In 2024 the IMS Guido Adler Prize was awarded to Georgina Born.
Georgina Born
Georgina Born is a musicologist whose disciplinary innovations have established new research trajectories for musicologists around the world. Her main interest lies in analyzing the cultural meaning of music, particularly how this meaning is influenced by musical institutions and the relationships between human and nonhuman actors involved in the processes of musical production, reception, and mediation. Her highly regarded first book, Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde (California, 1995), was a landmark publication, followed in 2004 by Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC (Vintage, 2004). In recent years, she has devoted major studies to the role of technologies in the formation of musical meanings. Throughout her work, Georgina Born has developed methodologies that cross the boundaries between disciplines, integrating approaches from anthropology, historical musicology, sociology, and ethnomusicology. The perspective of her research is global, focusing on forms of cultural representation within processes of cultural mediation.
Georgina Born is professor of anthropology and music in the Department of Anthropology, University College London, and has held numerous guest professorships. She studied cello and piano at the Royal College of Music, and during the 1980s appeared with numerous experimental music groups, making a number of recordings. Her scholarship has been recognized with a Dent Medal of the Royal Musical Association in 2007, a Fellowship of the British Academy in 2014, and an OBE in 2016 “for services to anthropology, musicology and higher education.” Her service to musicology has been extensive, as a guest professor and as the editor of several field-defining collections, the latest of which is Music and Digital Media: A Planetary Anthropology (UCL Press open access, 2022).
Committee
Federico Celestini (AT), Maria Rosa De Luca (IT, chair), Valentina Sandu-Dediu (RO), Imani Sanga (TZ)