I am beyond delighted to receive the Otto Kinkeldey Award from the American Musicological Society. I wish to thank the committee for this signal honour, and also my wonderful Cambridge University Press editor Kate Brett for taking an unexpected punt on a work of Indian music history. I am hoping this award will encourage others to write more and better global histories of music.
Professor Katherine Butler Schofield, Professor of South Asian Music and History, Head of the Department of Music
13 November 2025
Professor Katherine Schofield wins the 2025 Otto Kinkeldey Award
Professor Katherine Butler Schofield receives the Otto Kinkeldey Award for her book on music and musicians of the late Mughal period.
Professor Katherine Butler Schofield is the 2025 recipient of the American Musicological Society’s prestigious Otto Kinkeldey Award for her book Music and Musicians in Late Mughal India: Histories of the Ephemeral, 1748–1858 (Cambridge University Press, 2024).
Professor Katherine Schofield is a historian of music and listening in Mughal India and the paracolonial Indian Ocean. Working with Persian, Urdu, and visual sources for elite musical culture in North India and the Deccan c.1570–1860, her research interests lie in South Asian music, visual art, and cinema; the history of Mughal India; Islam and Sufism; empire and the paracolonial; music and musicians at risk; and the intersecting histories of the emotions, the senses, aesthetics, ethics, and the supernatural.
Music and Musicians in Late Mughal India, published by Cambridge University Press, draws on an extensive and largely unexplored archive of Indian writings and visual materials, offering the first comprehensive history of music and musicians in late Mughal India circa 1748–1858. In it, the lives of nine musicians are introduced as entry points into six prominent types of writing on music in Persian, Brajbhasha, Urdu and English, moving from Delhi to Lucknow, Hyderabad, Jaipur and among the British.
In the book, Professor Schofield addresses the central philosophical question: can we ever recapture the experience of music after the performance ends?
Based on exhaustive archival research and demonstrating the author’s astonishing linguistic and historical expertise, the book tells the little-known stories of nine Hindustani musicians in the fraught years of late Mughal India. Staged between a waning musical culture of classical court music and the dislocations of an encroaching British rule only slowly coming into view, a series of poignant stories unfold telling of court intrigues, musical rivalries, and colonial usurpation. But there are also heartening stories of heroic efforts by Hindustani musicians to remember, record, and memorialize the history of their musical legacy, to codify and theorize their musical practice reconceived for a new era.
American Musicological Society
Katherine Schofield’s research reveals a rich and little-studied archive of materials – musical, textual, and visual – which shows how the musicians of Mughal India responded to British rule. It draws together the lives of musicians, the material history of musical records, and a deeply philosophical interrogation of how we can analyse ephemeral experience. This prestigious award for her book, Music and Musicians in Late Mughal India: Histories of the Ephemeral, 1748–1858, demonstrates the importance of this work in our understanding of music, history, and culture.
Dr Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, Vice Dean for Research, Arts and Humanities (Interim)
The Otto Kinkeldey Award, awarded each year by the American Musicological Society, honours outstanding books on music by scholars beyond the early career stages.
The award is named after Otto Kinkeldey, Honorary President of the Society until his death in 1966. The Kinkeldey Award was first awarded in 1967.
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Professor of South Asian Music and History
Reader in Early Modern Literature