The International Gustav Mahler Society awards the 2025 Young Scholars Award for Gustav Mahler Research, as proposed by the selection committee on August 29, 2025, and approved by the board on September 4, 2025, to
Justin Gregg (Columbia University)
for his submitted dissertation
“Mahler, Politicized: Musical Diplomacy and Internationalism in the 1920 Amsterdam Mahler Festival,” PhD diss. Columbia University, 2024.
This outstanding and highly readable work is the first to examine in detail the historical and discursive contexts of the 1920 Mahler Festival in Amsterdam. Using research methods from festival studies, it sheds light on the political dimension of the event after the end of the First World War. The festival’s publications, in particular Rudolf Mengelberg’s program book, are discussed in detail in the spirit of close reading and convincingly placed in the context of earlier literature on Mahler, with a particular focus on the narrative of Mahler as a Jewish, German, and international composer. The evaluation of previously unknown or little-considered sources and the extensive analysis of historical sources results in a valuable contribution to Mahler research and defines a new state of research.
Justin Gregg is a Lecturer in Music at Columbia University in New York, where he received his PhD in Historical Musicology in 2024. In his dissertation, he analyzed the 1920 Amsterdam Mahler Festival not only as a major musical gathering, but also as an event with real political and diplomatic goals shortly after the First World War. He is broadly interested in the reception of Mahler’s music throughout the twentieth century, and has presented his work at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society and the first international symposium of the Wissenschaftszentrum Gustav Mahler, among other conferences. In addition to Columbia, he has taught courses in musicology at the University of Hartford and the University of Delaware.