Dr. Nancy Newman Honored by the International Alliance for Women Musicians

The International Alliance for Women Musicians selected Dr. Nancy Newman (Professor of Music & Theater & Joint WGSS Faculty member) for a prestigious award. Her article, “#AlmaToo: The Art of Being Believed,” received the 2024 IAWM Pauline Alderman Award for Outstanding Scholarship. Congratulations Dr. Newman!

An IAWM press release noted that in the "compelling article," Dr. Nancy Newman reexamines Alma Mahler-Werfel’s account of her marriage to Gustav Mahler through the lens of the #MeToo Movement. Drawing on Alma’s personal writings from the 1920s to 1950s alongside later biographical interpretations, Newman explores how evolving gender politics have shaped scholarly narratives about Alma’s life and legacy.

The article critiques the persistent undermining of Alma’s voice in twentieth-century musicology and exposes the misogynistic biases that have long influenced academic discourse. Newman argues that assessments of Alma often hinge on moral judgments rather than a nuanced understanding of her constrained role as wife and mother within the patriarchal structures of Viennese society. Her analysis interrogates the power imbalance in Alma’s first marriage and reframes discussions of consent and gender expectations in historical context.

IAWM adjudicators praised the article as “outstanding,” citing its “well-sharpened authorial wit” and “timely and ever-relevant” critique of entrenched misogyny in music scholarship. One adjudicator described the work as “frankly revelatory,” noting its success in “disillusioning the power dynamic between Gustav and Alma, dispelling the myth of their marriage state.” Another remarked, “In this time where the events Alma chronicled are being reproduced, scholarship of this caliber is exactly what we all should be reading.”

Dr. Nancy Newman is Professor of Music and Joint Faculty in the Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University at Albany–SUNY. She is the author of Songs and Sounds of the Anti-Rent Movement in Upstate New York (SUNY Press, 2025), and Good Music for a Free People (University of Rochester Press, 2010). Her scholarship on the Germania Musical Society and 19th-century concert life has been featured in American Orchestras in the Nineteenth Century and in a 2014 Library of Congress talk co-sponsored by the American Musicological Society. Her current research on the Chicago Musical College is supported by a Rudolph Ganz Fellowship and the NEH Summer Institute at the Newberry Library. A semi-active pianist, she is also arranging accordion renditions of Anti-Rent tunes for regional audiences.