Derek Allen Prize
2025 Winner: Professor Owen Wright
Professor Owen Wright is awarded the 2025 Derek Allen Prize.
Since the 1970s Owen Wright has specialised in the music and historical musicology of the Middle East, producing seven field-defining monographs and numerous book chapters and articles. He has contributed to a fundamental transformation of musicology, by transcending boundaries between ethnomusicology, historical musicology, music theory, and analysis.
Over a long research career, Wright has constructed successive arches of this bridge through editions, translations, commentaries and interpretive surveys of the major sources for music history and theory in Arabic, Persian and Turkish, addressing enormous gaps in our understanding of these traditions.
He took his first degree in French (at Leicester University) and a second BA in Arabic at SOAS University of London, where he also completed his PhD and pursued his academic career.
He was appointed Lecturer in Arabic, then Reader in Arabic and finally Professor of Musicology of the Middle East and was at various times Head of the Department of the Near and Middle East and Chair of the Centre of Music Studies.
His research concentrates on the historical development of the art-music traditions of the Islamic Near and Middle East, with at its core an engagement with both the theoretical literature, initially in Arabic and subsequently also in Persian and Turkish, and the extant documentation of practice as recorded in notations and song-text collections.
A Festschrift for him appeared in 2018: 'Theory and Practice in the Music of the Islamic World', edited by Rachel Harris and Martin Stokes, Routledge.
His recent publications include:
- 'The Ottoman classical repertoire in historical perspective'. Abingdon and New York: Routledge (in press 2025)
- ‘The modal road: Bokhara – Baghdad – Cairo’, Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Arabisch-Islamischen Wissenschaften 2024.
- ‘Persian perspectives: Chardin, Kaempfer and De la Borde,’ Rast Musicology Journal, Special Issue 2019/7(2): 2050-83.
- Music theory in the Safavid age. The taqsīm al-naġamāt wa-bayān al-daraj wa-’l-šu‘ab wa-’l-maqāmāt.' Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2019.
- ‘The peregrinations of panjgāh’, Annali di Ca’ Foscari 55, 2019: 73-119.
- ‘Bridging the Safavid-Ottoman divide’, in Reinhard Strohm (ed.), 'The music road. Coherence and diversity in music from the Mediterranean to India' (Proceedings of the British Academy 233), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019, pp. 168-93. [Persian tr. in Māhūr 80, 2018: 35-68.]
- ‘The Ottoman usul system and its precursors’, in Zeynep Helvacı, Jacob Olley and Ralf Martin Jaeger (eds.), Rhythmic Cycles and Structures in the Art Music of the Middle East, Würzburg, Ergon Verlag, 2017, pp. 31-48.
- ‘Amīr Ḫān Gurjī and Safavid-Ottoman usul parallels’, idem., pp. 49-68.
"My first reaction to the award of the Derek Allen's prize was one of bafflement: having worked in what I always regarded as a somewhat secluded niche area, I had never expected to be singled out for attention in this way.
"I am honoured to be selected, and thank the committee; and I am also delighted that the award points to a recognition of the presence of the Near and Middle East within the wider world of historical musicology. I regard it on the one hand as recognizing, by implication, the achievements the several predecessors and contemporaries to whose work I am indebted and, on the other, as providing encouragement to the several able younger researchers in the field to continue to build upon existing scholarship and develop it further."
- Owen Wright, August 2025.
Previous winners
History of the prize
The award commemorates Derek Fortrose Allen (1910-1975), elected a Fellow in 1963, who served from 1969 to 1973 as Secretary of the Academy and from then until his death as Treasurer. It was founded in 1976 by his widow, Mrs Winifred Allen, and her sons to provide an award in one of three academic fields in which Mr Allen had particular interest. The prize was first awarded in 1977.