RMA/Cambridge University Press Book Prizes 2020

A shelf full of books of varying sizes and colours

RMA/Cambridge University Press Monograph Prize for 2020

The RMA/Cambridge University Press monograph prize for 2020 is awarded to Florian Scheding for Musical Journeys: Performing Migration in Twentieth-Century Music (Boydell and Brewer, 2019). The prize is awarded in recognition of a musicological monograph focused on any under-represented cultural groups, as defined by (for example) gender, race, sexuality, cultural and religious heritage. Musical Journeys focuses on the displacement of European musics and musicians during the twentieth century. Using a number of case studies, it moves between the Austro-Hungarian empire, proto-fascist Hungary, fascist German, war-time Britain, post-war Canada and socialist East Germany. It brings together musicology, migration, exile and mobility studies and critical theory to address issues of identity, memory and creative responses to migration, nationalism and politics.

Florian Scheding is Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of Bristol. He is a cultural historian of music and migration, especially the displacement of European musics and musicians caused by the catastrophes that characterise the twentieth century. His publications address migratory musics in all their forms. He is interested in historiographies of exile studies and has addressed the Jewish musical modernity, mobility, and migratory heterotopia. His work has been published in numerous edited collections and journals.

Berta Joncus receives an honourable mention for her monograph, Kitty Clive, or The Fair Songster (Boydell and Brewer, 2019). The panel were impressed by the depth of scholarship and the complex and nuanced portrayal of the singer Clive within eighteenth-century theatre.

Joncus is Senior Lecturer in Music at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research focuses on celebrity culture and the role of the performer in creating musical works, especially in the eighteenth century. She is currently engaged in research on transatlantic Black music before 1800.

RMA/Cambridge University Press Outstanding Edited Collection Book Prize for 2020

The RMA/Cambridge University Press Outstanding Edited Collection Book Prize for 2020 is awarded to Gavin Williams for Hearing the Crimean War: Wartime Sound and the Unmaking of Sense (Oxford University Press, 2019). This focused collection of essays explores the soundscapes of the Crimean War from an admirably diverse range of disciplinary and geographical perspectives. In doing so, it not only offers an ambitious rethinking of the transnational phenomenon of the Crimean War but also serves as a ground-breaking exemplar for the historical study of aurality.

Gavin Williams completed a PhD at Harvard University in 2013 on the Futurist soundscapes of Milan. He was a research associate on the ERC project ‘Music in London’ and a postdoctoral fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge and King’s College London. He is currently a Lecturer at UC Berkeley, where he is writing a monograph entitled Blared Friction: Shellac Discs as Global Media.

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