RMA member Professor Katherine Butler Schofield is the 2025 recipient of the American Musicological Society’s Otto Kinkeldey Award, for her book Music and Musicians in Late Mughal India: Histories of the Ephemeral, 1748–1858 (Cambridge University Press, 2024).

The Otto Kinkeldey Award is presented annually to “honour a musicological book of exceptional merit published by a scholar who is past the early stages of their career”.

Past recipients of the award include Susan McClary, Richard Taruskin, Martha Feldman, Katharine Ellis, and last year Bettina Varwig. This is the first time since 1993 that the award has been presented for research on music outside Europe or North America.

Based on a vast, virtually unstudied archive of Indian writings alongside visual sources, Professor Schofield’s book presents the first history of music and musicians in late Mughal India c.1748–1858 and takes the lives of nine musicians as entry points into six prominent types of writing on music in Persian, Brajbhasha, Urdu and English, moving from Delhi to Lucknow, Hyderabad, Jaipur and among the British. It shows how a key Mughal cultural field responded to the political, economic and social upheaval of the transition to British rule, while addressing a central philosophical question: can we ever recapture the ephemeral experience of music once the performance is over? These rich, diverse sources shine new light on the wider historical processes of this pivotal transitional period, and provide a new history of music, musicians and their audiences during the precise period in which North Indian classical music coalesced in its modern form. 

Katherine Butler Schofield is Professor of South Asian Music and History and Head of the Department of Music at King’s College London. A Fellow of the Royal Asiatic and Royal Historical Societies, and a recipient of major grants from the European Research Council and the British Academy, Professor Schofield draws on Persian, Hindi, English and visual sources to tell stories about musical lives in early modern and colonial India. Her latest book, Music and Musicians in Late Mughal India: Histories of the Ephemeral, 1748–1858, was described as a “masterpiece” by William Dalrymple, is winner of the 2025 Otto Kinkeldey Award of the American Musicological Society, and was one of three finalists for the 2025 Association of American Publishers Prose Award (Music Category).