The IMS Guido Adler Prize (IMS GAP) honors distinguished scholars who have made an outstanding contribution to musicology. In 2019 the prize has been awarded to Margaret Kartomi.

Margaret Kartomi
The IMS Directorium has chosen Margaret Kartomi to receive this award because of her lifetime record of outstanding research, her extraordinary service to the discipline of musicology, and her role as a teacher and mentor to a generation of scholars who have themselves had successful careers. Her name is known throughout the scholarly world for her contributions to ethnomusicology and passionate promotion of the discipline in the Asia-Pacific region. She has received many prestigious awards, in Australia, the USA, Asia, and Europe. She has served as president of the Musicological Society of Australia, and for a lengthy period as an IMS Directorium member. Moreover, she has recently been celebrated for fifty years continuous service at Monash University.

Concerning her research in Indonesia and South-East Asia, she has been a pioneer with regard to the music and culture of many different regions of Indonesia beyond Java, in Sumatra and Aceh and most recently in the Riau Islands. The IMS Directorium notes the breadth of her work, the variety and diversity of the perspectives from which she has viewed music and cultural experience. Beyond her contribution to the study of music in particular locations and regions, she has also made broader contributions to numerous theoretical areas of musicology, particularly her influential contribution to the theoretical understanding of musical instruments and organology, and other areas such as youth orchestras and performativity theory. The IMS Directorium also recognizes that her scholarly output has continued to be as prodigious now as it has been at any other point in her career.

One of her special attributes is her unflagging commitment to the discipline of musicology, whether through her international contributions or within her local environment. She is admired for promoting throughout her career a holistic notion of musicological training that took for granted the need for students to study the music of other cultures as well as their own. In her vision of ethnomusicological training she pioneered incorporating practical experience of Asian music traditions into the tertiary curriculum. Within Australia she has striven to implement her belief in the need for international collaboration to strengthen the discipline and has displayed outstanding leadership in organizing two Intercongressional IMS Symposia in Melbourne. She also spent an extended period as head of her own school during which she was the driving force in the transformation of a once exclusively academic department into a comprehensive music school. The IMS Directorium salutes her and sees her as a most worthy recipient of the IMS Guido Adler Prize.

IMS GAP Guidelines

1. The IMS GAP is for outstanding scholarly achievement in the fields of musicology, ethnomusicology, and music theory; professional performers may also be considered if they have contributed significantly to scholarship.
2. There will normally be one prize awarded per year; other options are two or none in any given year.
3. The Directorium will make nominations to a smaller GAP committee; the nominations will consist of a summary paragraph plus a CV that contains at least the person’s most important publications and previous awards; the committee will then decide on who should receive an award; they then report this decision as a recommendation to the Directorium; the Directorium has the final right to approve or not.
4. The committee will serve terms of 3 to 5 years and consist of 3 to 5 people who rotate on and off, one each year (if there are four on the committee, any tie vote for a candidate will be broken by the President).
5. There are no geographical restrictions on where the awardees live and work, and it is understood that this is a worldwide award. It is further understood (a) that there will be a balance of nominees from around the world, and (b) that countries with larger percentages of professional musicologists will inevitably generate more nominees.
6. The scholarship of the awardee can be in any language. In the event a nominee publishes in a language not comprehended by members of the  committee, the Directorium will suggest at least one other outside reader. Nominations for scholars who publish in a language not understood by the committee should be as long as necessary; that is, such nominations are not limited to a summary paragraph (see item 3), but can extend to whatever length necessary to explain the significance of the nominee’s research.
7. Recipients of the award need not be IMS members.

Current Committee

Florence Gétreau (FR), Andrea Lindmayr-Brandl (AT), Christopher Reynolds (US, chair), Suk Won Yi (KR)

Previous IMS GAP Winners

Winners of the IMS Guido Adler Prize 2018

THE PRIZE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY IMS MEMBERS
DR. KATHRYN JOURDAN AND DR. PAUL JOURDAN.