Carla Shapreau awarded Palisca Award for the digital edition of looted music manuscript

Carla Shapreau, a faculty member at Berkeley Law whose research involves the Nazi-era plunder of musical cultural property and the restitution of those possessions, a senior fellow in the Institute of European Studies and a curator at the Department of Music, as well as a member of the Magnes Working Group on Mapping Diasporas, is the recipient with two co-authors of this year’s Claude V. Palisca Award of the American Musicological Society announced this week.

The award recognizes outstanding scholarly editions or translations in the field of musicology published during the previous year. Shapreau received for the Ferrell-Vogüé Machaut Manuscript, published by the University of Oxford’s Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music, reconstructs the long history of the manuscript, a rare work by Guillaume de Machaut, a medieval French poet and scholar.

The manuscript was confiscated by the Nazis from its owner, Georges Wildenstein, in Paris on Oct. 30, 1940, and shipped to Germany. Later, it was taken to the German countryside for safekeeping. In the summer of 1945, the U.S. Army discovered this 14th century musical, literary and artistic work hidden in a Bavarian monastery, and in 1949 it was returned to its true owner.