It is one of the aims of Association RIdIM to promote scholarship at all levels, both inside and outside academia. That can only be done by supporting young scholars, and in particular those who are pursuing pre-doctoral research.
2018 Maria Fernandes
At the 18th International Conference of Association RIdIM, Maria Fernandes caught the attention of the Council with her paper entitled Politics and Musical Caricature: The African Colonial Issue in “A Paródia.” We are pleased to announce that Maria Fernandes is the first recipient of the first Award for the Encouragement of Young Scholars. Maria Fernandes is currently a Master’s student in Musicology, in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, NOVA University (NOVA/FCSH). Her dissertation focuses on musical caricatures, drawn by Rafael and Manuel Gustavo Bordalo Pinheiro, and their political, social and cultural discourses. She is a collaborator and researcher at the Centre for the Study of Sociology and Aesthetics of Music (CESEM), integrating the Musical Iconography Group (NIM), where she studies musical iconography. Since 2017, she has been Vice President of Da Capo Portuguese Musical Magazine and, since 2016, she has held a B.A. in Musicology, and a Liturgical Music Course in Organ.
2019 Rachel Coombes
Rachel Coombes’s paper “Maurice Denis’s L’Histoire de la Musique: Allegorizing cultural tradition in early 20th-Century France” presented at the 19th International Conference of Association RIdIM received the Award for the Encouragement of Young Scholars of Association RIdIM because of its quality, originality and its innovative interdisciplinary approach. Rachel Coombes is a second year doctoral candidate in History of Art at the University of Oxford, where she is undertaking research on the decorative work of the painter Maurice Denis (1870-1943), a life-long music lover and close friend of French composers. She has an undergraduate degree in Music from the University of Oxford, and an MA in History of Art from the University of Birmingham, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Before resuming her academic studies in 2018 she pursued work in journalism and public relations at the Barbican Centre in London.
2023 Lea Luka Sikau
Lea Luka Sikau delivered at the 22nd International Conference of Association Répertoire International d’Iconographie Musical (RIdIM) that was held in Seoul (South Korea), from 19 to 21 October 2023, a highly inspiring paper that examined the process of developing Michael van der Aa’s posthuman opera Upload (2021) from the perspective of a rehearsal ethnography. The paper’s originality and innovative approach as well as the remarkable presentation performance convinced the jury of the Award for the Encouragement of Young Scholars of Association RIdIM. Lea Luka Sikau is an Artist-Researcher, conducting her PhD on new opera, critical posthumanism and rehearsal ethnography at the University of Cambridge. Currently, she holds a lectureship at Humboldt University Berlin, teaching on contemporary music theater and emerging technologies in artistic processes. Sikau has been a Bavarian American Academy Fellow at Harvard University’s Mellon School for Performance and Theater Research and was awarded with the Bavarian Cultural Award for her research at MIT’s Center for Art, Science and Technology. Amongst others, her research has been published in Tempo, The Opera Quarterly and Sound Stage Screen. Within and beyond music theater, she has worked with some of the most sought-after visionaries in the arts such as Romeo Castellucci, Marina Abramović and Stefan Kaegi (Rimini Protokoll). As a mezzo soprano, stage director, and media artist, Sikau was commissioned by Ars Electronica Festival, transmediale Berlin, Ensemble Modern, and Climate Week NYC.
2023 Christopher Ellis Reyes Montes
Christopher Ellis Reyes Montes is a current musicology PhD student at the Schulich School of Music at McGill University, focusing on music and colonialism in the Americas during the 16th-18th centuries. An accomplished musician and writer, his writings have been published by Forward Movement and Church Publishing, and his research has been presented at the Early Music America Virtual Summit. He performs early music around North America on several historical wind instruments, including the bassoon, recorder, and pipe and tabor, and as a singer. He often leads music and liturgy around the Episcopal Church in the Americas and is a member of the Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music of the Episcopal Church.
2024 Chloe Elizabeth Green
Chloe Elizabeth Green is a doctoral student at University College, Oxford, funded by the Open-Oxford-Cambridge AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership and the Clarendon Fund. She recently completed a first-class BA in Music as well as an MPhil with distinction in Musicology at Somerville College, receiving Oxford’s Gibbs Prize in Music and Master’s Examination Prize in Musicology.
2024 Emma Schrott
Emma Schrott is a first-year PhD candidate at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna as part of the ERC funded interdisciplinary research project “GOING VIRAL. Music and Emotions during Pandemics (1679-1919)”. Her doctoral thesis, tentatively titled “Emotional Echoes: Music and Emotions During the Spanish Flu Pandemic in Vienna (1918–1919)“, delves into sound and music related dimensions of emotional practices and the transformation of musicking throughout the trajectory of the Spanish Influenza in Vienna, and aims to enrich nascent cultural-historical perspectives on the 1918/1919 pandemic. Emma has worked in historical research at the New York-based Leo Baeck Institute and has studied musicology and ethnomusicology at the University of Vienna, Sorbonne Université and the University of Oxford, where she graduated with distinction in 2023 as a St Hugh’s College scholarship recipient.