UO music theory professor Jack Boss has been awarded the 2015 Wallace Berry Award, the top national book award for music theory and analysis, for his book “Schoenberg's Twelve-Tone Music: Symmetry and the Musical Idea.”

“I am deeply honored — not to mention a little amazed — to receive this year’s Wallace Berry Award,” Boss said. “This is a culmination of many years of hard work, and I thank my colleagues and the school’s dean, Brad Foley, for their support through the process.”

Cambridge University Press published “Schoenberg's Twelve-Tone Music” in 2014. In the book, Boss adapts the controversial composer's notion of a “musical idea” — broken down into problem, elaboration, solution — as a framework for the book as a whole, and focuses on the large-scale coherence of the Schoenberg's individual pieces.

The annual Wallace Berry Award is presented each year at the Society for Music Theory conference in recognition of a distinguished book by an author of any age or career stage. This year’s conference took place in St. Louis, Missouri.

For the full story, see “Boss Wins Top Music Theory Award” on the School of Music and Dance website.