Research wins prestigious award

Dr Amanda Bayley, Reader in Performing Arts, received the Ruth A. Solie Award for her latest book, Recorded Music: Performance, Culture and Technology, published by Cambridge University Press in 2010.

The award was made by the American Musicological Society for "a collection of essays of exceptional merit".

Dr Bayley, from the University’s Department of Music in the , said: "I was thrilled to travel to the AMS conference in San Francisco to receive such an accolade. Unique in its field, the book is intended to be of great interest to music academics and students alike with an international appeal.”

Recorded Music is described by Margot Fassler, Chair of the Award Committee, as: "A pioneering collection, building on and surpassing the theorising of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno on the ways we think about and study recorded sound. Recorded Music heralds a shift towards sound studies and resonates with many observable directions in the field today, from studies of stagings, performances, rehearsals, the physicality of playing instruments, and issues surrounding multiple takes.

“The interdisciplinary treatment of the subject is invigorating, especially in the contributors' discussions of mash-ups, electronic mediation as musical meaning, and the democratisation of production from elite specialists to mass users."

The American Musicological Society (AMS) was founded in 1934 to advance research in the various fields of music as a branch of learning and scholarship. 3,600 individuals and 1,100 institutional subscribers from over 40 nations participate in the Society.

Recorded Music: Performance, Culture and Technology is currently available in hardback and will be released in paperback in 2012.

ENDS

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