The Adele Katz Early Career Researcher Award is one of several awards newly created by the Society for Music Analysis in 2023-24. Named after the late post-Schenkerian music analyst Adele Katz (1887-1979), it is awarded annually to between one and three Early Career Researchers, defined as someone who has either completed their PhD in the last eight years or has been in permanent or temporary salaried employment as a musicologist for a period of not more than five years, and who has produced important work in the realms of music analysis. It is determined through nominations from SMA members, and judged by a four-person panel including the President and Awards Officer of the SMA.

It is our great pleasure to announce that the first Adele Katz award is given to Dr Oliver Chandler, currently an academic professor at the Royal College of Music and a college lecturer in music at Keble College, Oxford. Oliver was thought by the panel to be an outstandingly talented early-career theorist and analyst with the potential to make a truly significant and lasting contribution to our discipline. His work to date has focused on late 19th– and 20th-century tonality, and on the twentieth-century guitar repertoire. He has published articles in a range of scholarly journals including Music & Letters, Music Theory Online and Music Theory & Analysis. These have considered intersections between Schenkerian, neo-Riemannian and New Formenlehre approaches to analysis, the concept of ‘tonal-atonal equilibrium’ in the theories of Reginald Smith Brindle, ‘tonal dodecaphony’ in the music of Humphrey Searle, and a range of articles looking at different works of Edward Elgar, considering structural dissonance, octatonic voice leading, tonal ambiguity, prolongation of function and diatonic illusions in the composer’s work. His first monograph, A Twelve-Tone repertory for Guitar: Julian Bream and the British Serialists, 1956-1983, in the series Guitar Foundation of America Refereed Monograph Series, was published in 2023, and is available at https://digitalcommons.du.edu/gfamonographs/vol4/iss1/ [digitalcommons.du.edu] . His second book, Return to Riemann: Tonal Function and Chromatic Music  completes and expands work begun by J.P.E. Harper-Scott, was published by Routledge in 2024 as part of the RMA monograph series – https://www.routledge.com/Return-to-Riemann-Tonal-Function-and-Chromatic-Music/Harper-Scott-Chandler/p/book/9781032025056 [routledge.com] . This explores the limits of harmonic-functional analysis in the music of Richard Wagner. More widely, Oliver is concerned with developing further understanding of key concepts in the history of sonata form, and the ways in which history is sedimented in musical material, particularly relating to fin-de-siècle philosophy and theories of utopianism.

Oliver has also been a key figure, with boundless energy and enthusiasm, in organising conferences, other events, online symposia and more, in the name of promoting and disseminating music theory and analysis. His work and wider efforts have already become an indispensable part of the British and international musicological landscape. The SMA are delighted that he is the first winner of this distinguished award.