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Congratulations to Assistant Professor Daniel M. Callahan for being awarded the 2019 Alfred Einstein Award and the 2019 Philip Brett Award for his article "The Gay Divorce of Music and Dance: Choreomusicality and the Early Works of Cage-Cunningham," published in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Summer 2018, Vol. 71, Number 2, pp. 439–525. 

"The Alfred Einstein Award honors a musicological article of exceptional merit, published during the previous year in any language in any country by a scholar in the early stages of his or her career who is a member of the AMS or a citizen or permanent resident of Canada or the United States. This year’s pool of nominees shows a strength and excellence in music scholarship that foretells a very bright future for our field. This year’s winner wrote a brilliant article that is a genuinely original contribution to music studies, but also to modern dance studies and LGBTQ+ history. The author’s analysis of music-movement is a model of historically-informed and contextualized choreomusical analysis, clearly founded in a thorough investigation of a breadth of sources that includes letters, videos, photographs, existing scholarship, and analyses of both music and choreography. The clarity of writing, the author’s passion, and the clarity, sophistication, and strength of the argument make this an exceptional work of scholarship. The article shows that the early collaborations between John Cage and Merce Cunningham were not abstract in nature, but rather, heavily programmatic. The author’s analysis and revisionist origin story of Cunningham’s Revivalist/”Preacher” solo from Appalachian Spring significantly revises the scholarly record and offers a new interpretive framework for understanding this iconic work."

Citation as read by the chair of the Alfred Einstein Committee.