The 2003 Kurt Weill Prize has been awarded to W. Anthony Sheppard’s book Revealing Masks: Exotic Influences and Ritualized Performance in Modernist Music Theater (2001, University of California Press). Citing the work of twentieth-century composers such as Stravinsky, Britten, and Honegger, Sheppard investigates their use of Japanese Noh, medieval Christian drama, and ancient Greek theater as models for the creation of “total theater.” Sheppard receives a prize award of $2500. The prize panel also singled out Anthony Shay’s Choreographic Politics: State Folk Dance Companies, Representation and Power (2002, Wesleyan University Press) for honorable mention in the book category. In the article category, the $500 prizewinner was Alan Lareau’s “Jonny’s Jazz: From Kabarett to Krenek,” which appeared in Jazz & the Germans: Essays on the Influence of “Hot” American Idioms on 20th-Century German Music (2002, Pendragon Press).

The Kurt Weill Prize is awarded biennially for distinguished scholarship on twentieth-century musical theater. The four-member selection panel consists of representatives from the Modern Language Association, the American Musicological Society, the American Society for Theatre Research, and the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music. Scholarly work first published in 2003 and 2004 may be nominated for the 2005 book and article prizes. Nominations, including five copies of the nominated work and contact information for the author, must be received by 30 April 2005 at the offices of the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music, 7 East 20th Street, New York, NY 10003.