At the most recent annual conference of the American Musicological Society, in Rochester, NY, UNC Music Assistant Professor Andrea Bohlman received the Alfred Einstein Award for Outstanding Article in Musicology. This award is given annually to one essay “of exceptional merit, published during the previous year in any language and in any country by a scholar in the early stages of his or her career.”
Bohlman received the prestigious award for her article “Solidarity, Song, and the Sound Document.” In the citation for the award, Lawrence Earp (University of Wisconsin-Madison), described it as “a model of scholarship, theoretically sophisticated, rigorously supported by evidence, and elegantly written. We believe that this article has great potential to shift the discipline and to be widely influential.”
Published in the Journal of Musicology in Spring 2016, Bohlman’s award-winning piece “offers a media archeology of the cacophonous sounds and songs of the occupational strikes at the Lenin Shipyards in Gdańsk, Poland.” The article intertwines a subtle political analysis with a rich recovery of the soundscape of the events, drawing on such sound documents as cassette tapes, films, typed transcripts, posters, diaries, and radio reportage. You can read more about her article here.