Vanderbilt Musicologists Honored by Society for American Music

Three musicologists affiliated with the Blair School of Music received honors at the 42nd Annual Conference of the Society for American Music held in Cambridge, MA, March 9-13.

Dale Cockrell, Professor of Musicology (Emeritus), received the Lifetime Achievement Award “in recognition of his pioneering scholarship—propelled by intellectual innovation, remarkable breadth, and a deep sensitivity for his subjects—that has resonated throughout American musical studies.” Cockrell is the author of Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World (Cambridge, 1997) and editor of The Ingalls Wilder Family Songbook (A-R Editions, 2011). He is currently completing a groundbreaking study on music and sex workers in New York City.

Douglas Shadle, Assistant Professor of Musicology, received the Irving Lowens Article Award for “How Santa Claus Became a Slave Driver: The Work of Print Culture in a Nineteenth-Century Musical Controversy” (Journal of the Society for American Music, 2014). Shadle is the author of Orchestrating the Nation: The Nineteenth-Century American Symphonic Enterprise (Oxford, 2016).

Samuel Parler (Mus. Arts, ’09) is a Ph.D. candidate in musicology at Harvard University and won the Mark Tucker Award for his presentation “Racial Nationalism and Class Ambivalence in Carson Robison’s World War II Songs.” This award recognizes the most outstanding paper delivered by a student.

(From left: Shadle with SAM President Charles Hiroshi Garrett, Parler with Steve Baur and Garrett, Cockrell with Garrett and Judith Tick. Photos courtesy: Michael Broyles)