Congratulations to Charles Atkinson (OSU), the 2015 winner of The Medieval Academy of America's Haskins Medal!

The Haskins Medal is awarded annually by the Medieval Academy of America for a distinguished book in the field of medieval studies. First presented in 1940, the award honors Charles Homer Haskins, the noted medieval historian, who was a founder of the Medieval Academy and its second President. The award is announced at the annual meeting of the Academy each spring. The medal was designed in 1939 by Graham Carey, and the name of the recipient and the year of the award are engraved on the edge.

In his masterful The Critical Nexus: Tone-system, Mode, and Notation in Early Medieval Music, Charles M. Atkinson charts the transition from ancient Greek music theory to the early medieval tonal, modal, and notational systems.  Explicating and synthesizing a formidable body of primary sources, including ancient, Byzantine, and medieval musical treatises, tonaries, glosses, and pedagogical works, as well as a vast array of secondary literature, Atkinson crafts a meticulous, compelling account of the development of western chant and musical thought and notation.  The book weaves together highly specialized materials, but does so with a deftness and clarity that make it rewarding to the interested yet uninitiated as well as the specialist reader.

The Critical Nexus traces nine centuries of intellectual and creative activity.  It begins with the transmission of Greek music theory to the Latin world in the writings of major figures such as Boethius, Martianus Capella, and Cassiodorus, and moves to the Frankish reception and adaptation of these texts in the context of Carolingian liturgical reform, the emergence of the system of the eight modes and forms of music notation, the contributions of the multi-author compilation known as Alia musica, and the achievements of key Frankish, south German, and Italian scholars and composers of the tenth through early fourteenth century.  A central theme of The Critical Nexus is the relationship between music theory and grammar.  Atkinson elucidates that relationship’s far-reaching implications through his close readings of the sources, lucid explications of terminology, and vivid, succinct portraits of the medieval schoolmasters and theorists who labored to reconcile the harmonic writings of antiquity with the practices of their own age.  Important, too, is the evolving visualization of musical systems in modes of notation.  Beautifully designed and generously equipped with charts, figures, and illustrations, The Critical Nexus illuminates with erudition and wit the long process of theoretical, performative, and visual convergence that yielded one of western Europe’s signature cultural forms.

Read more here!