I’m excited to announce that my book The Musical Brain: what students, teachers, and performers need to know has won a 2024 ASCAP Foundation Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson book award. Sometimes this award is won by first-time authors as I am; it has also been awarded to well-known authors such as Oliver Sacks for Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, and Alex Ross (writer for The New Yorker) for The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. It is an unbelievable honor for me to have won this award!

The ASCAP Foundation, founded in 1975, supports music creators and encourages their development through awards, grants, commissioning programs, educational programs, and community outreach.

The Deems Taylor award is given to people who write about music. Quoting from the ASCAP website:
The ASCAP Foundation Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Awards program recognizes books, articles, and liner notes on the subject of music selected for their excellence. The Awards were established in 1967 to honor the memory of composer, critic, and commentator Deems Taylor, who died in 1966 after a distinguished career that included six years as President of ASCAP. The Awards were renamed in 2014 to also honor the memory of Virgil Thomson (1896 – 1989), one of the leading American composers and critics of the 20th Century, and a former member of the ASCAP Board of Directors.

ASCAP itself is a non-profit organization that ensures that member composers get paid for performances of their work. You may know the name Victor Herbert, composer of the early 20th century Broadway hits “Babes in Toyland” and “Naughty Marietta.” The story goes that Herbert was in a restaurant one night and heard the resident orchestra playing one of his songs. Although it was under copyright, he wasn’t being paid. So in 1914, he and several other composers founded The American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers to enforce copyright law and collect royalty payments. Today, ASCAP collects licensing fees from music performance venues, broadcasters, and streaming services who use music of ASCAP members and then pays royalties to member composers.

The official press release about the 2024 ASCAP Foundation Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson awards can be found here.

I am overwhelmed by this honor and wanted to share the news with my readers. My thanks to all of you who have supported my writing over the years!!