Thursday, November 26, 2009

Doctoral Student receives award for research on medieval music


William Hudson, doctoral voice student at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music's Early Music Institute, received the Noah Greenberg Award from the American Musicological Society in a ceremony earlier this month

The annual award, consisting of $2,000 and a certificate, is intended as a grant-in-aid to stimulate active cooperation between scholars and performers by recognizing and fostering outstanding contributions to historical performing practices.

Hudson's project will produce a commercial recording of previously unrecorded pieces of the trecento repertoire based on texts by identifiable poets, performed by the medieval vocal ensemble Liber: Ensemble for Early Music. The ensemble consists of tenor Hudson and soprano Melanie Germond, a voice teacher at Cochise College in Bisbee, Arizona.

"It is wonderful to have our project recognized with such a prestigious award. I'm truly grateful for this honor," said Hudson. "Because the trecento repertoire is under-represented in both classical music recording and Italian literature studies, my hope is that the Greenberg award will bring attention to our recording, thereby raising awareness and stimulating discussion of both areas."

With the assistance of Indiana University Professor of Musicology Thomas Mathiesen and Professor Margaret Bent of All Souls College, University of Oxford, Hudson will prepare new or revised transcriptions for the performance. H. Wayne Storey, IU professor of Italian and an expert on medieval Italian poetry, will serve as a consultant on the texts.

For more information about the Jacobs School of Music and the Early Music Institute, see http://www.music.indiana.edu.

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