Distinguished Service Citation

Neil Lerner

Neil Lerner’s first time attending a conference of the Sonneck Society ended up being his last: at the business meeting in 1999, a robust debate about renaming the society concluded with the vote that transformed us into the Society for American Music. He has served on and chaired several committees, including the Long-Range Planning, Local Arrangements (for the 2012 conference in Charlotte, NC), Lowens Book Award, Nominating, and Program. Lerner was Secretary of the Society for four terms, where he chronicled and coordinated eight years of agendas, committee reports, and minutes. Lerner’s editorial work includes serving as Editor of the journal American Music and the Routledge Music and Screen Media book series, as well as serving on several editorial boards. He edited or co-edited four books: Sounding Off: Theorizing Disability in Music (2006), Music in the Horror Film: Listening to Fear (2009), Music in Video Games: Studying Play (2014), and The Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies (2016). After writing one of the first musicological dissertations on film music, he went on to publish widely on music in a variety of screen media genres and time periods, including film music, television music, video game music, music and disability, and music in pinball. At Davidson College he is the J. Estes Millner Professor of Music and Core Faculty and Chair of the Department of Film, Media, and Digital Studies; he has also held the E. Craig Wall, Jr. Distinguished Teaching Professorship in the Humanities.

Joice Gibson

Joice Gibson has been on the faculty of Metropolitan State University of Denver since 1999. Her research interests include English comic opera, opera, blackface minstrelsy, early American music publishing, music and the brain, recorder (instrument) literature, globalization of music, corridos of Mexico, historical ethnomusicology, transcultural music participation, African American spirituals, musical theater, film music, music history pedagogy, OER, Creative Commons licensing, issues and best practices for teaching with AI. As a longtime member of SAM, Gibson has served on several committees and as conference manager.

Denise Von Glahn

Denise Von Glahn is Professor of Musicology in the College of Music at Florida State University where she served as Director of the Center for Music of the Americas for twelve years and Curtis Mayes Orpheus Professor and Coordinator of the Musicology Area for seven. She currently serves as President of the Society for American Music. Her scholarly interests include the music of Charles Ives, music and place, ecomusicology, music and identity, music and gender, music and institutions, and biography. She has published essays, articles, and book chapters, as well as a critical edition of Leo Ornstein’s Quintette for Piano and Strings, and five books: The Sounds of Place: Music and the American Cultural Landscape, (which won the 2004 ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award); Leo Ornstein: Modernist Dilemmas, Personal Choices, written with Michael Broyles, (which won the 2009 Irving Lowens Book Award from the Society for American Music); Music and the Skillful Listener: American Women Compose the Natural World, (which won the 2015 Pauline Alderman Award from the International Alliance for Women in Music); Libby Larsen: Composing an American Life, (2017, a part of the University of Illinois Press, Music in American Life Series); and Circle of Winners: How the Guggenheim Foundation Composer Awards Shaped American Music Culture that appeared in 2023 and won Von Glahn a second ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award. She takes enormous pleasure in working with students and directing theses and dissertations on a range of topics that explore US American music culture and has been recognized at two different universities with awards for excellence in teaching.

Katherine “Kitty” Preston

Katherine K. Preston is the Bottoms Professor of Music, Emerita, at William & Mary, where she taught for thirty years and served as Chair of the Department of Music for seven. Her academic degrees are from The Evergreen State College (Olympia, Washington; BA Liberal Arts, 1974), the University of Maryland (MM, 1981), and the Graduate Center, CUNY (Ph.D, 1989). SAM has been her scholarly home since 1979, when she attended her first conference (Sonneck Society, Baltimore); she has subsequently served on (and chaired) many committees, was on the Board of Trustees (1981-83), Secretary (1997-2002), and President (2011-13), during which time she organized SAM 2.0, the Society’s first capital campaign, which raised $1 million. An enthusiastic scholar of nineteenth-century American musical culture, she has published articles, chapters, and four monographs on that topic, including two prize-winning books on opera performance history in 19th-century America, a study of musicians’ work in Washington, D. C. (1877-1900), and a biography of George Frederick Bristow (1825-1898). She has also edited (or co-edited) four scholarly editions, including Bristow’s second and fourth symphonies. In 2022 she organized the Forging an American Musical Identity project, which promotes both knowledge of 19th century American musical culture and performance of music written in the US during that period; she continues as Chair of the FAMI Board. Preston’s scholarship has been recognized and supported by the Fulbright Program, NEH, National Humanities Center, American Antiquarian Society, Newberry Library, New York Public Library, Ransom Center (UT/Austin), New York Historical Society, and elsewhere. She also loves gardening, hiking, and traveling and has been an avid cyclist for her entire life.

bruce d. mcclung

Thomas L. Riis

Thomas L. Riis is Professor Emeritus of musicology at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he served as Director of the American Music Research Center from 1992–2018. His book, Just Before Jazz: Black Musical Theater in New York, 1890 to 1915, won an ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award. He is also the author of the book Frank Loesser. He lives in Oberlin, Ohio (bio from SUNY Press).

Michael Broyles

Michael Broyles is Professor of Musicology at Florida State University, retired, and Distinguished Professor of Music and Professor of American History-Emeritus, at Pennsylvania State University. His areas of specialization are American music and music of the Classic era, especially Beethoven. He has also published on the connection between music and photography. Broyles most recent book, Revolutions in American Music: Three Decades that Changed the Country and its Sounds was published in 2024 (WW Norton). An earlier book written with Denise Von Glahn, Leo Ornstein: Modernist Dilemmas, Personal Choices (2007), won the Irving Lowens Award from the Society for American Music as the best book on American music for the year.  Broyles is the author of five other books, and with Denise Von Glahn a critical edition of Leo Ornstein’s Quintette for Piano and Strings.  Broyles has published many articles, in journals such as Music in Art, Musical Quarterly, Nineteenth-Century Music, Music Review, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Journal of the Society for American Music, Beethoven Journal, Revue belge de Musicologie, including four in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, the latter which shows he is a glutton for punishment. He has contributed chapters to several other books.  Broyles has an M.M. in music theory and a Ph.D. in musicology from the University of Texas at Austin, and he has received numerous awards, including two National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships. He is a Past-President of the Society for American Music, and was a music critic for the Baltimore Sun.

Paul Wells

Paul F. Wells served as the President of SAM from 2001-2003. He held the position of Director of the Center for Popular Music at Middle Tennessee State University from 1985 to 2010. Named Emeritus in 2011, Wells built the Center’s library and archive into one of the country’s finest popular music research collections.

Dale Cockrell

Dale Cockrell is Professor of Musicology Emeritus at Vanderbilt University and a Research Associate of the University of the Free State (South Africa). He has also held appointments to Indiana University, the University of KwaZulu-Natal (South Africa), Dartmouth College, Middlebury College, College of William and Mary (where he was the David N. and Margaret C. Bottoms Professor of Music), the University of Alabama, and Middle Tennessee State University (where he was Director of the Center for Popular Music). He is a former President of the Society for American Music, from which he received the Distinguished Service Award and the Lifetime Achievement Award, an elected Member of the American Antiquarian Society, and the founder and former President of Pa’s Fiddle Recordings, LLC. He is widely published in the field of American music studies, including Everybody’s Doin’ It: Sex, Music, and Dance in New York, 1840-1917; The Ingalls Wilder Family Songbook; Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World, which won the C. Hugh Holman Award; Excelsior: Journals of the Hutchinson Family Singers, 1842-1846, recipient of the Irving Lowens Award; nine other books and editions; more than seventy scholarly articles; and produced four albums of music embedded in the Little House books. Cockrell has received three NEH Fellowships among other awards and grants, and takes special pride in The Margaret Cuninggim Mentoring Prize “for outstanding contributions to the professional and intellectual development of Vanderbilt women.” Dale lives now in the mountains of Vermont, where he allows for a silence that suggests a more just and natural world.

Dianna Eiland

Anne Dhu McLucas

Anne Dhu McLucas (1941-2012) was a brilliant polymath with wide-ranging interests in all things musical, a wonderful teacher, a gifted and supportive mentor, and a path-breaking scholar. She received her PhD from Harvard University and taught at Harvard, Boston College, Wellesley College, Colorado College, and the University of Oregon. She was the recipient of fellowships from Fulbright, the Smithsonian, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the author of several books, including The Musical Ear: Oral Tradition in the USA.

Jean Geil

Deane L. Root

Deane L. Root was Curator of the Stephen Foster Memorial and administrator of Heinz Memorial Chapel at the University of Pittsburgh when he was elected president of the Sonneck Society. He had helped create the Society’s journal American Music, and edited or co-edited two of its special issues. As a staff editor for The New Grove in London in the 1970s, he had created its popular-music coverage. During his presidency (1989-93), the Society implemented its first strategic plan, changed its name to the Sonneck Society for American Music, created a handbook for the tasks of officers and committees, diversified the board, and adopted the rotation of president elect—president—past president. He served as the Society’s delegate to the American Council of Learned Societies. In 1995 he initiated the Society’s first major education project, Voices Across Time.

J. Bunker Clark

J. Bunker Clark was a Professor of Music History at the University of Kansas and the author of Transposition in Seventeenth Century English Organ Accompaniments and The Transposing Organ. In addition to serving as editor of the Anthology of Early American Keyboard Music, 1787-1830, he contributed articles to Notes, Fontes Artis Musicae, Musica Disciplina, Music & Letters, and The American Organist.

Wayne Shirley

Wayne Shirley served thirty-seven years as a reference librarian and then music specialist in the Music Division at the Library of Congress, during which time he assisted and mentored generations of scholars.

Raoul F. Camus

Raoul Camus is a scholar of American band music and professor emeritus of music at Queensborough Community College of the City University of New York. Camus has served the Society as both president and treasurer, and through his leadership on various committees, including Conference Site Selection and Honors and Awards.

William K. Kearns

William (Bill) Kay Kearns (1928–2020) was a horn player, musicologist, educator, and advocate for American music. After earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in music from The Ohio State University and a Ph.D. in Musicology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1965, he joined the faculty of the University of Colorado Boulder, where he taught French horn and music history for more than three decades. Before his appointment at Colorado, Kearns served on the faculty of Ohio State University and performed as principal horn with the Columbus Symphony Orchestra from 1952 to 1965. At the University of Colorado, he played a central role in shaping graduate music education, establishing the university’s PhD program in Musicology and later serving as Associate Dean of Graduate Studies. In 1992, he founded the American Music Research Center at the University of Colorado where he brought together significant collections of American music materials.

William Lichtenwanger

William Lichtenwanger was a founding member of the Society, where he played an integral role in building a solid foundation to enable future growth. Lichtenwanger established the Sonneck Society’s archives at the Library of Congress, where he served as a music librarian for 34 years. He also served as an associate editor and then editor of Notes and as music editor for Collier’s Encyclopedia. On April 8, 1989 he was the first recipient of the Distinguished Service Award.