SMA Awards and Winners

Award Winner 2026: Professor Kofi Agawu

The sixth winner of the SMA Pascall Medal is Kofi Agawu, Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center, CUNY.

His work focuses on analytical issues in selected repertoires of Western Europe and West Africa. He is the author of six monographs and numerous articles and reviews. His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Dent Medal, the Frank Llewellyn Harrison Medal, the Howard T. Behrman Award from Princeton University, the Guido Adler Award from the International Musicological Society (IMS) (2023), and honorary degrees from Stellenbosch University (2017) and Bard College (2019). He has served on the editorial boards of leading journals in musicology, music theory, African studies and ethnomusicology. A Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, he is a Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences, Honorary Member of the Royal Musical Association, Fellow of the International CORE Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and Adjunct Professor in the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, Legon. He was Music Theorist in Residence for the Dutch-Flemish Music Theory Society in 2008-09, Astor Visiting Lecturer at Oxford University in 2010, and George Eastman Visiting Professor at Oxford University in 2012-13.

Award Winner 2026: Professor Benedict Taylor

The third Anthony Pople Mid-Career Research Award goes to Prof. Benedict Taylor, Professor of the Analysis and Philosophy of Music at the University of Edinburgh, for groundbreaking research in the analysis and philosophy of music from the 18th to the mid-20th centuries. Specialising particularly in German and British music, his research interests nevertheless extend over a wide range of European repertory, seeking to move beyond conventional distinctions between serious, light, and popular musics and melding close analytical engagement with music and its experience with wider aesthetic questions of meaning.

The author of seven monographs and editor of several further books, Taylor has also published on a broad range of music from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries in leading journals such as 19th-Century Music, Journal of Musicology, Musical Quarterly, Music & Letters, Music Theory Spectrum, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Music Analysis, Journal of Music Theory, Cambridge Opera Journal, and Eighteenth-Century Music. He has been co-editor of Music & Letters since 2017, and is currently series editor for Cambridge University Press’s Music in Context series.

Joint Award Winner 2026: Dr Rajan Lal

One of two Adele Katz Early Career Researcher Awards 2026 goes to Rajan Lal (University of Cambridge) for his research on Russian music, early twentieth-century modernism, and pitch-class set theory. Publications include Webern’s Lost Cello Sonata and Music in the Aphoristic Style (Routledge: 2026), ‘Scriabin’s Lisztian-Stravinskian Sonata Forms’ (Journal of the Royal Musical Association 150/i, 2025), and ‘Alban Berg’s Op. 5/ii and the Concept of Recomposition’ (Music Analysis 42/iii, 2024). He is a Title A Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.

Joint Award Winner 2026: Dr Kelvin Lee

The other of two Adele Katz Early Career Researcher Awards 2026 goes to Kelvin Lee (University of Leeds) for his analytic and theoretical research on music in Europe and East Asia (1861–1949). Publications include ‘Tonality, Modernity and Scalar Thinking in Otaka Hisatada’s Sonatine (1940), in Global Musical Modernisms (2025), ‘Fantastical Forms and Where to Find Them: Improvisation and Formal Freedom in César Franck’s Symphonic Thinking’ (Journal Revue belge de Musicologie 78, 2024), and ‘Desire in Chromatic Harmony: A Psychodynamic Exploration of Fin de Siècle Tonality’ (Journal of Music Theory 68/2, 2024).

Award Winner 2025: George K. Haggett

The 2025 SMA PhD Award goes to George K. Haggett for his thesis ‘Medievalism in Contemporary Opera’ (University of Oxford, 2024).

Award Winner 2026: Aidan McGartland

‘Analysing Metric Dissonance in Elisabeth Lutyens’s Six Tempi for Ten Instruments’

Aidan McGartland is a doctoral candidate in music theory at McGill University. His dissertation examines the serial works of Elisabeth Lutyens from the 1960s, synthesising post-tonal, formal, timbral, and sketch-based approaches to evaluate her style and technique, and to situate her music within the broader landscape of twentieth-century modernism. Focusing on musical modernism, he has published analytical articles on the music of Elisabeth Lutyens and Igor Stravinsky, with forthcoming work on Benjamin Britten, Margaret Sutherland, and Maurice Ravel. He has also written book reviews for journals such as the Journal of the American Musicological Society and contributed numerous public-oriented articles to The Conversation.

Higly Commended 2026: Katrina Fox

‘Non-functional harmony and tonal allusion in Matthew Aucoin’s Eurydice‘

Katrina Fox is studying for an MA by Research at the University of Leeds. Her work focuses on contemporary opera. She is currently researching the mythic and narrative functions of musical processes in Matthew Aucoin’s Eurydice, with broader interests in musical semiotics and operatic dramaturgy.

Highly Commended 2026: Ville Vokkolainen

‘Track/topline analysis: a new approach to compositional techniques in post-millennial popular music’

Ville Vokkolainen is an interdisciplinary composer who has released over 130 albums under his own name and holds a portfolio of over 40 classical works. His musical styles, beyond contemporary classical music, include jazz, various world and folk traditions, improvised, experimental, noise, progressive rock, electronic music, schlager, and exotica. In addition to being a recording artist, Vokkolainen leads Art First Records record label and the Laponia Improvisations education collective, where he teaches composition. He is also active as avisual artist and music producer. His current academic research focuses on composition techniques and music theory in popular music since the 2010s.