The Society for Seventeenth-Century Music
Irene Alm Memorial Prize
The Irene Alm Memorial Prize is awarded annually for a scholarly presentation or lecture-demonstration given by a student at the Society’s annual spring conference. The prize helps subsidize the lodging, conference registration, and transportation costs for the recipient to attend the SSCM conference the following year. A prize for the best student paper was first awarded in 1999. It was named and first given to honor the memory of Alm at the Society’s ninth annual meeting in April 2001.
The Alm Prize will be awarded annually by the program committee. Eligible graduate students should identify themselves as such on their non-anonymous proposals. To be eligible, a student must not have been awarded a doctoral degree before the deadline for submissions. A representative draft of the final presentation (including citations and accompanied by drafts of any handouts, slides, or other presentation elements) must be submitted at least two weeks before the Annual Meeting start date. To confirm eligibility, this submission should include the name and contact information of the primary graduate advisor and expected graduation date.
Winners of the Irene Alm Prize receive a $750 grant to participate fully in the subsequent SSCM conference. The recipient should register for the conference and is expected to attend both the business meeting lunch and the banquet. Upon the presentation of receipts, the grant will reimburse the recipient for the cost of registration, lunch, and the banquet as well as travel and lodging expenses up to the total amount awarded. The winner of the Irene Alm Award will receive notification of the grant from the Chair of the Travel Committee in January of the year following the receipt of the award.
The Society invites tax-deductible contributions to the Irene Alm Memorial Prize Fund, which may be sent to the Treasurer of SSCM. The Society is a §501(c)(3) tax-exempt, not-for-profit organization. Checks should be made payable to the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music.
Irene Alm
A founding member of the Society and associate professor of music at Rutgers University, Irene Alm died after a brief illness on 25 October 2000. Apart from her numerous contributions to the study of theatrical music in Venice and to dance music in particular, Professor Alm had served on the SSCM program committee for the 1998 conference in Urbana, Illinois and was to be co-chair of the 2002 conference in Princeton, New Jersey. In naming the prize for her, the Society honors her dedication to teaching and her active fostering of graduate students.
Awarded the Irene Alm Memorial Prize
2024
Anastasia Shmytova (Ph.D. candidate, Princeton University), “Khabuvy, Anenaiki: Towards an Understanding of the Use and Reception of Nonsensical Syllables in Russian Orthodox Chant”
2023
Ana Beatriz Mujica (Ph.D. candidate, The Graduate Center, City University of New York), “The Othering Sound of a Strummed Guitar: Twelve Songs in Étienne Moulinié’s Third Book of Airs (Paris, 1629)”
2022
Paul G. Feller (Ph.D. candidate, Northwestern University) for “Markedness and Jewish Masculinity in the Italian Musical Comedy at the Turn of the Seventeenth Century”
2021
Addi Liu (DMA in Historical Performance Practice, Case Western Reserve University) for “Teaching Hexachordal Solmization in 17th-century China: Lessons for an Emperor”
2020
Saraswathi Shukla (Ph.D. candidate, University of California, Berkeley) for “The Musicians of Saint-Merry: Communauté, Urban Networks, and Instrumental Music in Seventeenth-Century Paris”
2019
Malachai Bandy (Ph.D. candidate, University of Southern California), for “Squaring the Circle: Structure, Proportion, and Divine Geometry in Buxtehude’s Herr, wenn ich nur Dich hab’, BuxWV 38”
2018
John Romey (Ph.D. candidate, Case Western Reserve University) for “Anti-Truths: Satirical Portraits as Literary and Musical Salon Games”
2017
Natasha Roule (Ph.D., Harvard University, 2018) for “Who’s Judging Whom? Civic Identity, Royal Praise, and a Newly Found Libretto from the Académie de Musique of Marseille”
2016
Tom Marks (Ph.D., Graduate Center, CUNY, 2019) for “Feeling the Thirty Years’ War: A History of Emotions in Melchior Franck’s Paradisus musicus (1636)”
2015
Michael Bane (Ph.D., Case Western Reserve University, 2016) for “The Art of Singing Well: Bertrand de Bacilly and Issues of Amateur Performance Practice in Seventeenth-Century France”
2014
Matthew J. Hall (Ph.D. candidate, Cornell University) for “Concerts Royaux, 1670-1700: Genre, Style, Performance Practice”
2013
Patrick Bonczyk (M.A., Michigan State University, 2012) for “Temple-Musick: Exploring the Musical Metaphor in George Herbert’s The Temple”
2012
Sara Pecknold (Ph.D., Catholic University of America, 2015) for “‘On Lightest Leaves Do I Fly’: Natality and the Renewal of Identity in Barbara Strozzi’s Sacri musicali affetti (1655)”
2011
Matt Henson (Ph.D., Florida State University, 2012) for “Cruda Amarilli Angelo Notari’s Adaptations of Monteverdi’s Madrigal”
2010
Patrick Wood Uribe (Ph.D. Princeton University, 2011) for “’He plaid on that single Instrument a full Consort’: Thomas Baltzar’s Polyphonic Music for Solo Violin”
2009
Rebekah Ahrendt (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 2011) for “Jean-Jacques Quesnot de la Chenée, entrepreneur d’opéra”
2008
Jed Wentz (Ph.D., Universiteit Leiden, 2010) for “Roxana’s Dance: The Persuasive Footwork of Defoe’s The Fortunaste Mistress”
2007
Yael Sela (Ph.D., St. Hugh’s College, Oxford University, 2010) for “Performing the Virgin(al): Women and Domestic Keyboard Music in Early Modern England”
2006
Valeria De Lucca (Ph.D., Princeton University, 2009) for “Female Patronage in Seventeenth-Century Rome: The Case for Maria Mancini”
2005
Esther Criscuola de Laix (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 2009) for “Culture and Ceremony in the Wedding Motets of Jacob Praetorius”
2004
Paul Schleuse (Ph.D., The Graduate Center, City University of New York, 2005) for “Monteverdi’s Operatic Experiments: Finding Orfeo in the Continuo Madrigals of 1605″
2003
Jonathan B. Gibson (Ph.D., Duke University, 2003) for “The Cries of Nature in Mourning: Temporality and Aesthetics in Marais’s Elegy for Lully”
2002
Arne Spohr (Ph.D., Musikhochschule Köln, 2006) for “The Hamburg Ratsmusik and its Repertoire: Johann Schop’s Erster Theil Newer Paduanen (1633/40)”
2001
Susan Mina Agrawal (Ph.D., Northwestern University, 2005) for “The Musical Ayre as Sanguine-Producing Curative in Seventeenth-Century England”
Awarded the SSCM Student Paper Prize
2000
Stuart Cheney (Ph.D., University of Maryland, College Park, 2002) for “A Newly Discovered Source of French Hunting Horn Signals, ca. 1666”
1999
Mauro Calcagno (Ph.D., Yale University, 2000) for “Signifying Nothing: Debates on the Power of Voice in Seventeenth-Century Italy”
SSCM Annual Meeting, Yale University, April 3-6, 2025
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