I’m honored and humbled to announce that this past weekend, I won the Adam Krims Award from the Society for Music Theory’s Popular Music Interest Group. This award is given for an outstanding publication on popular music by a junior scholar, and this year the committee chose to honor my article “Music Theory and the Epistemology of the Internet; or Analyzing Music Under the New Thinkpiece Regime.” The award citation is below:
“This year’s Adam Krims Award winner is William O’Hara, for his article, “Music Theory and the Epistemology of the Internet; or, Analyzing Music Under the New Thinkpiece Regime,” published in Analitica: Rivista online di studi musicali in 2018. This piece examines the phenomenon of recent articles in the popular press that use music theory, treating it simultaneously as scientifically rigorous, and arcane and mysterious. O’Hara shows that these writings offer fascinating reflections upon music theory as it is practiced in the academy, particularly as it relates to the growing movement to engage with non-specialist audiences.”