The Austin B. Caswell Award was established by a colleague in honor of Austin B. Caswell, a devoted teacher and longtime member of the musicology faculty at Indiana University, on the occasion of his retirement in 1996. The award is given each spring for the best paper or project created the previous year by an undergraduate for a music history course in the Jacobs School of Music. There are two awards, one for the best paper or project on a topic before 1750, and the other for the best paper or project on a topic after 1750.
Austin was born in Minneapolis, the son of Austin B. Caswell Sr. and Corice Woodruff Caswell. After graduating in 1949 from West High School in Minneapolis, Austin earned his BA in History from Amherst College in 1953 and his MA (1957) and PhD (1964) in Musicology from the University of Minnesota. He taught at the Vermont Academy and the University of Minnesota General College, then in 1966 he joined the faculty of the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University, where he was Professor of Musicology and served as Chair of the Musicology Department for several years. His research and teaching interests included vocal performance practice, music at the court of Louis XIV, women in music, popular music in America, and the New Musicology. He also taught courses on Ideas and Human Experience for the IU Honors College (1973-2006) and on Popular Music in America for IU’s Intensive Freshman Seminar program.
Austin was a lifetime choral musician. A choirboy in his youth, he later served as music director for several churches including Wayzata Community Church in Minneapolis (1961-1966) and First United Church in Bloomington (1966-1971).
Throughout his career, Austin developed a reputation among students from freshmen to graduate students as one of the most approachable professors on campus. Many students called him “my favorite professor.” In 1996, the year of his retirement, he was recognized for excellence in teaching with the All-University Herman Frederic Lieber Memorial Award.
Award Recipients and Titles of Winning Papers
| 2024 | Jack Szczuka | Soviet Musical Orientalism: The Role of the Symphonic Works of Reinhold Glière |
| 2024 | Olivia Woodrow | An Argument On the Female Musicianship and Sexual Morality of Barbara Strozzi |
| 2023 | Miles Damaso | Recording Techniques in Early Jazz and How They Helped Shape the Music |
| 2023 | Hudson Maness | The Tragedy of the Ospedali |
| 2022 | Jamey Guzman | The Accademia degli Incogniti: Roots of Misogyny in Seventeenth-Century Opera |
| 2022 | Ari Schwartz | Spanish Colonial Era Filipino Music as an Interpretive Process |
| 2021 | Keslie Pharis | The English Anthem from the Reformation to the Restoration: The balancing of Catholic and Puritanical influences in English church music |
| 2020 | Amane Machida | A computational music analysis of Handel’s two divas and their musical taste |
| 2020 | Alex Tedrow | The Brevity of Breves: A Functional Transition in the Notation of Medieval Polyphonic Music |
| 2019 | Noah Sonderling | Evil Twin: The Piano Transcription of the Große Fuge |
| 2019 | Ethan Balakrishnan | Tracing the Contenance Angloise: The Roles of Ecclesiastical Impotence, Irish Folk Music, and the University in the Development of the English Harmonic Style |
| 2018 | Joseph Wiegand | Colonization and Consolidation in New Spain |
| 2018 | William Bradley Berg | The Father of the Piano Trio |
| 2017 | Brian Curl | Byzantium and Rome: Musical Borrowing |
| 2017 | Vanessa Gehring | Haydn’s Forgotten Operas: The Influence of Residential Opera on Haydn’s Operatic Works |
| 2016 | Natalie Hart | A Comparison of the Social Implications of the Musette and the Bagpipe |
| 2016 | Grant Luhmann | The Decline of Baroque Trumpet Performance in the Eighteenth Century |
| 2015 | Michael Gebhart | Style and Eloquence in Early Tudor Melody: Towards a Rhetorical Interpretation of Motivic Repetition and Variation in the Melismatic Style of Robert Fayrfax |
| 2014 | Jessica MacLean | Spanish Missionary Music: A Method for New World Christianization |
| 2014 | Katie Minion | To Be European: Toward an Understanding of National Style in 17th-and 18th-Century French and German Organs |
| 2013 | Evita Jovic | St. Mark’s and Cori Spezzati: Polychoral Style Development in Renaissance Venice |
| 2013 | Charles D Helge | Beatrice Harrison and Jacqueline du Pré: Misrepresentation and Mythology and the Elgar Cello Concerto |
| 2012 | Grace Saunders | The Appeal of the Unexpected in Die Zauberflöte |
| 2012 | Zhizhong (Danny) Xie | Cori Spezzati in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries |
| 2011 | Kaitlyn Paradise | Kepler’s Music of the Spheres and His Astronomy |
| 2011 | Rose Fraser | A Developmental Dialogue: Common Roots and Interplay in Medieval Jewish and Arabic Music |
| 2010 | Linsey Rogers | Crossing the Line: A Stylistic Study of the Film Music and Concert Music of Miklós Rózsa |
| 2010 | Abraham Smith | Guillaume de Machaut and the Inception of the Musician-Celebrity |
| 2009 | Carol Ann Cheung | Sexuality in Lady Macbeth |
| 2009 | Clara Nieman | Rameau as Theorist and Composer |
| 2008 | Miyo Aoki | The Origins of the Ars Subtilior Style |
| 2008 | Rebecca Gabriel | Dær was hearpan sweg… or was there?. Music, Speech, and Beowolf |
| 2007 | Alyssa Yorgan | A Critical Look at Hermeneutical Analyses of Schubert’s Works |
| 2007 | Stanley Fink | An Insightful Study of Influences on Ottaviano Petrucci |
| 2006 | Ross Crane | On the Evolution of Style: The Trouvere Tradition and Guillaume de Machaut |
| 2005 | Dena Borman | Voice of Steve Reich in the Third Movement of Different Trains |
| 2005 | Ben Syversen | Aristoxenus’ Spatial Conception of Music |
| 2004 | Liam Byrne | Marin Marais’s Influence on French Accompanimental Style |
| 2004 | Drew Massey | The Piano as Proving Ground in the Music of John Cage, 1940-1951 |
| 2003 | Leanne Dodge | Spectacle, Humanism, and Patronage: Claudio Monteverdi’s Orfeo and Arianna as Political Tools of Vincenzo Gonzaga |
| 2003 | Maria del Carmen Espinosa | The Influence of the Argentinian Context in Alberto Ginastera’s ‘Objective Nationalism’ (1937-1947) through the Analysis of Danzas Argentinas |
| 2002 | Justin Hoffman | Ockeghem’s Missa Cuiusvis Toni, Tinctoris, and Choirboys: A Fifteenth-Century Catholicon Mass in Theory and Practice |
| 2002 | Jeffrey Litman | The Marriage of Music and Poetry in Leonard Bernstein’s: The Age of Anxiety Symphony Number Two For Piano and Orchestra after W.H. Auden |
| 2001 | Julia Dolken | An Ancient Partnership Renewed: The Historical Relationship Between Music and Medicine |
| 2001 | William Quillen | The Aesthetics of Otherness: Eighteenth-Century European Exoticism as Expressed in Mozart’s Turquerie |
| 2000 | Jennifer E. Borhart | Olivier Messiaen: Musical Philosopher |
| 2000 | Matthew Van Brink | Salomone’s Sacred Style Reading Rossi Rhetorically |
| 1999 | Brian P. Harlow | William Byrd: Master of Text and Music |
| 1999 | Teddie Hwang | Parallels in the Artistic Style of Arnold Schoenberg and Wassily Kandinsky |
| 1998 | Rebecca Powell | The Music of the Spheres and its Effects in Renaissance Musical Thought |
| 1998 | Cory Smythe | The Girl with the Flaxen Toupee: Simulated Sex and the Decadent Aesthetic in the Music of Claude Debussy |