The Society for Music Theory is pleased to announce its 2020 publication awards!

2020 SMT Publication Award Winners

Wallace Berry Award

Joseph Straus, Broken Beauty, Oxford University Press, 2018.

Outstanding Publication Award

Mark Spicer, “Fragile, Emergent, and Absent Tonics in Pop and Rock Songs,” Music Theory Online 23.2 (2017).

Emerging Scholar Award (book)

Jonathan de Souza, Music at Hand: Instruments, Bodies, and Cognition, Oxford University Press, 2017.

Emerging Scholar Award (article)

Megan Kaes Long, “Cadential Syntax and Tonal Expectation in Late Sixteenth-Century Homophony,” Music Theory Spectrum 40.1 (2018): 52 – 83.

Outstanding Multi-Author Publication Award

Alexander Rehding and Steven Rings, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Critical Concepts in Music Theory, Oxford University Press, 2019.

Citation of Special Merit

Gregory J. Decker & Matthew R. Shaftel, eds., Singing in Signs: New Semiotic Explorations of Opera, Oxford University Press, 2020.


For more information and a list of previous winners, see the Past Publication Awards page.