The Harry White Doctoral Prize of the Society for Musicology in Ireland was inaugurated in 2020 as a tribute to Professor White’s work in founding the society, his extraordinary service as its inaugural President (2003–2006) and as council member in subsequent years to 2021. The prize is awarded biennially by the SMI for a distinguished doctoral dissertation on any musicological topic submitted within the two most recent academic years as part of a doctoral degree at an institution in the Republic of Ireland or Northern Ireland. The winning thesis is selected by a prize committee and submitted to SMI Council for award at the annual SMI Postgraduate Conference. The prize is jointly funded by UCD School of Music and the Society for Musicology in Ireland and will run in alternative years to the SMI's Alison Dunlop Graduate Prize.
December 2024: the prize for 2024 is being awarded to Joanne Cusack (Maynooth University) for her dissertation Changes in Society and Scene: An Examination of Women in Irish Traditional Music. The adjudicating committee have also awarded an Honorable Mention to Cillian Long (Trinity College Dublin) for his dissertation The Accompaniment of Plainchant in France, Belgium and Certain Other Catholic Regions: A Chronological Study of the Theory and Practice from the French Revolution to the Second Vatican Council. The award ceremony will take place during the joint SMI/ICTMD-IE Postgraduate Conference at Trinity College Dublin on 16-17 January 2025.
January 2023: the prize for 2022 was awarded to Bryan A. Whitelaw (Queen’s University Belfast) for his thesis Franz Liszt’s Sonata Narratives: Large-Scale Forms at the Weimar Court. In addition, the committee awarded ‘Highly Commended’ to Roslyn Steer (Maynooth University) for her thesis Beyond Boundaries: The Aesthetics of the Scream in the Music of the Second Viennese School. The award ceremony took place at the joint SMI/ICTM-IE Postgraduate Conference at UCD on 20 January 2023.
December 2020: the inaugural prize, formally presented at the joint SMI/ICTM Postgraduate Conference in January 2021, was awarded to Dr Bláithín Duggan for her thesis Paralanguage and The Beatles (Trinity College Dublin). The prize committee also awarded an Honorable Mention to Dr Nicolás Puyane for his thesis Exploring Liszt’s Evolving Relationship to the Lied as a Genre through his Variants, Recompositions, and Resettings, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Textual Fluidity (Maynooth University).
Harry White is Professor of Music at University College Dublin and a Fellow of the Royal Irish Academy of Music. He is General Editor (with Gerard Gillen) of Irish Musical Studies and inaugural President of the Society for Musicology in Ireland (2003–2006). His recent publications include The Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland (UCD Press, 2013; edited with Barra Boydell), A Musical Offering. Essays in Honour of Gerard Gillen (Four Courts Press, 2018; edited with Kerry Houston) and The Musical Discourse of Servitude (Oxford University Press, forthcoming in 2020). Professor White was elected to the Royal Irish Academy in 2006, the Academy of Europe in 2015 and the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts in 2018.