The Popular Music Section of the Society for Ethnomusicology has awarded the Lise Waxer Prize to Rachel Horner, a PhD candidate in Music and Sound Studies. The honor recognizes the most distinguished student paper on popular music presented at the Society’s 2023 Annual Meeting.
The award committee provided the following commendation with the award: "Horner puts forth the novel analytical framework of 'musical implicature,' which weaves together the polysemy of political discourses, the musical quality of language, and the myriad forms of intertextual "versioning" endemic to the digital age. Forcefully, she demonstrates the power of the materiality of non-linguistic sound in circulating political meaning. And, in so doing, Horner suggests that it is precisely these digitally mediated forms of musical speech—through TikTok, YouTube, and other media that afford political satire—that may be an ever-present force in the future of pop music circulation. In addition to her theoretical intervention, which the committee anticipates can provide new analytical possibilities for the ethnomusicology of popular music, we were also impressed with Horner’s highly engaging narrative style, which layers sonically vivid ethnographic descriptions of a political event with meticulous textual analysis and multifaceted social contextualization of its speech act and later musical derivations. Her poignant theoretical framework on language, music, and sound not only contributes a local musical understanding of political speech but also provides a necessary perspective within the emerging discourse of DIY technological interventions to sound.”
