Simon Frisch (PhD Candidate in Music, Stanford) Awarded 2025 AMS Paul A. Pisk Prize

Simon Frisch (Music, Stanford) has been awarded the American Musicological Society's 2025 Paul A. Pisk Prize. The prize is awarded annually to two graduate music students for scholarly papers presented at the annual meeting of the Society. 

The paper, Sounding Sovereignty: Occasional Motets in the Early Modern Transition, "offers a new perspective on a long-discussed repertory, pushing against the notion of ‘state’ or ‘occasional motet’ as the primary generic marker for a body of works associated with the French court prior to 1535. By drawing on an impressive array of musical, iconographic, and archival sources, Frisch re-examines widely accepted assumptions about the performance contexts of three case studies (by Jean Mouton, Jean Richafort, and Mathieu Gascogne), convincingly arguing that these motets were conceived for devotional and semi-private settings rather than for civic rituals.”

Simon Frisch is a music historian of late medieval and early modern France currently pursuing a PhD at Stanford University. His dissertation traces the movement of royal polyphony into French civic and ecclesiastical spheres in the early sixteenth century, as crises over jurisdiction and heresy reconfigured the urban media conditions of a nascent ancien régime. He has forthcoming chapters with Classiques Garnier and Brepols, and his work has been profiled on Radio France. A sometime composer and performer, Simon has been commissioned by ensembles including The New Consort and the New Juilliard Ensemble, and he has appeared with Cut Circle and the Schola de la Sainte-Chapelle. He held a 2021–22 Fulbright for research in Paris and received the 2023 Richard F. French Dissertation Prize from The Juilliard School, where he earned a DMA in composition.

Congratulations, Simon!