We are happy to announce the two winners of this year’s Dissertation Fellowships, Rachel Hottle and Hannah Davis-Abraham.
Rachel Hottle
McGill University
Bio
Rachel Hottle is a PhD candidate in music theory with a graduate concentration in gender and women’s studies at McGill University. She holds a B.A. in Music from Swarthmore College, as well as an M.A. in Music Theory from McGill. Her research has received support from the Fonds de recherche du Québec. Her article “The Embodied Guitar of Elizabeth Cotten” will appear in Music Theory Online in September 2025. She currently teaches Music Theory and Aural Skills at Walnut Hill School for the Arts in Natick, MA.
Elizabeth Cotten, Joni Mitchell, and the Guitar/Body Interface
Dissertation summary
In my dissertation, I integrate fretboard analysis with disability theory to examine the embodied and musical effects of the acoustic guitar’s physical interface. I excavate the ways that the guitar’s shift in the United States from being predominantly a classical instrument to a folk instrument inaugurated a new paradigm of flexible use as regional styles proliferated and new techniques were born. At the same time, I argue that physical changes to the instrument itself, as well as specific marketing strategies by record companies and guitar manufacturers, constructed the ideal guitar-playing subject as masculine and able-bodied, making it both socially and physically difficult for certain bodies to interact with the instrument. I examine how two innovative 20th century woman guitarists, Elizabeth Cotten and Joni Mitchell, drew on this history of flexible guitar use while also reconfiguring the instrument’s embodied structure to meet their physical needs. I assess how their novel guitar techniques led to unique musical structures and modes of performance.
Hannah Davis-Abraham
University of Toronto
Bio
Hannah Davis-Abraham is a PhD candidate in music theory at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on 21st-century Western classical music and alternative analytical approaches. Her article “Pacing, Performance, and Perception in Alice Ping Yee Ho’s Angst” was published in Contemporary Music Review in 2023, and she has presented her work at the Society for Music Theory, Music Theory Midwest, and Dialogues: Analysis and Performance. Her research has received support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Hannah holds a MA in Music Theory from the University of Toronto, as well as a BMus (Honours) in Piano Performance from Memorial University.
Expanding Analytical Approaches to Contemporary Compositions
Dissertation summary
This dissertation examines selected musical works for unaccompanied voice written in the last twenty-five years, focusing on how they challenge received analytical approaches, assumptions, and aesthetic goals. I seek to illuminate why certain compositions do not align with typical aesthetic and analytical assumptions, necessarily engaging with academic discourse that questions purposes and practices of the analytical process. I present alternative strategies for approaching these works, such as incorporating autoethnography and interviews with musical practitioners; in so doing, I showcase approaches that reveal aspects of the music without necessarily contributing to a coherent narrative or summary analysis.