Two Bienen School of Music faculty members in the Music Theory and Cognition program have recently received major awards for their publications.

Professor Danuta Mirka received the 2023 Marjorie Weston Emerson Award from the Mozart Society of America for her book Hypermetric Manipulations in Haydn and Mozart: Chamber Music for Strings, 1787–1791 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021). The award is given annually to an outstanding scholarly work on Mozart published in English during the previous two calendar years.

Mirka’s book forms a companion piece to her earlier publication Metric Manipulations in Haydn and Mozart: Chamber Music for Strings, 1787–1791 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), which examines the same repertory of string quartets and quintets. According to the award announcement, made November 10 at the society’s annual meeting, “[Mirka’s] ability to combine ‘authentic theory’ with aspects of contemporary research is a notable strength of her study, which is densely packed with revelatory insights into not just individual works and movements but also this style period as a whole.”

Associate Professor Daniel Shanahan and his co-editors have received the Outstanding Multi-Author Collection Award from the Society for Music Theory for Volume 8 of the journal Engaging Students: Beyond Western Musicalities (Ohio State University Libraries, 2020). The publication presents short essays on the subject of student-centered learning, and serves as an open-access, web-based resource for those teaching college-level classes in music.

According to the award citation, the committee was impressed by the authors’ editorial work and their contributions to the field. “We found this to be a deeply researched resource that puts post-colonial theories into contact with music theory, while remaining grounded in our discipline.”