LIBER receives the 2009 Noah Greenberg Award!
LIBER accepted the Noah Greenberg Award from the American Musicological Society in a Nov. 14 ceremony in Philadelphia.
The annual award, consisting of $2,000 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.
The project will produce new editions and a commercial recording of previously unrecorded pieces of the trecento repertoire based on texts by identifiable poets.
"It is wonderful to have our project recognized with such a prestigious award. I'm truly grateful for this honor," said Wiliam Hudson (co-director of LIBER). "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 Distinguished 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.
Recent Review in Gramophone magazine
Our performance of the song cycle Solsange by American composer Lansing McLoskey has received a rave review in the annual "Awards issue" of Gramophone magazine (October '08). We recorded this piece a few years ago, and it was recently released on Lansing's debut album sixthspecies on Albany Records.
Solsange ("Sunsongs") are three vocal settings written to the composer's own Danish poems, penned while McLoskey was living in Copenhagen. The canonic first setting manages to suggest medieval music yet possesses a subtle 21st-century harmonic edge and the increasingly dense polyphony shines with the extraordinary bell-like soprano of Melanie Germond [of Liber unUsualis]. The central, more chant-like setting is striking in maintaining a communicative simplicity despite the chromatic complexity, while the concluding "Hymne" offers elaborate solo lines in "a sort of organum in 21st-century St. Martial style". This is difficult music but quite beautiful in its melding of old and new, and the most compelling work on the disc. — GRAMOPHONE
In this featured review, Gramophone called Lansing's compositions "smart, compelling and fascinating music...a bracing sampler from an engaging, greatly gifted composer I hope to hear more from." Congratulations Lansing!
You can buy sixthspecies directly from Albany Records or from Amazon.com
Click here to listen to an excerpt
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