Marjorie Weston Emerson Award
The Mozart Society of America invites nominations for the Marjorie Weston Emerson Award, a $500 prize given annually for outstanding scholarly work on Mozart published in English during the two previous calendar years. The Award will be given in alternate years to books and editions, and to essays and articles. The 2025 Award will be for the best book published in 2023 or 2024.
The selection is made by a committee of Mozart scholars appointed by the President of the MSA, with approval from the Board of Directors.
The Society reserves the right not to award the prize in a given year.
The 2024 Marjorie Weston Emerson Award goes to Dorian Bandy for his article, “Thema da capo: Another Look at Mozart’s Embellishments,” published in Eighteenth-Century Music in 2022. Bandy’s work uses Mozart’s embellishments as an entry point into broader aesthetic issues, such as affect, composer–performer persona, humor, showmanship, communication, and interpretive play. His systematic exploration of the art of embellishment is highly relevant to performers, while his discussion of memory and expectation offers thoughtful insights from the listener’s perspective. The article sheds new light on Mozart’s creative process, with Bandy’s fresh and nuanced analysis standing out for its freedom from any particular theoretical agenda. Eloquently written and meticulously organized, the article encourages a renewed appreciation of an element that may have seemed settled, demonstrating importance of attention of detail. The committee was further impressed by Bandy’s broad choice of musical works for analysis, including piano music, symphonies, and opera.
Winners of the Marjorie Weston Emerson Award
- 2024: Dorian Bandy, “Thema da capo: Another Look at Mozart’s Embellishments,” Eighteenth-Century Music 19/1 (2022): 37–57.
- 2023: Danuta Mirka, Hypermetric Manipulations in Haydn and Mozart: Chamber Music for Strings, 1787–1791 (Oxford University Press, 2021)
- 2022: Martin Nedbal, “Heinrich Wilhelm Haugwitz and the Reception of Mozart’s Operas in Early Nineteenth-Century Moravia,” Musicologica Brunensia (volume 56, no. 1; 2021)
- 2021: W. Dean Sutcliffe, Instrumental Music in an Age of Sociability: Haydn, Mozart and Friends (Cambridge, 2020)
- 2020: Sarah Eyerly, “Mozart and the Moravians,” Early Music 47/2 (2019): 161-182
- 2019: Edmund Goehring, Coming to Terms with Our Musical Past: An Essay on Mozart and Modernist Aesthetics (University of Rochester, 2018). Now available as an Open Access eBook!
- 2018: Austin Glatthorn, “The Imperial Coronation of Leopold II and Mozart, Frankfurt am Main, 1790,” Eighteenth-Century Music 14 (2017): 89-110
- 2017: Edward Klorman, Mozart’s Music of Friends: Social Interplay in the Chamber Works (Cambridge, 2016)
- 2016: Justin Lavacek, “Mozart’s Harmonic Design in the Secco Recitatives,” Theoria: Historical Aspects of Music Theory 22 (2015): 63-97
- 2015: Matthew Riley, The Viennese Minor-Key Symphony in the Age of Haydn and Mozart (Oxford, 2014)
- 2014: Nicholas Baragwanath, “Mozart’s early chamber music with keyboard: traditions of performance, composition and commodification,” in Mozart’s Chamber Music with Keyboard, edited by Martin Harlow (Cambridge, 2012)
- 2013: Simon P. Keefe, Mozart’s Requiem: Reception, Work, Completion (Cambridge, 2012)
- 2012: Roman Ivanovitch, “Mozart’s Art of Retransition,” Music Analysis 30/1 (2011): 1-36
- 2011: Daniel Heartz, Mozart, Haydn, and Early Beethoven, 1781–1802 (Norton, 2009)
- 2010: Dorothea Link, “The Fandango Scene in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 133/1 (2008): 68-91
- 2009: Ian Woodfield, Mozart’s ‘Cosí fan tutte’: A Compositional History (Boydell, 2008)
- 2008: Karol Berger, Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow: An Essay on the Origins of Musical Modernity (California, 2007)