Alan Merriam Prize awarded to Prof. Joshua Pilzer

The Society for Ethnomusicology has awarded the Alan Merriam Prize to Prof. Josh Pilzer (Ethnomusicology) for Quietude: A Musical Anthropology of "Korea's Hiroshima" (Oxford U Press, 2022). It is a prize to recognize the most distinguished English-language monograph in the field of ethnomusicology, published as the author’s second or a later monograph. 

More about this work:

What can be learned from musically encountering others beyond music? Quietude is an attempt to answer this question, a holistic ethnography of the expressive lives of Korean first and second-generation victims of the atomic bombing of Japan, focused on the everyday arts of living that they employ to make life possible and worthwhile. The book documents the practically unknown history of Korean experiences of the atomic bombs and their aftermath, focused on the large community of victims—former residents of Hiroshima and their children—living in Hapcheon, South Korea. It considers victims’ uses of voice, speech, song, and movement in the struggle for national and global recognition, in the ongoing work of negotiating the traumatic past, and in the effort to consolidate and maintain selves and relationships in the present. It attempts to explain the multifaceted atmosphere of quiet that predominates in “Korea’s Hiroshima” by focusing on the poetics of endurance, refusal, and self-effacement in the face of discrimination, the atomic experience, and its politicization.

Hearty felicitations, Prof. Pilzer!