International Alliance for Women in Music
2024 Pauline Alderman Award Winners
The International Alliance for Women in Music is pleased to announce the winners of the 2024 Pauline Alderman Awards for Outstanding Scholarship on Women in Music.
Book Prize Winner
John Michael Cooper
Margaret Bonds: The Montgomery Variations and Du Bois Credo
Cambridge University Press, 2023
Margaret Bonds: The Montgomery Variations and Du Bois Credo chronicles the life and legacy of acclaimed composer, pianist, and social justice activist Margaret Bonds. A talented composer in multiple genres, Bonds composed over 200 pieces, but is most well known for her classical art songs, her frequent collaborations with Langston Hughes, and her arrangements of African-American spirituals. She is remembered for her tireless work championing Black creatives and her dedication to fostering a deeper appreciation for Black art and culture.
Through Bonds’ lengthy correspondence with her contemporaries, fellow activists, and creatives, Cooper paints a compelling narrative of how Bonds intertwined her musicianship and compositions with achieving racial justice. Using two obscure and forgotten compositions, The Montgomery Variations and Credo, Cooper re-evaluates Margaret Bonds’ legacy, music, politics, and activism. Cooper argues these two works function as an auditory appeal for racial justice, a musical manifesto of Bonds’ beliefs and hope for the future. The book marries the sometimes disparate aspects of Bonds, as classical composer, as activist, and as a Black woman, subject to navigating the world that was not only uncomfortable with, but actively hostile towards her. Cooper’s research awakens Bonds’ voice and champions these revolutionary compositions that were unjustly silenced for decades.
Lauded as “illuminating” and “monumental” , adjudicators said the book “presents the necessary framework and context to enhance the understanding of” Margaret Bonds’ music and compositional intent. “In addition to contextualizing the history of these works, ” an adjudicator remarked, “Cooper offers a new perspective that has been long overdue. ” Adjudicators remarked on the “exceptional interdisciplinary analysis” and agreed that this publication is “revolutionary” , praising the diligent scholarship and research into the many facets of Margaret Bonds and her legacy.
John Michael Cooper (Southwestern University) is the editor of more than forty editions of previously obscure compositions by Margaret Bonds published by ClarNan Editions, E.C. Schirmer, and Hildegard Publishing Company, as well as 149 published editions of previously obscure works by Florence Price. In addition to his Cambridge University Press book on Bonds’s Montgomery Variations and Credo, his latest books include the Historical Dictionary of Romantic Music (two editions, 2013 and 2024) and, most recently, the first book-length biography of Margaret Bonds (New York: Oxford University Press, 2025). Before going public with his longstanding interest in Bonds and Price, he worked on the unpublished correspondence of Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel and published on topics including 19th-century U.S. Utopian communities, Felix Mendelssohn, romantic music and aesthetics, and 18th-century performance practice.
Article/Book Chapter Prize Winner
Nancy Newman
#Alma Too: The Art of Being Believed
Journal of the American Musicological Society 75, no. 1 (Spring 2022): 39–79
Through the lens of the #MeToo Movement, this article examines Alma Werfel-Mahler’s account of her marriage to Gustav Mahler, and analyzes how the shifting gender politics from Alma’s lifetime to now have influenced scholarship about her. Using Alma’s own writings from the 1920s to 1950s and later biographies about her, Newman compares how later musicologists have framed their relationship versus Alma’s recollections, the continued undermining of the veracity of Alma’s accounts in late-twentieth century research, and the misogynist bias that has colored the discussion for over a century. She argues that scholarly assessments of Alma rely on moral judgements of character rather than nuanced understanding of her situation and role in her marriage to Gustav Mahler. The article questions the power imbalance in her first marriage, the suffocation of Alma’s compositional output during her role as wife and mother, and how the environment and the sexual politics of Viennese society have affected our understanding of consent and gender expectations in relation to Alma Werfel-Mahler.
Adjudicators described the article as “outstanding” , praising its “well-sharpened authorial wit” and “timely and ever-relevant” analysis of the misogyny that has permeated scholarly discussions on Alma Mahler-Werfel. One adjudicator said the work was “frankly revelatory in the manner in which it disillusions the power dynamic between Gustav and Alma, dispelling the myth of their marriage state. ” One commented that “in this time where the events Alma chronicled are being reproduced, scholarship of this caliber on this topic are exactly what we all should be reading.”
Dr. Nancy Newman is Professor of Music and Joint Faculty in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University at Albany–SUNY, where she has taught for 20 years. She is the author of Songs and Sounds of the Anti-Rent Movement in Upstate New York (SUNY Press, 2025). Earlier work on the Germania Musical Society led to the monograph, Good Music for a Free People (University of Rochester Press, 2010); the essay, “Gender and the Germanians: ‘Art-Loving Ladies’ in 19th-Century Concert Life, ” in American Orchestras in the Nineteenth Century; and a 2014 talk at the Library of Congress, co-sponsored by the American Musicological Society (available at loc.gov). Her current research on the Chicago Musical College was supported by a Rudolph Ganz Fellowship and the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute at the Newberry Library. A semi-active pianist, she is working up accordion renditions of Anti-Rent tunes for regional audiences.