On September 15, 2012, UNC musicologist Annegret Fauser received the 50th Edward J. Dent Medal of the Royal Musical Association during a well-attended study day in her honor. In her Dent Lecture, Fauser spoke about the man behind the medal, Edward J. Dent, and his place in international twentieth-century music and musicology.

Written by UNC music theorist Jocelyn Neal, Country Music: A Cultural and Stylistic History is the first undergraduate textbook that focuses solely on country music.  The path-breaking text offers a coherent narrative that explains country music, its origins, its development, and its meaning from the first commercial recordings of the 1920s up to the present. It highlights significant performers, songs, and institutions in country music. It also considers key social, political, and musical issues that span many decades of evolution within the genre.

The Music Department's Prof. Jon Finson has been selected to receive the 2013 Robert Schumann Prize! Awarded biennially by the composer's birth city of Zwickau, Germany, this prize celebrates performers, musicologists, and organizations who have furthered the performance or research of Schumann's music. This honor recognizes Prof. Finson's extensive contributions to Schumann scholarship, and places him among such past honorees as Georg Eismann, Alfred Brendel, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, and Sir John Eliot Gardiner.

In 1936, Kurt Weill and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paul Green ('21) collaborated on the anti-war musical Johnny Johnson. Seventy-five years later, the Kurt Weill Edition is releasing a critical edition of the work, edited by UNC-Chapel Hill musicologist Tim Carter.

In Groove Music, UNC musicologist Mark Katz delves into the fascinating world of the DJ, tracing the art of the turntable from its humble beginnings in the Bronx during the 1970s through a meteoric rise into a global phenomenon today. Based on extensive interviews with practicing DJs, historical research, and his own personal experience, Katz presents a history of hip-hop from the point of view of the people who invented the genre.

Winner, ASCAP Deems Taylor Award
Certificate of Merit, ARSC Best Research in Recorded Country Music

In this cultural and historical study, Jocelyn R. Neal discusses three of Rodgers' most influential songs—"Muleskinner Blues," "In the Jailhouse Now," and "T for Texas." She offers a radically new perspective on the role of Rodgers and his music in the making of country music, and on the ways in which individual songs take on special significance in American cultural life (Indiana University Press).

Winner, AMS Ruth Solie Award

Music, Theater and Cultural Transfer [co-edited by Fauser and Mark Everist] explores the diverse institutions that shaped Parisian music and extended its influence across Europe, the Americas and Australia. Opera and musical theater dominated French culture in the 1800s. The book was based on a 2004 conference, 'The Institutions of Opera in Paris,' that Fauser co-organized at UNC and Duke University.

In the early fourteenth century, musicians in France and later Italy established new traditions of secular and sacred polyphony. This ars nova, or "new art," popularized by theorists such as Philippe de Vitry and Johannes de Muris was the among the first of many later movements to establish the music of the present as a clean break from the past. The rich music of this period, by composers such as Guillaume de Machaut and Francesco Landini, is not only beautiful, but also rewards deep study and analysis.

Certificate of Merit, ARSC Best Research in Recorded Folk, Ethnic, or World Music

Arsenio Rodríguez was one of the most important Cuban musicians of the twentieth century. In this first scholarly study, ethnomusicologist David F. García examines Rodríguez's life, including the conjunto musical combo he led and the highly influential son montuno style of music he created in the 1940s. García recounts Rodríguez's battle for recognition at the height of "mambo mania" in New York City and the significance of his music in the development of salsa.

The Gedanke manuscripts, from which The Musical Idea is compiled, are legendary writings of Arnold Schoenberg. Central to his concern was his concept of the “musical idea,” which represents the wholeness of the musical work and embraces Schoenberg’s notions of motive, gestalt, phrase, theme, rhythm, harmony, and form. Ultimately, the musical idea is the vision of the composer by which a musical work achieves unity in relation to the means by which the work is comprehended in its unity by the listener.

Before the nineteenth century, instrumental music was considered inferior to vocal music. Kant described wordless music as "more pleasure than culture," and Rousseau dismissed it for its inability to convey concepts. But by the early 1800s, a dramatic shift was under way. Purely instrumental music was now being hailed as a means to knowledge. Music as Thought traces the roots of this fundamental shift in attitudes toward listening in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.