Lifetime Achievement Awards

Katherine Preston

Katherine K. Preston is the Bottoms Professor of Music, Emerita, at the College of 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.

J. Peter Burkholder

J. Peter Burkholder is distinguished professor emeritus of music in musicology at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. He is the author of Listening to Charles Ives: Variations on His America (2021), All Made of Tunes: Charles Ives and the Uses of Musical Borrowing (1995), and Charles Ives: The Ideas Behind the Music (1985), and lead author of A History of Western Music, 10th ed., with Donald Jay Grout and Claude V. Palisca, and Norton Anthology of Western Music, 8th ed., with Claude V. Palisca (2019). He is the editor of Charles Ives and His World, is co-editor of Charles Ives and the ClassicalTradition, and has articles in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., Grove Dictionary of American Music, 2nd ed., Grove Music Online, Journal of the American Musicological Society,  Journal of Musicology, 19th-Century Music, Musical Quarterly, American Music, Journal of Musicological Research, Notes, Music Theory Spectrum, College Music Symposium, Journal of Music History Pedagogy, and others. His writings have been translated and published in Japanese, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Korean, Chinese, and Arabic. He has written liner notes for Decca, Deutsche Grammophon, and Centaur. Burkholder was named an honorary member of the American Musicological Society in 2010, the youngest person to receive this award. In addition, he has received awards from the American Musicological Society (Alfred Einstein Award), Society for American Music (two Irving Lowens Awards), ASCAP (two Deems Taylor Awards), and the Association for Recorded Sound Collections as well as Danforth, Rockefeller, and American Council of Learned Societies fellowships. At Indiana University, he has won awards from the Campus Life Division and the Commission on Multicultural Understanding for contributions to improving the campus climate and promoting understanding with regard to diversity issues (abridged bio from the Indiana University website).

Guy Ramsey

A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr. is a music historian, pianist, composer, and the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania. A widely-published writer, he’s the author of Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop (2003), and The Amazing Bud Powell: Black Genius, Jazz History and the Challenge of Bebop (2013). Dr. Ramsey is co-author beside Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., with Melanie Zeck of The Transformation of Black Music: The Rhythms, the Songs and the Ships of the African Diaspora (2017) and editor of Rae Linda Brown, The Heart of a Woman: The Life and Music of Florence B. Price (2020). His books in progress include Who Hears Here?, a collection of essays, and the monograph Sound Proof: Black Music, Magic and Racial Intimacies, a history of African American music from the slave-era to the present. He was editor for the series Music of the African Diaspora at the University of California Press for ten years and founding editor of the blog Musiqology.com (from the University of Pennsylvania website).

Cynthia Adams Hoover

Cynthia Adams Hoover has spent her entire professional career as a public musicologist and organologist in the museum world, as Curator of Musical Instruments at the National Museum of American History of the Smithsonian Institution (1961-2004; Curator Emerita 2004-present). During that time she significantly helped to educate the general public about the place of music and musical instruments in American culture. At the Smithsonian, she conducted research, published (articles, book chapters, exhibit catalogues, record liner notes), and curated major exhibits, including Music in Early Massachusetts, Nineteenth-Century American Ballroom Music, 1840-1860; Music Machines-American Style, and PIANO 300: Celebrating Three Hundred Years of People and Pianos. Her publications, which appeared in musicological, historical, cultural, and organological books and journals, were outgrowths of her curatorial activities and reflect the wide interdisciplinarity of her research. In 1996, she began to work with materials belonging to the Steinway family in New York and eventually secured William Steinway’s voluminous diaries for the Smithsonian; she subsequently served as Co-Editor in Chief of the William Steinway Diary (1861-1896) Project at the museum. Hoover served as president (1989-1995) of the Comité international pour les musées et collections d’instruments et de musique and was an officer or board member of the American Musical Instrument Society, the American Musicological Society, and the Society for American Music.

John Graziano

John Michael Graziano has sustained a career of 40-plus years since completing his PhD in historical musicology at Yale University in 1969. His contributions include longevity as a teacher at CUNY and the Graduate Center, where he was a devoted mentor to hundreds of students and adviser to their dissertations. He is emeritus director of “Music in Gotham,” an NEH-sponsored project documenting music performance in New York City from 1862–1875. Graziano is a former editor of the journal American Music, recipient of SAM’s 2000 Irving Lowens Article Award for “The Early Life and Career of the ‘Black Patti’: The Odyssey of an African American Singer in the Late Nineteenth Century,” and president of the Society for American Music from 2007 to 2009. He has written numerous articles in scholarly journals. His extensive editorial work includes general series editor of Recent Researches in American Music; a co-edited volume with the late Susan Porter, Vistas of American Music: Essays and Compositions in Honor of William E. Kearns (1999); and European Music and Musicians in New York City, 1840–1900 (2006).

Deane 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.

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, The 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.

Pete Seeger

Donald Krummel

Horace Clarence Boyer

Vivian Perlis

Dena Epstein

H. Wiley Hitchcock

Richard Crawford