The 2022 Student Presentation Award winners are Rachel Gain (Yale University) and Audrey Slote (University of Chicago).
Audrey Slote (left) and Rachel Gain (right)
The Student Presentation Award Committee is delighted to congratulate our 2022 award winners: Rachel Gain (Yale University) for “Beyond the Audible: Embodied Choreographic Syncopations in Rhythm Tap Dance” and Audrey Slote (University of Chicago) for “Chiasmus as Critique: Dallapiccola’s Ulisse and the Political Resonances of Musical Form.” In their outstanding paper presentations, Rachel and Audrey invited us to participate in novel ways of listening, in unique ways of knowing music. Rachel opened the space for music-theoretical research that attends to intersections of the sonic, the physical, and the embodied elements of dance while constructing a framework for parsing and analyzing tap dance choreography and its syntax. Audrey immersed us in a virtuosic analysis of cross-partitions, revealing how row forms and partitioning strategies manifest chiasmus at a micro-level while reflecting on the dramatic and narrative impact of motivic transformations across opera scenes, as well as the implications of Dallapiccola’s approach to form for a postwar, antifascist politics.
Rachel Gain is currently a Music Theory Ph.D. student at Yale University. Their research focuses on rhythm tap dance and baroque music (sometimes together), primarily examining these repertoires in terms of choreomusical interactions, embodied experience, and the instruments and physical acts of musicmaking.
Audrey Slote is currently writing a dissertation that explores what analysis has meant to the field of Anglo-American music theory since its inception, with the goal of reexamining and expanding practices of analysis so that they can meaningfully interface with questions of power and representation.