Michael Noone
Professor
Biography
Michael Noone’s career as both music scholar and choral director has taken him to teaching, research, and performance posts at universities in five countries on four continents. He was educated at St Ignatius’ College , Riverview, before going on to the University of Sydney and King’s College, Cambridge . He has served as Chair of Musicology at the Australian National University’s School of Music and Chair of Music at the University of Hong Kong . Michael has recorded 28 CDs for the Glossa and ABC Classics labels with such groups as the Orchestra of the Renaissance, the Sydney Chamber Choir, and the Song Company. In 2001 he founded, with singer Warren Trevelyan-Jones, the London-based Ensemble Plus Ultra for the specific purpose of performing the Spanish music that is the subject of his research. The Ensemble’s CDs have received high praise from critics (WGBH named one among the Top Ten Classical CDs of 2007 and another was awarded the Prelude Classical Award for 2008), and their performances at the most prestigious international festivals, especially in Europe and the UK, are consistently acclaimed. In 2011 the Ensemble released a boxed set of ten CDs of sacred music by the great Spanish Renaissance priest-composer Tomás Luis de Victoria in celebration of the 400th anniversary of the composer’s death. Victoria was educated at the German College in Rome where he later became a teacher. Victoria was the first of a long line of great composers whose association with the Society of Jesus was decisive for the history of Western Music. The Boston Globe named the Victoria CDs among the “season’s best new box sets” for 2011 as did Britain’s Guardian newspaper. Similar accolades emerged from the San Francisco Chronicle and the Philadelphia Inquirer and the CDs won the 2012 Gramophone Awards. Michael counts among his awards a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of New South Wales , a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship at Cornell University , a research fellowship at the Fundación Valparaíso in Spain, a research fellowship at Cornell’s Society for the Humanities and a fellowship at Boston College’s Jesuit Institute . At the University of Hong Kong he received an Outstanding Young Researcher Award and in 2006 he was honored by His Majesty Juan Carlos I for his contribution to Spanish music through publications, concerts and recordings. He is a member of Spain’s Real Academia de Bellas Artes y Ciencias Históricas de Toledo . Scholarly articles by Michael Noone have been published in Early Music, Revista de Musicología, Anuario Musical, Memoria ecclesiae , Cuadernos abulenses , Reales Sitios, Scherzo, Musicology Australia, Goldberg, and Notes. Noone’s first book, Music and musicians in the Escorial liturgy under the Habsburgs, 1563—1700 , was hailed as “trailblazing’ and his Códice 25 de la Catedral de Toledo (described as ‘spectacular’ by Robert Stevenson) presented innovative codicological work that unveiled hitherto unknown works by Morales, Guerrero, Lobo and many other leading composers of Spain’s Golden Age. Professor Noone’s research focuses on Early Modern sacred music, with a special emphasis on Spain and Latin America; he is passionate about the interrelationship of music scholarship and performance, and is deeply concerned with the complex issues raised when music of the past is performed in the present. Michael will spend the 25/26 academic year as a member of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study .