The Australian Academy of the Humanities
Application details
Please read the rules of the award (.PDF, 260KB) before submitting a nomination. Nominations need to be submitted according to the rules. Nominations that deviate from the rules will not be considered.
A new award for musicologists
Andrew McCredie, Professor of Music and Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, died in 2006 leaving a bequest to the Academy. He wished the bequest to fund a musicological award:
...by way of a medallion and certificate to be given on a triennial or quinquennial basis to a post-graduate scholar of an Australian university under the age of 40 years for his/her distinguished contribution to the historical and/or systematic streams of musicology. The historical streams should cover European, Euro-Islamic or Euro-Semitic studies or those in the high cultures of Asia or in the field of transplanted or multi-lingual musical traditions...
The Award is made on the basis of outstanding research towards a Higher Research Degree (Masters or Doctoral) in an Australian University, and is granted to a scholar who is under the age of 40 years as at January the first of the year when the award is made. The research may cover areas of musicology other than those stipulated.
The 2008 McCredie Musicological Award
The Academy is pleased to announce that the inaugural 2008 McCredie Musicological Award has been won by Dr Grantley McDonald for for his doctoral thesis “Orpheus Germanicus: Metrical Music and the Reception of Marsilio Ficino’s Poetics and Music theory in Renaissance Germany”, awarded by the University of Melbourne in 2002.
Dr McDonald’s thesis demonstrated outstanding conceptual originality, combined with a highly innovative methodology. Emeritus Professor Andrew McCredie himself recognised it as extraordinary. Dr McDonald's research covered an area of music history that had until then been somewhat neglected by music scholars. Dr McDonald re-established its aesthetic and cultural relevance through contextualising it within the intellectual developments that were taking place in southern Germany in the early sixteenth century. The study shows how the Humanistenode developed from a humanist concern with number and metre, rather than the affective relationship between musical mood and textual content. Dr McDonald demonstrated this through a detailed study of the ideas and musical practices of Italian humanist Marsilio Ficino, the reception of Ficino’s ideas in Germany, and their incorporation into Germany thought and practice.
The thesis presented a detailed analysis of a large number of Latin treatises on medicine and theology that had never been considered in musicological writing before. Dr McDonald handled the texts magnificently, demonstrating an outstanding capacity to comprehend, interpret and extrapolate from the enormous volume of materials he had at his disposal. His achievement is particularly unusual in that he combines the philological skills of being a Latinist (and more specifically a neo-Latinist or renaissance Latinist) of the highest order, steeped in the classical tradition, with great sensitivity to Latin quantitative verse and intuitive understanding of neo-Platonist philosophy, and great depth of musicological awareness.
Dr McDonald recently took up a two-year fellowship at the Centre d’Etudes Superieures de la Renaissance in Tours, France.
Nominations for this award will open again in 2011 or at a later date to be advised.
For further information about this award, please email grants (at) humanities.org.au or call the Academy on (02) 6125 9860.
