In 2013 the siblings Dr Lloyd Old and Constance Old established the The Lloyd Old and Constance Old Award in Music, Dance & Theatre in Visual Culture. This award is given by Association RIdIM to an early career scholar (max 2 years post PhD) on the basis of an evaluation awarding an oustanding scholarly paper delivered at a conference organized by Association RIdIM.
The Founders
Dr Lloyd J. Old, who made seminal discoveries about the relationship between cancer and the immune system, and steadfastly promoted the development of vaccines and other immunological means to fight cancer, died on Nov. 28 2011 at his home in Manhattan. He was 78. Dr Old made many significant discoveries and received numerous awards, including the Alfred P. Sloan Award in Cancer Research (1962), the Cancer Research Institute for Discoveries in Basic and Tumour Immunology (1975, honoured as one of the “Founders of Tumor Immunology”), the Rabbi Shai Shacknai Memorial Prize in Immunology and Cancer Research (1976), Research Recognition Award, Noble Foundation (1978), New York Academy of Medicine Medal for Distinguished Contributions in Biomedical Science (1985), the Honorary Doctor of Medicine, Karolinska Institute (1994), the Honorary Doctor of Medicine, University of Lausanne (1995), the Honorary Doctor of Sciences (Medicine), University College London (1997), the President’s Medal, Johns Hopkins University (2004), the Dean’s Award, Stanford University School of Medicine (2004), the Honorary Professor, Peking University (2004), the Charles Rodolphe Brupbacher Prize for Cancer Research (2007) and the C. Chester Stock Award Lectureship, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (2011). He was, among others, Associate Director of Research of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (1973–83), Scientific Director of the Cancer Research Institute (CRI) (1971–2011) and director of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, New York Branch at MSKCC (1990–2011). Throughout his life Dr Old was a passionate consumer and supporter of the arts, and in particular wished to encourage young scholars in both appreciation and contribution to music.
Constance Old is a landscape designer and horticulturalist who has had a lifelong interest in the performing and visual arts and their relationship to culture. She worked for many years as a historian of music and dance iconography and established The Performing Arts Index of Music and Dance for The Metropolitan Museum of Art in conjunction with the Research Center for Music Iconography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She served on the board of the Dance Perspectives Foundation, which published the International Encyclopedia of Dance (Oxford University Press), and on the board of the Isadora Duncan Dance Foundation. Her interest in dance led her to establish youth programs for the San Francisco Ballet. The Music in Society lecture series, currently running at the Barry S. Brook Center for Music Research and Documentation, allows Constance Old to carry on the interest she shared with her brother, Lloyd Old, in the role of music in contemporary society.
Laureates
2013: Candela Perinña
Association RIdIM is delighted to announce that the recipient of the first Lloyd Old and Constance Old Award is Candela Perpiña. Ms Perpiña gave her paper A Musical Bestiary: Musical Properties of Animals in the Medieval Tradition Between East and West at the 14th International RIdIM Conference in Istanbul on 6 June 2013. The committee that awarded the prize consisted of Professor Dr Richard Leppert, Constance Old, Professor Dr Antonio Baldassarre and Professor Dr Arnold Myers.
2017: Mikkel Vad
The Council of Association RIdIM is pleased to announce that the recipient of the 2017 Lloyd & Constance Old Award is Mikkel Vad, for his paper presentation, Landscape Iconography in Nordic Jazz and Popular Music at the 17th International Conference of Association RIdIM, Athens, 5-7 Oct 2017.
Mikkel Vad’s paper, titled “Landscape Iconography in Nordic Jazz and Popular Music,” shows a connection between the spatial features of recorded music and its iconography. Looking particularly at Nordic music, the paper showed how landscape iconography and musical representations and allusions to landscapes form a so-called landscape ideology of Nordic music. Building on scholarship in art history, cultural studies, popular music studies, music theory, and geography this work is part of Vad’s secondary project on the sound recording as an object of study and how ideas associated with the “spatial turn” can draw close connections between music iconography and music analysis. Such interdisciplinary scholarship is indicative of Vad’s approach more broadly. As a Phd student in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota (USA), he builds on his previous degrees in musicology (from the University of Copenhagen in his native Denmark) in a dissertation, tentatively titled April in Paris, Autumn in New York: European Jazz in the US, 1945–1970s, which explores the dissemination and reception of European jazz in the US. He attended his first RIdIM conference in 2013.
2018: Wm Keith Heimann
The Council of Association RIdIM is delighted to announce that the recipient of the 2018 Lloyd & Constance Old Award is Wm. Keith Heimann, for his paper presentation, Hidden in Plain Sight: “The true, unutterable…great sin” in “The Etude Music Magazine at the 18th International Conference of Association RIdIM, Canterbury, 9-12 July 2018.
Heimann won a full scholarship to The Juilliard School, from which he graduated with Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees. His Master’s degree recital included Mouvements du Coeur, a song cycle with lyrics by Louise de Vilmorin, and music by members of Les Six. He is currently a Doctoral candidate at Boston University, pursuing a Doctor of Music in Music Education Degree. His music iconography research is focused on the social and political implications found in the original illustrations published in The Etude Music Magazine, with a particular concentration on the “The Golden Age of Illustration,” c.1900-1920s. His research has been published in Music in Art, American Music Teacher and The Art of Artertainment: Nobrow, American Style. Currently a professor of music, music technology, theatre and the humanities at Brookdale Community College, he sang extensively with the opera companies of Vienna, New York, Los Angeles, and Santa Fe in addition to The Phantom of the Opera, Evita, and Lady in the Dark.
2023: Timur Sijaric
Timur Sijaric’s paper, entitled “Genocide for the Lulz. War Songs as Memes and Representations of Imaginary Reality” explores the resurgence of patriotic and war songs – and especially their respective music videos – as Internet memes, with audiovisual elements used as tools of illusory representation. In line with the intertextual quality of Internet memes, these representations were changed and reworked to mirror not only historical but also contemporary events. The quantity and the aesthetics of music and music videos on the one hand and the historical embedding of the events in the contemporary culture on the other transformed the music (and especially music videos) into memetic forms of expression in the Digital Age. The paper was awarded the Lloyd & Constance Old Award for its exceptional quality, originality, and innovative interdisciplinary approach. Timur Sijaric studied saxophone, composition, and musicology in Vienna. Since 2020 he has been a research associate at the Music and Arts University of the City of Vienna and since 2022 senior research associate at Lucerne School of Music.
2024: Gaia Prignano
Association RIdIM is delighted to announce that the recipient of the 2024 Lloyd & Constance Old Award is Gaia Prignano (Università di Bologna), for her paper presentation Music in the frescoes of the “Rimini School” at the 23rd International Conference of Association RIdIM, Vienna, 29 – 31 August 2024. The award recognizes Dr. Prignano’s sound examination of a rich, yet hitherto under-researched visual corpus with musical subject matter and the rigor of her methodological approach, that she has already impressively demonstrated in her recently published study Musical Images at the Court of Alfonso I d’Este: Patronage and Self-Representation in Early Sixteenth-Century Ferrara (Brepols, 2022).
Gaia Prignano’s research centers on music iconography as a unique expression of identity-related issues and a valuable testimony to otherwise lost musical worlds. Her work primarily focuses on the courtly setting of Renaissance Ferrara, the subject of her monograph Musical Images at the Court of Alfonso I d’Este. Patronage and Self-Representation in Early Sixteenth-Century Ferrara (Brepols, 2022). She has also explored the construction of “otherness” in European imagery of dancing witches and brought to light overlooked music-iconographic sources from 14th-century Central-Eastern Italy. Her contributions have been published in leading journals, and she contributes to the new online edition of the DEUMM curaing entries on studiolo culture and Ferrarese painters.
A key aspect of her work is the integration of digital humanities in the study and valorization of music iconography. This approach spans from her direction of the virtual reconstruction of Alfonso I’s studiolo during her PhD at the Department of Cultural Heritage of the University of Bologna, to her collaboration on the Atlante Digitale Dantesco (2022), culminating in the award of a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship (2024) for the project In-MusIc. Interactive Tools for the Study and the Enhancement of Music Iconography (University of Barcelona).