Michael Dodds receives top national awards for new book
School of Music faculty member Michael Dodds has received two major national honors for his book "From Modes to Keys": the Wallace
Berry Distinguished Book Award from the Society for Music Theory — the society’s highest
publication award — and the Early Music Award from the American Musicological Society,
which recognizes an outstanding single-author study on music before 1550.
In its award citation, the American Musicological Society praises the book as “a landmark
contribution to the study of Early Music,” noting Dodds’s nuanced exploration of the
transition from modality to tonality. The citation highlights his four decades of
scholarship and his ability to illuminate not only the structures of modal and tonal
systems but also the processes through which they developed, calling the work “bold
in scope and nuanced in detail” and “a new standard for understanding Early Music
and the tonal systems that grew from it.”