The student paper prize committee, consisting of Robin Wallace, Felicia Sandler, and Cathy Elias, awarded this year’s prize for best student presentation at the SCSM annual meeting to
Emilie Coakley’s paper,
“Time for Prayer or Time for Work?: Nostalgia, Memory, and the Changing Reception of Church Bells in a City Soundscape.”
Coakley’s paper is refreshing and innovative in the way it shows how musical phenomena tied to church, but situated in the world, can affect the everyday lives of people who experience them in myriad individual ways. An appreciation of how musical experiences can be tied to one’s understanding of the divine outside of worship is a promising avenue for future research, as is the idea of a “McDonaldized” culture in which such understanding is perhaps more commodified than communal. We hope that Coakley and others will be inspired to travel further in this direction.