The Jerome Roche Prize for 2026 is awarded to Edwin Li for his article ‘Retranslating Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde‘, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 150/2 (2025), pp. 401-35.  The article uses the Mandarin version of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, created by prominent female conductor Zheng Xiaoying, as the focal point for a widespread investigation of the complex reception of the work in China, and the political and intercultural undercurrents of its retranslation. Zheng’s stated aim was to reunite the ‘yijing’ of Mahler’s music with the Tang poetry he used, and to match the speech tones in Mandarin to the melodic tones in the music, producing a translation that is very free, but is also highly comprehensible for audiences. This is contrasted with a later Cantonese translation produced in Hong Kong by Daniel Ng Yat-chiu, which, in prioritising authentic translation of the poetry, ignored the tonality of the Cantonese language, making it incomprehensible. The article thus highlights the complexity of intercultural translation, and emphasises its significance as an arbiter of knowledge, culture and politics.

Edwin Li’s PhD, ‘Border Listening: A Global Hermeneutics of Gustav Mahler and his Music’, was awarded by Harvard University in 2022. He is now Assistant Professor of Music at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.  

Honourable Mentions

Adam Behan receives an Honourable Mention for his article ‘Music History, the Practice Turn, and Maria Yudina’s Journey through the Soviet “Thaw”’, 1959–63’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 150/1 (2025), pp. 71–106.  This article uses the pianist Maria Yudina as a case study through which to address criticism of the ‘practice turn’ in musicology by demonstrating what can be achieved when performer-focused approaches move beyond a narrow focus on performance as an iterative process to encompass a much fuller range of the performer’s activities, including administrative and political roles as well as the more purely artistic.  

Behan received his PhD, entitled ‘Life, Work and the Individual Classical Performer: Maria Yudina’s Artistic Practice and Imagination, 1947–70’, from the University of Cambridge in 2022. Since then he has held teaching posts and a post-doctoral fellowship at Maynooth University, and he will take up an ERC-funded Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship at Queen’s University, Belfast in summer 2026.   

Misty Ka Man Choi also receives an Honourable Mention for her article ‘In Search of the Ineffable: Ravel’s Musical Transposition of Mallarmé’s Linguistic Precocity’, Music & Letters, 106/4 (2025), pp. 576-608.  It examines how Ravel’s Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé (1913) ‘transpose’ Mallarmé’s Symbolist poetics into music, incorporating the poet’s notion that poetry should create an ‘overall experience’ that shifts the focus away from syntax and grammar onto sensuous images and ambiguity of meaning. A close linguistic analysis of the three poems is mapped onto a detailed musical analysis of the structure and harmonic language used by Ravel to respond to Mallarmé’s approach.

This study was developed under the academic auspices of The Chinese University of Hong Kong before being prepared for Music & Letters. Choi was then awarded her PhD from Duke University in 2022, with a thesis entitled ‘In Pursuit of a Utopia between Sound and Sense: Luciano Berio’s “Linguistic Projects” of Meta-Music’. Since then she has worked at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, and is currently a Research Associate at Saint Francis University in Hong Kong.