SOCAN Foundation/MusCan Award for Writings on Canadian Music

The SOCAN Foundation/ MusCan Awards for Writings on Canadian Music are two $2500 prizes intended to encourage students’ research and writing on Canadian music topics and music professors’ mentorship of students in these endeavors. One prize will be for the best English-language paper and one for the best French-language paper. Topics in Canadian music will be understood as potentially deriving from a wide range of genres, including, but not limited to, such areas as concert, folk, jazz, and popular music.

The links below lead to a PDF file of each winning paper.

Previous Winners:

2018 (French): Martin Desjardins, "Le geste sonore comme objet d’analyse pour observer les pratiques musicales distinctives d’improvisateurs jazz"

2018 (English): Adam Roy, "Canadian Mosaic: Canadian Mosaic: Pitch Structures and Resources in Barbara Pentland’s Quintet for Piano and String Quartet (1983)"

2017 (English): Virginia Georgallas, "'The Sublimest Music on Earth': An Aural History of Niagara Falls in the Mid-Nineteenth Century"

2017 (French): Laura Trottier, «Le cross-over en musique classique au Québec : stratégie marketing ou démocratisation culturelle ?»

2016 (French): Paul Bazin (Université McGill), « Serge Garant et le genre mélodique : stylistique d'une premiere maturité »

2016 (English): Jamie Meyers-Riczu (University of Alberta), "Nature and the Construction of National Identity in Jean Coulthard’s The Pines of Emily Carr".

2015 (English): Muriel Smith (University of York, UK), "Singing in ‘the Peg’: Anglo-Canadian and Mennonite choral exchanges in Winnipeg, Manitoba (1920 - 1960)"

2015 (French):  No submissions qualified for the award.

2014 (French): Erin Sheedy (Université d'Ottawa), «Chanter la « mosaïque musicale »: Florence Glenn et les festivals du Chemin de fer Canadien Pacifique»

2014 (English): Vanessa Blais-Tremblay (McGill University), "'Don't Pocahontas Me': Politics of Improvisation in Tanya Tagaq's Throat Games with Concert Stage String Ensembles"

2013 (English): Lucille Mok (Harvard University), "Performance as Narrative in Two McLaren Animated Shorts"

2013 (French): No submissions qualified for the award.

2012 (English): Deanna Yerichuk (University of Toronto). "Music’s Social(ization) Goals: The Emergence of Community Music Education in Toronto’s Settlement Houses, 1915-1946"

2012 (French): No submissions qualified for the award.

2011 (English): Daniel Laxer (University of Toronto), "Instruments of Exchange: Music in the Fur Trade and the Arrival of European Instruments into the Canadian West 1760-1821"

2011 (French): No submissions qualified for the award.

The Canadian University Music Society gratefully acknowledges the generous financial support of the SOCAN Foundation in the awarding of these prizes.

SOCAN Foundation/MusCan Awards Rules

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