I was extremely honored to receive the Outstanding Emerging Researcher Award, presented by the Center for Music Education Research at the Suncoast Music Education Research Symposium at the University of South Florida. I was particularly moved after hearing the exemplary papers of the conference, many of which will find an audience through a book Clint Randles is editing.

The plaque resides on my shelf at the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, where I am a Faculty Fellow at work on a related book.

[Edit: My paper, The Shifting Locus of Musical Experience from Performance to Recording to New Media: Some Implications for Music Education has been published. For the conference, I prepared brief remarks, drawing on my paper to set up a discussion, and for those interested in the basics of my paper I have posted those remarks on IDEALS.

For those considering attending the next SMERS Conference (2015), may I leave you with two images that capture a sense of the fun to be had: the first is of an iPad jam that went on during the third evening (a multimedia piece that included an audience countdown and a painter whose painting of the ensemble served as part of the composition), the second is of the analog jam that went on late into the evening.

Finally, here’s a detail shot of the award, and of two tweets I want to remember: