IASPM Canada 2024 Book Prize Winners

On behalf of the selection committee, we are nominating two equally brilliant manuscripts as co-winners of the 2024 IASPM Canada Book Prize. According to the committee, both manuscripts show “excellence” in the study of Canadian popular music and are therefore deserving of the prize. 

 The two monographs are: 

Disaster Songs as Intangible Memorials in Atlantic Canada by Heather Sparling 

Sonic Sovereignty: Hip Hop, Indigeneity, and Shifting Popular Music Mainstreams by Liz Przybylski 

Based on in-depth, long term, and extensive archival research and interviews, Disaster Songs as Intangible Memorials in Atlantic Canada by ethnomusicologist Heather Sparling engages with over 600 songs from unknown to famous contemporary artists relating to Atlantic Canada disasters from 1891 until the present. 

Sparling explains how those disaster songs are the intangible equivalent of vernacular memorials, defined as mementos that may emerge spontaneously in the hours of and days after a high-profile tragedy. In the case of Atlantic Canada, these unexpected tragedies are most often characterized by mining, maritime, and airlines. Sparling sheds a unique and fascinating light on those intangible memorials that have often attracted less attention than other forms of visible mementos such as ceremonies, monuments, flowers, and candles. In looking at “disaster songs” Sparling allows for an enlightening and unique exploration of how songwriting is a key everyday heuristics tool adopted by communities in grief to memorialize painful events. 

The website (www.disastersongs.ca) meaningfully complements the book with audio-visuals, updates about the research and additional songs and resources. 

Sonic Sovereignty: Hip Hop, Indigeneity, and Shifting Popular Music Mainstreams by Liz Przybylski is a timely contribution to the decolonial project in social sciences and music studies, among others, in giving voice to contemporary Indigenous musicians in Canada and the United States. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, which consisted in following musicians and producers, as well as participatory research, Przybylski proposes a relational form of audibility in which close moments of listening can move a listener out of normative time. One of the most notable contributions made by Przybylski, in addition to her examination of the online-offline divide in media spaces of production and distribution, is the concept of sonic sovereignty which connects self-definition, collective determination and Indigenous land rematriation with the effects of long-term expressive culture. 

In placing sound at the center of Indigenous sovereignty, Przybylski expresses the need to recognize sound and silence as critical to self-determination. Who can listen, and what, who has the chance to participate and not, are tied to how individuals and groups can express power. Sonic Sovereignty shows rigorous scholarship written in an accessible and engaging narrative.