This year's medal was awarded to Bryan for his thesis ‘Franz Liszt’s Sonata Narratives: Large-Scale Forms at the Weimar Court’.

We are absolutely delighted to hear this news! Many congratulations to Bryan -- thoroughly deserved!

Before engaging with his doctoral work, Bryan also did his BMus and MPhil with us, and so in the last ten years or so, we saw him maturing and developing as scholar of international recognition. We wish him all the best in his future career.

Yo Tomita (Supervisor), Professor of Musicology and Composition

School of Arts, English and Languages

The prize was established in 2020 in tribute to Professor White’s work in founding the Society for Musicology in Ireland (SMI), his extraordinary service as its inaugural President (2003–2006) and as council member up until 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 joint SMI/ICTM-IE Postgraduate Conference. The prize is jointly funded by UCD School of Music and the Society for Musicology in Ireland and runs in alternate years to the SMI graduate prize. 

The SMI are pleased to announce that entries were received from nine institutions and the adjudicators, Professor Rachel Cowgill (University of York) and Dr Gareth Cox (Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick), noted that they were impressed by all of the entries. 

​​​​​​​The award ceremony took place at the joint SMI/ICTM-IE Postgraduate Students’ Conference at UCD on 20 January 2023, at which the jurors read the following citation of Dr Whitelaw’s work:

"The thesis focuses on compositions written in large-scale instrumental forms by Liszt during his time as Hofkapellmeister at the Weimar Court Theatre, 1848–1861. Reflecting the composer’s insistence that these works stood on their own terms as absolute music despite their programmatic inspiration, Whitelaw considers them according to the principles of formal theory, and in doing so, adopts a multidimensional approach bringing together literary, empirical and hermeneutic models from historical and contemporary theorists. The broader significance of the thesis, therefore, lies in its contribution to developing a conceptual framework for the analysis of large-scale sonata forms as narrative processes that permits the inclusion of materials otherwise referred to as ‘extramusical’, illuminating relationships between literature and music in instrumental genres—an issue considered at length with composers like Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann, but less so with Liszt—and showing how musical works can explicate narratives.

The judges appreciated in particular: the wealth of culturally, historically and analytically rigorous research; the mastery of an exceptionally wide range of relevant literature; the excellent knowledge and thoughtful comprehension of the Lisztian repertoire and beyond; the engagement with the phenomenological experience of the various musical stakeholders; and the lucid and persuasive presentation of ideas within an engaged flow through the thesis."