Paul Horsley has received the Kansas City Musical Club’s 2025 Annual Award, given each year to someone who has made “many outstanding contributions to the cultural life of the Kansas City Metropolitan Area.”
For more than a quarter century, Paul has been a leading advocate of music, theater, and dance in the city—effected through thousands of feature articles, editorials, performance reviews, and news stories about arts groups large and small. For a decade he also provided extensive coverage of the planning, construction, and completion of the Kaufmann Center for the Performing Arts—first for The Kansas City Star and later for The Independent.
This is the first time the Annual Award has gone to a critic. The Musical Club’s president, Susan Klankey, presented the award at a ceremony on May 5th at Asbury United Methodist Church, which also included a recital of Chopin, Ravel, and Prokofiev by the internationally renowned pianist Ilya Shmukler.
The Musical Club, which was established in 1899 (the same year as The Independent), is one the oldest and most distinguished music clubs in the Midwest.
Previous recipients of Club’s Annual Award include Russell Patterson, Patricia McIlrath, Richard Harriman, Tatiana Dukoudovska, Tiberius Klausner, Cynthia Siebert, Eph Ehly, Richard Cass, Bruce Sorrell, Shirley & Barnett Helzberg, Jean Belmont, Don Dagenais, Brian Steele, John Schaefer, John Obetz, Merton Schatzkin, Evan Luskin, Jan Kraybill, Stanislav Ioudenitch, Charles Bruffy, Richard Williams, Arnold Eply, Alex Shum, Elizabeth Suh-Lane, and Lolita Lisovskaya-Sayevich.
Paul studied journalism and piano performance and, early in life, performed extensively as pianist. He earned his PhD in musicology from Cornell University and taught music history at Cornell, Louisiana State University, and Park University. He also studied in the United States and abroad on fellowships from the Fulbright, Newberry, and D.A.A.D Foundations.
In 1992, he was named full-time program annotator and musicologist for the Philadelphia Orchestra; in 2000 he decided to move to Kansas City to become the music and dance critic for the Star.
Since 2008, he has served as performing arts editor for The Independent, where he continues to cover music, theater, dance, arts philanthropy, and other topics. He has written for Symphony, Dance Magazine, Musical America, The New York Times, Playbill, and many other publications.
For more information on the Award, go to kcmusicalclub.org.
