We are delighted to announce that two colleagues have received awards at the Society for Music Analysis Annual Conference, DubMAC 2026.
Dr Rajan Lal, Research Fellow in Music at Trinity College, Cambridge, has won the Adele Katz Early Career Researcher Award, established by the Society for Music Analysis in 2023–24. This award honours early career researchers who have produced significant work in the field of Music Analysis.
Dr Lal is a specialist in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century music, especially concerning Scriabin, Stravinsky, Debussy, the Second Viennese School, and Alma Mahler-Werfel. His essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Music Analysis (x3), the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Music Theory Online, the Journal of Musicology, and Music & Letters. Dr Lal is the author of Webern's Lost Cello Sonata and Music in the Aphoristic Style [Routledge: RMA Monographs], and the forthcoming Scriabin's Late Works and the Holy Grail of Music Analysis.
Professor Benedict Taylor has won the 2026 Anthony Pople mid-career award. Named after the late musicologist Anthony Pople (1955–2003), this award honours a Mid-Career Researcher with a body of music analysis work behind them.
Professor Taylor’s research encompasses the analysis and philosophy of music from the eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries; his background specialisation in German and British music is counterbalanced by research interests in a wide range of European repertory, blurring distinctions between serious, light, and popular musics. He is co-editor of Music & Letters, series editor for Cambridge University Press's Music in Context series, and associate editor of 19th-Century Music. His most recent books are Music, Subjectivity, and Schumann (Cambridge University Press, 2022) and Fanny Hensel: String Quartet in E flat for the New Cambridge Music Handbooks series (2023).