The Jerome Roche Prize is awarded annually by the RMA for a distinguished article by a scholar in the early stages of their career.

The Roche Prize for 2024 is awarded to Giles Masters for his article ‘Mimetic Mechanicity: The Iron Foundry and Vernacular Internationalism in the 1930s’, in Twentieth-Century Music 21, no. 1, 74–109. The article undertakes an in-depth examination of Soviet composer Aleksandr Mosolov’s popular work the Iron Foundry, piecing together its international performance and reception history to explore concert music’s relationships with modernity, politics, and mass entertainment with respect to ‘machine aesthetics’. The panel commended the article’s engaging style, the originality of the findings and the rigour of the underpinning research.

Giles Masters is a Fellow by Examination (postdoctoral researcher) at Magdalen College, University of Oxford, following a postdoctoral research assistant post at the University of Nottingham. He completed his PhD at King’s College London with a thesis entitled New-Music Internationalism: The ISCM Festival, 1922–1939.

Jacob Olley receives an Honourable Mention for his article ‘Evliya’s Song: Listening to the Early Modern Ottoman Court’ in Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 76, Number 3, pp. 645–703. The article discusses the relationship between music, sound, writing, and power in the early modern Ottoman Empire. The panel was impressed by the ambitious approach which ensured the significance of this article beyond its immediate subject.

Jacob Olley is Research Associate in the Faculty of Music, University of Cambridge following postdoctoral posts at Cambridge and the University of Münster. He completed his PhD at King’s College London with a thesis entitled Writing Music in Nineteenth-Century Istanbul: Ottoman Armenians and the Invention of Hampartsum Notation.