Brown University Associate Professor of Music Emily I. Dolan co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Timbre (Oxford University Press, 2021) with Alexander Rehding of Harvard University. The scholars' publication earned the 2022 Ruth A. Solie Award from the American Musicological Society “for an outstanding collection of essays.” The AMS praised Dolan's book as follows:
"This exceptionally well-organized, superbly edited collection of essays engages squarely with the idea of timbre that has long been neglected within the field of musicology. Rather than simply offering a summative snapshot of the current state of scholarship on timbre, this volume is exploratory in a way that both revises typical expectations for the "handbook" genre and invites future research. It attempts to recover the history of the concept of timbre and proposes highly original, and novel ways of engaging with the elusive concept... 'For the longest time,' notes the introduction to the volume, 'musicology treated timbre as an afterthought.' No longer. By affirming the importance of thinking about timbre in our discipline, this imaginatively curated collection of essays promises to be field-changing."
Congratulations to Professor Dolan on this achievement!
About the Ruth A. Solie Award
The Ruth A. Solie Award honors each year a collection of musicological essays of exceptional merit published during the previous year (2021) in any language and in any country and edited by a scholar or scholars, one of whom is a member of the AMS or citizen or permanent resident of Canada or the United States. “Previous year” refers to the copyright year as found on the copyright page of the collection. Both books and collections that form themed journal issues or volumes are eligible. Established to honor the editor of Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship (University of California Press, 1995), a field-defining and field-changing book, the award acknowledges the value of the individual authors’ contributions to the collection while recognizing the central role of the editor(s) in conceiving and shaping the whole.
The award committee, consisting of five scholars, will accept nominations from any individual and will choose a single winner from among all the candidates. The winning editor(s) receive a monetary prize and a certificate, as well as recognition at the Annual Meeting of the Society. A book may receive only one AMS award.