Patricia Carpenter Emerging Scholar Award

MTSNYS both supports and encourages pre-professionals in their pursuit of a career in music theory with an Emerging Scholar Award for the best student paper at the annual meeting. The award, which was renamed the Patricia Carpenter Emerging Scholar Award in 2004, carries a cash prize and promise of publication in Theory and Practice. Both the oral and written version of the paper are taken into consideration, and any student who has not yet received a doctoral degree at the time of the meeting is eligible. The winners have been:


Past Winners

2023

Stephen Spencer, “Visualizing the Relative Brightness of Concurrent Textural Layers in Ruth Crawford’s Music for Small Orchestra (1926)”

2022

Issa Aji, “The Making of Tarab: Emotion as Temporal Disruption in Umm Kulthūm’s ‘Alf Leila wa Leila’”

2021

Anna Yu Wang, “Perceiving banyan: Temporal Syntax Unbeholden to Periodicity”

2020

Kyle Hutchinson, “From A Certain Point of View: Learning to Hear Consonance as Dissonance in Late Nineteenth-Century Tonality”

2019

Michèle Duguay, “A Model for Measuring Physical Balance in Contemporary Piano Works”
Ben Baker, “A Cyclic Approach to harmony in Robert Glasper’s Music”

2018

Thomas Jul Kirkegaard-Larsen, “Transformational Attitudes in Scandinavian Function Theories”

2017

Derek Remeš, “J.S. Bach’s Chorales: Reconstructing Eighteenth-Century German Figured-Bass Pedagogy in Light of a New Source”

2016

Olga Sánchez-Kisielewska, “Interactions Between Topics and Schemata: The Case of the Sacred Romanesca”

2015

Joan Huguet, “Reconsidering Interruption in Rondo Forms”

2014

Zachary Bernstein, “The Problem of Completion in Milton Babbitt’s Music and Thought”

2013

Sarah Marlowe, “On the Subject of Tonal Answers: A Closer Look at William Renwick’s Paradigms”

2012

Rodney Garrison, “Unraveling Heinrich Schenker’s Ideas of Musical ‘Unfolding’”

2011

Drew F. Nobile, “Form and Voice Leading in Early Beatles Songs”

2010

Jason Hooper, “Heinrich Schenker’s early Theory of Form, 1895–1914”

2009

Christopher Segall, “K-Nets, Inversion, and Gravitational Balance” Noam Sivan – Honorable Mention: “Teaching Improvisation: The Creative Application of Theory in Performance”

2008

Katharine Soper, “Making Many From Few: Orchestration in the Chamber Works of Ruth Crawford Seeger”

2007

J. Daniel Jenkins, “Schoenberg’s Concept of ruhende Bewegung

2006

Vasili Byros, “‘Tonal oder Atonal?’: Interval Cycles, Whole-Tone Tonality, and the Dialectics of Musical Process in Berg’s Piano Sonata, op. 1”

2005

Sam Ng, “The Hemiolic Cycle and Metric Dissonance in Brahms’s Cello Sonata in F, op. 99”

2004

José António Martins, “Stravinsky’s Harmonic Practice and the Guidonian Space”

2003

Jeannie Guerrero, “Multidiminsional Counterpoint and Social Subversion in Luigi Nono’s Choral Music”

2002

Adam Ricci, “A Classification Scheme for Harmonic Sequence”

2001

Don Traut, “Displacement and its Role in Schenkerian Theory”

2000

Stephen Slottow, “Fifths and Semitones: A Ruggles Compositional Model and its Unfoldings”

1999

Daphne Leong, “Metric Conflict in the First Movement of Bartók’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion”

1998

Matthew Santa, “Chordal Tone Centers in Stravinsky’s Neoclassical Music”

1995

Wayne Alpern, “Aggregates, Assassination, and an ‘Act of God’: The Impact of the Murder of Archduke Ferdinand Upon Webern’s Op. 7 No. 3”

1994

Wayne Petty, “Cyclic Integration in Haydn’s E-flat Piano Sonata Hob. XVI:38”

1993

Jennifer Shaw, “Rethinking Schoenberg’s Composition of Die Jacobsleiter”