The Royal Musical Association
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RMA News
Call for Contributions: RMA Research Student's Conference 2011
Call for Papers and Call for Works
13 Jan 11 - 15 Jan 11
Call for Papers: Music and Philosophy
1st Annual Conference of the RMA Music and Philosophy Study Group - Opera and Philosophy
1 Jul 11 - 2 Jul 11
University of London
Call for Papers: Music: Action Across Distance
Sound Thought 2011 - Deadline for proposals 22 Oct 2010
3 Feb 11 - 5 Feb 11
Honorary Membership awarded to Robert Pascall
15 Sep 09
Honorary membership in the RMA is awarded occasionally in recognition of substantial and long-standing contributions to musical scholarship. It is expected that honorary membership will remain a rare honour, and it is unlikely that more than one name will be recommended to Council in any one year.
Robert Pascall
In 2009, honorary membership has been awarded to ROBERT PASCALL. Broad in his interests, wide-ranging in his teaching, and an exemplary practical musician-scholar, Robert Pascall has focussed his research energies on a specific place and time-period: Vienna in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
At the heart of his research over the past thirty-five years he has, by the highest international standards, rendered a major contribution to Brahms scholarship. This is exemplified above all in his editions of the four symphonies for the Neue Brahms Gesamtausgabe (of which he has been Vice-Chair since 1991), each produced as a full score, an Urtext edition with critical report, and a conductor's score with parts. He has mastered all the tools of editorial work - palaeography, bibliography, textual scholarship, printing process, publication history, reception history, music analysis - and brought them to bear on these magisterial works of scholarship, publishing articles in each of these areas along the way. He has edited collections of Brahms studies, published articles on other Brahms works, and on genres, forms, thematic process and other analytical issues in Brahms's music.
He has also contributed greatly to our knowledge of other composers of Brahms's time, notably Robert Fuchs, Franz Lachner, Franz Schmidt and others, not to mention his publications on Schubert, Bruckner, and more recently on Schoenberg.
He shows his roundedness as a scholar-musician by having written for several different audiences: in addition to monographs, articles in learned journals, scholarly editions, and papers to conferences, addressing historians, theorists and performers alike, he has written to the wider musical public through the Musical Times and record programme notes, and also to the pedagogical world through the Music Teacher. He does so also by having written for and spoken to both English- and German-speaking audiences.
He served on the Council of the RMA for five years. His contribution to musical life at the national level has been substantial and includes extensive examining and advisory work in many British universities, as well as membership of the Editorial Board for Music Analysis for thirteen years and service as President of the Society for Music Analysis between 1996 and 2000.