Frances Densmore Prize awarded to Mark Katz

The Densmore Prize Committee is pleased to award the 2026 prize for the most distinguished article-length publication in English that furthers the goals of the Americal Musical Instrument Society to Mark Katz, for his article “The Great War, the Little String, and the Transformation of Modern Violin Playing,” published in the Journal of the American Musicological Society (vol. 77, no. 1, 2024, pp. 65–102).

The near-universal adoption of the steel violin E string between 1918 and 1921 stands as one of the most consequential shifts in the history of violin performance practice, yet its causes had not previously been examined in depth. Katz constructs a rigorous microhistory that moves from the prewar history of gut string manufacture, through the disruptions of wartime trade, to the lasting consequences of the steel E string for violin construction and performance practice. The prose is precise without being dry, and the argument unfolds in a manner that is both persuasive and accessible.

By focusing tightly on a single material object, Katz is able to identify two interlocking causal factors—the collapse of the international gut string trade due to World War I and the simultaneous wartime demand for gut as a surgical suture material—and to document both with impressive archival precision, drawing on consular telegrams, trade publications, medical journals, and period interviews with performers. A central strength of the approach, as Katz demonstrates, is that close attention to a single object reveals the broader networks in which it is embedded. By tracing the supply chains connecting sheep farmers, gut string manufacturers in Markneukirchen and Naples, meatpacking companies, military surgeons, and concert violinists, the article provides a methodological model that could be applied to the material history of other instruments and other moments of technological transition.

This article makes an exemplary contribution to organology. By bringing the discipline of microhistory to bear on a question of genuine consequence for our understanding of the violin, Katz shows that the close study of a material object— however small—can illuminate the widest forces of history, and in doing so affirms organology’s capacity for rigorous, wide-ranging, and substantive scholarly inquiry.

Densmore committee: Massimiliano Guido (chair), Fanny Guillaume-Castel, Deborah Check Reeves