In 2021 the IMS Guido Adler Prize was awarded to Lorenzo Bianconi and Yoshihiko Tokumaru.

Lorenzo Bianconi
The IMS Directorium has chosen Lorenzo Bianconi to receive this award because of his lifetime record of path-breaking research, his outstanding administrative achievements, and his numerous earlier awards in and outside of Italy, including the Dent Medal of the Royal Musical Association, corresponding member in the American Musicological Society, honorary member of the Accademia Filarmonica in Bologna, corresponding member of Accademia delle Scienze in Turin, member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and corresponding member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. The IMS Directorium is impressed as well with his remarkable record as a teacher and pedagogue for a generation of scholars who have themselves gone on to distinguished careers. Bianconi has been one of the scholarly leaders of his generation in several areas of study, but especially concerning the musical events of the seventeenth century, with particular reference to the madrigal, the opera house, librettos and critical editions of operas. With studies such as Il Seicento (Torino: EDT, 1982, 2019; translated into English in 2011), with his collaborations with numerous scholars (including Thomas Walker, Ellen Rosand, Renato Bossa, Giovanni Morelli, Giorgio Pestelli, and Giuseppina La Face), with the cataloguing of the portrait collection at the Museo della Musica in Bologna (with other distinguished scholars, which won the Claire Brook Award, 2019), with the co-editorship of the Italian National Biography (2012–20), and with his imagination and energy to found new societies and journals, his efforts will shape studies of Italian music from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries for generations.

Yoshihiko Tokumaru
The IMS Directorium has chosen Yoshihiko Tokumaru to receive this award because of his lifetime record of significant research publications, which number in the hundreds and appear in five languages, his distinguished record of teaching, both at Ochanomizu University and the University of California, Los Angeles, his achievements as an editor of major international dictionaries and encyclopedias, including The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music and the Japanese editions of Larousse de la musique and The New Grove, and his previous awards, which include the Tanabe Prize, awarded by the Society for Research in Asiatic Music for his book, Minzoku-ongakugaku, and the selection of Tokumaru as keynote speaker during the Quinquennial IMS Congress in Tokyo in 2017. His many contributions to studies of Japanese music have led him to explore issues such as intertextuality, timbre, tonal systems, the impact of American music, the shamisen, and an activist concern for the preservation of Japanese musical traditions. Individually and collectively these studies will shape the study of Japanese music for generations to come. The IMS Directorium admires his care for musical cultures damaged by colonialism and wars, and how he has labored to restore and preserve traditional music, by returning the results of musicological research, including recordings and various types of documentation, to the field; this emphasis on “fieldback” has given a new sense of social responsibility to the study of music.

Committee

John Griffiths (AU), Christopher Reynolds (US, chair), Nozomi Sato (JP), Laura Tunbridge (UK)