sound track, much as they were in the then current music of the Beatles.