Curt Sachs Award - Stewart Carter
AMIS is pleased to announce that Dr. Stewart Carter is the recipient of the Curt Sachs Award for 2022. Stew has been a tireless author, editor, scholar, and leader of scholars in the field of musical instruments research.
The Curt Sachs Award, the Society's highest award, honors lifetime contribution toward the goals of the Society—to promote the understanding of all aspects of the history, design, and use of musical instruments in all cultures and from all periods.
The recipient of the 2022 Award is Stewart Carter.
Dr. Carter is a tireless editor, author, and scholar in the fields of musical instrument research and practice. He is past president of AMIS and a founding member of the Historic Brass Society as well as the long-time editor of that society’s Journal. Among his publications is The Trombone in the Renaissance: A History in Pictures and Documents (Pendragon Press, 2012). He has edited the Performer’s Guide to Seventeenth-Century Music(1997, 2nd ed., 2012), two volumes of Brass Scholarship in Review (Amherst, 1995 and Paris, Cité de la musique, 1999), and the journal Historical Performance. His numerous articles contribute to scholarship on the trombone and the trumpet, performance practice, the Gütter family of wind instrument makers, and lip-blown aerophones around the world.
Nicholas Bessaraboff Prize - Matt Brennan
… The 2022 Bessaraboff Prize is awarded Matt Brennan for Kick It: A Social History of the Drum Kit (Oxford University Press, 2020).
The Nicholas Bessaraboff Prize is awarded annually for the best book-length publication in English that furthers the goals of the Society. The 2022 Bessaraboff Prize is awarded to Matt Brennan for Kick It: A Social History of the Drum Kit (Oxford University Press, 2020).
Kick-It is a lively history of the drum kit or drum set and its players, focused on drumming and being a drummer. “Equally illuminating and entertaining, Kick It showcases the cross-disciplinary relevance and far-reaching potential of organology.”
Matt Brennan is Reader in Popular Music at the University of Glasgow, where he also directs the Interdisciplinary Music Industries Research Group (IMIRGe). His other publications include When Genres Collide (Bloomsbury, 2017), which earned numerous accolades, and The History of Live Music in Britain, of which he was a co-author (Ashgate, 2013; Routledge, 2019, 2021). He is an editor of the Bloomsbury series Alternate Takes—Critical Responses to Popular Music; he has also served as chair of the UK and Ireland branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM).
Frances Densmore Prize - Amine Beyhom
The Frances Densmore Prize is awarded annually for the best article-length publication in English that furthers the goals of the Society. The 2022 Densmore Prize is awarded to Amine Beyhom for his article “Was the Early Arabian ‘Ūd 'Fretted'?" published in Near-Eastern Musicology Online 5, no. 9 (November 2020).
“Was the Early Arabian ‘Ūd ‘Fretted’?” is “an erudite and impressive piece of scholarship. The author persuasively demonstrates that the early ʿūd was unfretted but that tie-frets may have been used for teaching or training purposes. Beyhom’s argument has important implications for not just Islamic and Western organology but indeed for the critical work of recognizing early Arabian treatises on praxis as central to the development of Greek and, therefore, to the development of European musical systems. The extraordinary analysis of primary source material that made this article stand out within a strong field of candidates exemplifies crucial considerations in organology, musicology, and music theory today.”
Amine Beyhom trained as a civil engineer as well as a musician (guitars and bass) and a composer. After obtaining his MA from the École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées (ENPC) in Paris, he worked as a research engineer in France, then changed the course of his life to become a professional musician and composer, firstly in France then in Lebanon, while learning the ʿūd and founding his own music production company. He completed his PhD in 2003 at the Sorbonne University, Paris, and his Habilitation at the same university in 2010. He later received the title of Professor in Music and Musicology.
Dr. Beyhom has published articles on numerous topics including Byzantine chant, the theory of music, and Orientalism in musicology. He has taught at universities in Lebanon and France, and in 2011 he founded the Centre for Research on the Music of Arabian and Akin countries (CERMAA), which he still leads. In 2018 he established VIAMAP (the Video Animated Music Analysis Project), which has produced more than sixty video analyses. He was awarded the Lois Ibsen Al-Faruqi triennial Award by the Society for Ethnomusicology in 2017. He is active as a music analyst and videographer, as Chief Editor of Near-Eastern Musicology Online, and as the head of the CERMAA research center. He is delighted to conduct workshops with international students on various themes, the last to date (before Covid) being about Artificial Intelligence and Music.
Frederick R. Selch Award - Dominik Ukolov Francis Lapointe
This year's winners of the Selch Prize are Dominik Ukolov and Francis Lapointe. The research projects of the two scholars represent very different and very valuable approaches to organology: one a historical deep dive through the archives and one an experimental approach to digitization‑both of which further the goals of AMIS.
The prize committee agreed that Domink’s presentation “Historical Instruments in Virtual Acoustic Environments: A Framework for the Generation of Interactive Virtual Acoustic Objects and Multimodal Organological Datasets” demonstrated extensive research and an innovative approach to digitization. As evidenced by his presentation, Domink’s research shows great potential to not only benefit the field of organology, but other disciplines as well.
The committee applauded Francis’s organization and keen attention to detail in his presentation “George Hooper Mead: One of Canada’s First Instrument Makers, 1827-1851.” It is fitting that we recognized Francis’s contribution to Canadian musical history during our meeting at the National Music Center in Calgary, as his research furthers our understanding of musical life in nineteenth-century Montreal. The committee also commended his analytic and academic approach to archival research and his clear and engaging presentation of the historical record.