The Jerome Roche Prize for 2025 is awarded to Peter Asimov for his article ‘The Melakartas and the ‘République Modale’: Naturalizing Indian Scales in French Musical Modernism’ published in the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 149/2 (2024), pp. 383–439. This article situates the expansion of musical modality in French composition alongside the intellectual history of comparative philology, in order to explain how the Karnatic melakarta system of raga classification, mediated via British imperial networks and tethered to racialized notions of Indo-European patrimony, was reappropriated by a generation of composers and pedagogues. The panel commended this impressively perceptive and nuanced re-examination of the well-known story of exoticism in early 20th-century French art music and particularly enjoyed the article’s more speculative conclusion, demonstrating its wider significance.
Peter Asimov is Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow and Director of Studies in Music, Magdalene College, following postdoctoral fellowships at Cambridge and the Université libre de Bruxelles. He completed his PhD at Clare College, Cambridge with a thesis entitled ‘Comparative Philology, French Music, and the Composition of Indo-Europeanism from Fétis to Messiaen.’
Daniel Walden receives an Honourable Mention for ‘The Global Tonnetz’ published in Journal of the American Musicological Society, 77/2 (2024), pp. 447–510. The article examines how the Tonnetz, widely considered the emblematic diagram of ‘Western’ music theory, emerged in its modern form from a global network of scholars spanning Japan, Germany, and India. The panel commended this ambitious and thought-provoking article, which offered a thorough contextualisation of each case study towards a global perspective on the emergence of modernism.
Daniel Walden is Assistant Professor, Department of Music, Yale University following posts at Durham University and The Queen’s College (Oxford). He received his PhD from Harvard for a thesis entitled The Politics of Tuning and Temperament: Transnational Exchange and the Production of Music Theory in 19th-c. Europe, Asia, and North America.
Virginia Georgallas receives an Honorable Mention for ‘Fantasies of Musical Inscription’ published in Journal of Musicology 41/3 (2024), pp. 334–366. This article focusses on John Creed’s 1747 proposal for a ‘fantasy machine’, a transcriptive device with rotating cylinders and steel pencils which sought to inscribe and store the effusions of keyboard improvisations in real time. The panel commended the article’s thorough exploration of this experiment resulting in insights on creativity and style in the eighteenth century and beyond.
Virginia Georgallas recently completed her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, with a thesis entitled ‘Archaeologies of Style and Music in the Long Eighteenth Century’.