We are delighted to announce that Dr Peter Asimov, a specialist in the history of French musical modernism, has been awarded the Jerome Roche Prize of the Royal Musical Association for his article ‘The Melakartas and the ‘République Modale’: Naturalizing Indian Scales in French Musical Modernism’, published in the Journal of the Royal Musical Association last year.
This article situates the expansion of musical modality in French composition alongside the intellectual history of comparative philology, in order to explain how the Karnatic mēḷakartā system of rāga classification, mediated via British imperial networks and tethered to racialized notions of Indo-European patrimony, was reappropriated by a generation of composers and pedagogues.
The RMA Jerome Roche Prize was inaugurated in 2001, in memory of the British scholar Jerome Roche (1942-1994); it honours an outstanding article by a scholar in the early stages of their career. The official citation can be found here.
We offer our warm congratulations to Peter, and to the two honourable mentions extended to our alumnus Danny Walden and to Virginia Georgallas.