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 2020 competition is now open.  View the call for papers here.

Submit papers as This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. attachments.

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

Previous Winners:

2019 (English): Carolyne Sumner, "Musical Networks and Cultural Expression in Canada: The Postcentennial Years"

2019 (French): Sarah-Anne Arsenault, «Co-création d’une chanson avec des jeunes de Québec : analyse du processus dans une approche de recherche-création»

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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