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:
2019 (English): Carolyne Sumner, "Musical Networks and Cultural Expression in Canada: The Postcentennial Years"
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.
2013 (English): Lucille Mok (Harvard University), "Performance as Narrative in Two McLaren Animated Shorts"
2013 (French): No submissions qualified for the award.
2012 (French): No submissions qualified for the award.
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.