Two prizes from the Society for Ethnomusicolgy awarded to William and Mary faculty
The Society for Ethnomusicology awards several prizes each year for the best scholarship in the field. The College of William and Mary was extremely well represented this year in the roster of prize-winners. Congratulations are due to Max Katz and Ethan Lechner!
Professor Katz and Professor Lechner are both in their first semester of teaching in the Department of Music. Professor Lechner conducts the Indonesian Gamelan Ensemble while Professor Katz lectures on several topics in Ethnomusicology (his research interests include North Indian classical music, Marxist Theory, Postcolonial Theory, and Popular Culture and he performs both jazz guitar and North-Indian sitar).
The Seeger Prize goes to W&M professor Max Katz
Established to recognize the most distinguished graduate student paper presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology, The Charles Seeger Prize is one of the profession’s most prestigious awards and competition is stiff with upwards of 60 submissions each year. The Seeger Prize for the best paper presented by a scholar of graduate student status during the 2008 meeting at Wesleyan University was just awarded to our newest colleague in the Music Department, Max Katz for his paper, “Introducing Institutional Communalism: Rupture and Continuity in the Sitar of Lucknow.” The award was announced at the SEM’s annual conference in November 2009 in Mexico City, Mexico.
The Stevenson Prize goes to W&M adjunct instructor Ethan Lechner
The recently established prize named for Robert Stevenson was awarded to Dr. Ethan Lechner, our adjunct director of the Gamelan Ensemble, for his dissertation titled “Composers as Ethnographers: Difference in the Imaginations of Colin McPhee, Henry Cowell, and Lou Harrison" (UNC Chapel Hill). This prize is “intended to honor ethnomusicologists who are also composers by encouraging research, and recognizing a book, dissertation, or paper (published or unpublished), on their compositional oeuvre” (SEM).
For more information see www.ethnomusicology.org.
