Department of Musicology

The Louise E. Cuyler Prize in Musicology was endowed in 1987 by the late emerita professor and founding member of the department to honor outstanding achievement by graduate students in musicology. In 2022, the Cuyler prize competition expanded to three distinct prizes given each academic year.

The Louise E. Cuyler Prize in Musicology for Best Conference Presentation, which includes a cash award, recognizes outstanding achievement by a graduate student as demonstrated by a presentation at an AMS, SEM, SAM, or comparable meeting. Previous winners of the Cuyler Prize for Best Conference Presentation are not eligible to apply. Applicants for this award may not apply for other Cuyler Prizes in the same year. The deadline for submissions is February 1.

The Louise E. Cuyler Prize in Musicology for Best Article, which includes a cash award, recognizes outstanding achievement by a graduate student as demonstrated the publication of an article in a scholarly journal. Previous winners of the Cuyler Prize for Best Article are not eligible to apply. Applicants for this award may not apply for other Cuyler Prizes in the same year. The deadline for submissions is February 1.

The Louise E. Cuyler Prize in Musicology for Best Dissertation Chapter, which includes a cash award, recognizes outstanding achievement by a graduate student as demonstrated by a dissertation chapter. Ph.D. candidates who are currently enrolled (during the Winter term when the prize is adjudicated) are eligible to apply. Former graduates of the program and previous winners of the Cuyler Prize for Best Dissertation Chapter are not eligible to apply. Applicants should submit a single chapter (a finished chapter or polished draft) from their dissertation. Applicants for this award may not apply for other Cuyler Prizes in the same year. The deadline for submissions is February 1.

Past Recipients

Prize for article

Prize for conference presentation

• ’23-’24: Emma Beachy, “Anna’s Ghost All Around: Holocaust Memory and Music Reception in the Digital Age”
• ’23-’24: Kelly Hoppenjans, “’Doing Something Unholy’: Mainstreaming Queer Subculture on TikTok”
• ’22-’23: Kai West, “Kill This Machine: Wendy O. Williams, Phoebe Bridgers, and Feminist Guitar Smashing”

 Prize for dissertation chapter

• ’23-’24: Julian Grey, “Non-Binary Drag: A Trans* Musicology of Sensation and Interperformativity”
• ’23-’24: Kai West, “Little Boxes: Collaborative Encounters with Guitar Pedals”
• ’22-’23: Michaela Franzen, “Sur le Borysthéne: Migratory Aesthetics and Neoclassical Ballet in Interwar Paris”
• ’22-’23: Conner Singh VanderBeek, “Talking Over Each Other: Misunderstanding Between Diasporic Punjabi Artists and Public Arts Institutions in Multicultural Canada”
• 21-’22: Elizabeth McLain, “The Apolitical as Political:”Olivier Messiaen’s Theology, Intellectual World, and Aesthetic Agenda in the 1930s”
• ’21-’22: Alyssa Wells, “Falling Out of Step: Belonging, Grit, and Drum Corps International’s Moment of Reckoning”
• ’20-’21 Lena Leson, “Dancing Envoys to Paris: George Balanchine, the Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century Festival, and the Congress for Cultural Freedom”
• ’19-’20 Kristen Clough, “Opera in Crisis? Revealing the Cultural and Political Impact of French Fourth Republic Opera, 1945-1958”
• ’18-’19 Austin Stewart “The Opera is Booming. This is a City: Opera in the Urban Frontier of Denver, 1864-1893”
• ’17-’18: James McNally, “‘Caostrópolis’: Material Engagements with the Urban Soundscape”
• ’16-’17: Katherine Cox, “‘Feelings of an Almost Human Nature’: Pink Floyd and Traumatic Narrative”
• ’15-’16: Ryan Bodiford, “‘Mi música no es un negocio (My music is not a business)’: New Media Transformations and the Arrival of the Netlabel as an Alternative Model of Music Diffusion”; Megan Hill, “Soundscape Montage: A New Model”; Leah Weinberg, “Playing American: European Patronage, Cultural Diplomacy, and the 1976 Tour”
• ’14-’15: Elizabeth Batiuk, “Dancing Solo as Heroic Self-making: Isnavi Cardoso Díaz and Choreographic Transvestisim in la Columbia”; Jessica Getman, “A Series on the Edge: The Social Tension in Star Trek’s Title Cue”

Combined prize

• ’21-’22 Kai West, “Buckra: Whiteness and Porgy and Bess“
• ’20-’21 Casper Chan, “The Chosen Kids: Children’s TV Shows and the Political Discourse of Hong Kong’s Millennials”
• ’20-’21Lisa Decenteceo, “Contesting ‘Igorotness’ and the Altered Significance of the Lang-ay Festival”
• ’20-’21 Alyssa Wells, “An Educational Example: Hanns Eisler’s Das Vorbild Revisited”
• ’20-’21 Chuyi Zhu, “Sing Like a Chinese Wife: Sonic and Bodily Memories in Tujia Bridal Lament”
• ’19-’20 Nathinee Chucherdwatanasak
• ’18-’19 Anne Heminger, “Music Theory at Work: The Eton Choirbook, Rhythmic Proportions and Musical Networks in Sixteenth-Century England.”
• ’18-’19 Lena Leson, “’I’m On My Way to a Heav’nly Lan’: Porgy and Bess as American Religious Export to the USSR”
• ’16-’17: James McNally, “Azealia Banks’s ‘212’: Black Female Identity and the White Gaze in Contemporary Hip-Hop”
• ’15-’16: Meredith Juergens, “‘Double Masked’ Minstrelsy in the Metropolitan Opera’s 1929 Production of Ernst Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf“
• ’14-’15: Ho-Chak Law, “King Hu’s Cinema Opera in his Early Wuxia Films”
• ’13-’14: Andrew Kohler, “Protest through Allegory: Carl Orff ’s Repudiation of Friedrich Hebbel in Die Bernauerin”; Elizabeth McLain, “Dreams of the Soul: Olivier Messiaen’s Nonconformist Catholic Surrealism in Chants de terre et de ciel (1939)”; Melanie Batoff, “The Visitatio sepulchri at the twelfth-century Saltzburg Cathedral: The Role of Musical Performance in Strengthening Community”
• ’12-’13: Daniel Blim, “Trauma, Absence, and Identity in John Adams’s On the Transmigration of Souls“; Sarah Suhadolnik, “Channel Surfing to the Top of the Charts: The ‘Extended’ Television Experience of Grey’s Anatomy”
• ’11-’12: Abby Anderton, “The Stars and Stripes of the Berlin Philharmonic: Classical Music and the American Cultural Agenda in West Berlin, 1945–47”
• ’09-’10: Alison DeSimone, “Medee et son pouvoir: Music and Dramatic Structure in Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s Medee (1693)”; Michael Mauskapf, “Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra and the Rise of Collective Virtuosity”
• ’08-’09: Nathan Platte, “Deceptive Melodies: Musical Fetishes and Motivic Manipulation in The Paradine Case (1947)”
• ’07-’08: Jesse Johnston, “Folk Music and Modernism: Janacek and Folkloric Performance”
• ’06-’07: Joys Cheung, “The ‘Grand Chinese Evening’ Concert (1933) and Chinese Essence in Semi-Colonial Shanghai”
• ’05-’06: Sabina Pauta Pieslak, “‘Lenin in Swaddling Clothes:’ A Critique of the Ideological Conflict between Socialist State Policy and Christian Music in Romania during the Cold War”
• ’04-’05: Christopher Scheer, “For the Sake of the Union: The Nation in the Fourth Irish Rhapsody of Sir Charles Villiers Stanford”
• ’03-’04: Stephanie Heriger, “Surface and Subtext: Handel’s Susanna and the Pastoral Tradition”
• ’02-’03: Rebecca Schwartz-Bishir, “Alexander Nevsky: Prokofiev’s Successful Compromise with Socialist Realism”; Tamar Barzel, “If Not Klezmer, Then What? Jewish Music and Modalities on New York City’s Downtown Music Scene”
• ’01-’02: Julia Bÿl
• ’00-’01: Eric Saylor, “The Nature of Spirit: Subtexts in Vaughan Williams’s Pastoral Symphony”
• ’99-’00: Amanda Eubanks, “‘Speak Sister, Speak’: Music, Politics, and Gender in the Restoration Revivals of Macbeth”
• ’98-’99: Mark Katz, “Aesthetics out of Exigency: Violin Vibrato and the Phonograph”
• ’97-’98: Jennifer DeLapp, “Of Politics and Style: Copland’s Quartet for Piano and Strings”
• ’96-’97: Paul Munson
• ’95-’96: Mark Benamou
• ’94-’95: Robynn Stilwell
• ’93-’94: Roark T. Miller
• ’92-’93: Jeffrey J. Taylor, “Earl Hines’s Piano Style in the 1920s: A Historical and Analytical Perspective”
• ’91-’92: James M. Manheim
• ’90-’91: Timothy D. Taylor
• ’88-’89: Susan Pratt Walton