The Faculty is pleased to announce that the project Schenker Documents Online: Phase Two, directed by Ian Bent, Honorary Professor in the History of Music Theory, and William Drabkin, Professor of Music at the University of Southampton, has recently been awarded the Society for Music Theory's Citation of Special Merit. The citation is awarded for 'editions, translations, reference works, edited volumes, and other types of publications that are of extraordinary value to the discipline'.
Announcing the award at the 2013 Annual Meeting of the Society, Richard Ashley, Chair of the SMT Publication Awards Committee said:
'Rare is the time when the work of a music theorist enjoys the kind of scholarly attention to life and works typically accorded major figures in intellectual history. In Heinrich Schenker we have a figure of that stature. However, the vast unpublished documentary record of Schenker's life as a theorist, critic, performer, teacher, and editor has remained largely invisible to the wider world. A major international team has undertaken the complex tasks of organizing Schenker's correspondence and other key records and coordinating a team of scholars to transcribe and translate these documents. This project, now in its third phase, has begun to yield a fuller, more nuanced picture of Schenker and his work, and its influence on Schenker studies cannot be overestimated.'
Schenker Documents Online may be accessed at http://www.schenkerdocumentsonline.org. One of the Contributing Scholars to the project, all of whom are included in the SMT citation, is Nicholas Marston, University Reader in Music Theory and Analysis. His own recently published book Heinrich Schenker and Beethoven's 'Hammerklavier' Sonata (Ashgate, 2013) draws widely on the resources of Schenker Documents Online. For more details go to http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9780754652274.