Richard Ashley, associate professor of music theory and cognition in the Bienen School of Music, was honored by the Society for Music Theory at its annual meeting’s November 9 awards ceremony in Columbus. The Routledge Companion to Music Cognition, which Ashley coedited with Renee Timmers of the University of Sheffield, received the society’s 2019 Citation of Special Merit.

The award citation noted that the book “encompasses a variety of methodological approaches, but from beginning to end, it is uniquely motivated by a concern to describe the nature of musical experience. The 42 essays included in it come from disciplines such as computer science, neuroscience, psychology, and various subfields of music studies. Music theorists are well represented in it, and the volume engages music-theoretical questions with a depth that its proper field has long promised but not always delivered. This encyclopedic volume gives us an extraordinary record of this field reaching its maturity, and it sets a sophisticated standard for future research.”