Antares Boyle recognized for scholarship in music theory

For the third year in a row, Portland State University’s School of Music & Theater Assistant Professor Antares Boyle has received an award for her scholarship in music theory during the annual Society for Music Theory (SMT) conference. The society recognized her with the Publication Award of the SMT’s Post-1945 Music Analysis Interest Group for her article “Gestural Temporality in Sciarrino’s Recitativo oscuro.” The Post-1945 Music Analysis Interest Group was founded within the SMT to foster scholarship of avant-garde, experimental, and modernist music after 1945.

Boyle published the article in the Society for Music Theory’s Music Theory Online journal. The article is an “analysis of a piano concerto by Salvatore Sciarrino, using the piece as a case study for understanding broader contradictions between gestural organicism and temporal discontinuity in the composer’s music,” said Landon Morrison when announcing Boyle’s award at the Society of Music Theory. He added that the “committee responded enthusiastically to Boyle’s invitation to ‘hear form through an analysis of gestural behavior,’ and we are excited for the rich new perspective on energetics and musical structure that is presented in her work.”

“I’m deeply honored to receive this award,” Boyle said. “My article was part of a symposium on the music of Salvatore Sciarrino by an international panel of authors that also included Christian Utz, Mingyue Li, and Robert Hasegawa. Sometimes there can be a bit of a disconnect between European and North American music scholarship, so I was very proud to be part of this collaboration, and I hope it will inspire more international dialogue and more U.S. scholarship on this important living composer.”

Antares Boyle completed her Ph.D. in music theory at the University of British Columbia in 2018. That same year, she was awarded the Society for Music Theory’s SMT-40 Dissertation Fellowship. She has published articles in Music Theory Spectrum, Music Theory Online and Perspectives of New Music, and has work forthcoming in Journal of Music Theory, as well as the edited collection Analytical Essays on Music by Women Composers. In 2023, Boyle received the Society of Music Theory’s Emerging Scholar Award, and in 2022, she received the Award for Excellent in Jazz Scholarship from the SMT’s Jazz Interest Group.

Boyle’s research interests include contemporary art music, theorizing musical meter, ostinato, and groove; the interactions between performance and analysis; and minimalist and process composition and improvisation.