Reader in Music recognised by the Society for Music Theory

The Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory, edited by Reader in Music Danuta Mirka, has received a Citation of Special Merit during the last annual meeting of the Society for Music Theory in St Louis.

In the words of the SMT Executive Board, the Citation of Special Merit is awarded 'occasionally for editions, translations, reference works, edited volumes and other types of publications that are of extraordinary value to the discipline'. The following is the text of the citation read during the award presentation in St Louis:

'This year’s Citation recognizes an important contribution to music scholarship across disciplinary divides. This latest addition to the Oxford Handbook Series refines and re-defines Leonard Ratner’s concept of musical topics, addresses questions concerning their identification, organization and syntax, and distinguishes them from other uses of stylistic conventions in eighteenth-century music. The twenty-five contributors to the volume include theorists, musicologists and performers, who from multiple perspectives explore the historical origins of topics, their compatibility with other theories of musical structure, their utility to performers, and their reliance on listeners’ expectations. At the same time, the volume as a whole is grounded in a theoretically consistent definition of topics as “musical styles and genres taken out of their proper context and used in another one,” and lays the foundation for their further investigation as tools for analysis and interpretation. The SMT has selected The Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory, edited by Danuta Mirka, as the recipient of a Citation of Special Merit'.