The Philip Brett Award, sponsored by the LGBTQ Study Group, each year honors exceptional musicological work in the field of lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender/transsexual studies complete during the previous two academic years (ending June 30), in any country and in any language. By "work" is meant a published article, book, edition, annotated translation, conference paper or other scholarly effort accepted by the award committee that best exemplifies the highest qualities of originality, interpretation, theory and communication in this field of study.

The award is named in recognition of the signal, ground-breaking publications of Professor Philip Brett, who is also one of our founders. See his memorial website.

The award consists of the sum of $500 (US) and a certificate, and will be announced at the Annual Meeting of the AMS and conferred at the annual meeting of the LGBTQ Study Group. The committee will entertain nominations from any individual, and scholars are encouraged to nominate their own work. Individuals may receive the work on more than one occasion.

Nominations should include the name of the scholar, a description of the work, and a statement to the effect that the work was completed during the previous two academic years. By "completion" is meant the publication or commitment to publish from an editor in the case of articles, books, editions, etc.; delivery at a conference of the like in the case of a paper.

Past winners include:

• 2004: Ruth Sara Longobardi, "Music as Subtext; Reading between the Lines," from "Models and Modes of Musical Representation in Benjamin Britten's Death in Venice: Musical, Historical, and Ideological Contexts" (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University)
• 2003: Boden Sandstrom, documentary film Radical Harmonies
• 2002: Sophie Fuller and Lloyd Whitesell, eds., Queer Episodes in Music and Modern Modernity (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002)
• 2001: Bruce Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture (Stanford, CA; Stanford Univeristy Press 2001)
• 2000: Byron Adams, "The 'Dark Saying' of the Enigma: Homoeroticism and the Elgarian Paradox," Nineteenth Century Music 23(2000), 218-235; and "No Armpits, Please, We're British': Whitman and English Music, 1884-1936," in Walt Whitman and Modern Music: War, Desire and the Trials of Nationhood, ed. Lawrence kramer (New York: Garland, 2000) 25-42
• 1999: Martha Mockus, "Sounding Out: Lesbian Feminism and the Music of Pauline Oliveros" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1999)
• 1998: Gillian Rodger, "Male Impersonation on the North American Variety and Vaudeville Stage, 1868-1930" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, 1998)
• 1997: Elizabeth Wood, "Decomposition" in Decomposition: Post-Disciplinary Performance, edited by Sue-Ellen Case, Philip Brett, and Susan Leigh Foster (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000) and "The Lesbian in the Opera: Desire Unmasked in Smyth's Fantasio and Fete Galante, in En travesti: Women, Gender Subversion, Opera, edited by Corinne E. Blackmer and Patricia Juliana Smith (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).