Mauro Calcagno, an associate professor in musicology in Stony Brook’s Department of Music, has been awarded a three-year grant of $125,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) as the Principal Investigator for the project “Online Edition of the Secular Music of Luca Marenzio” (see www.marenzio.org). The project is the only one awarded to a Stony Brook faculty member from a pool of 249 projects funded with $40 million announced on July 27, 2011, by the NEH.
“The NEH grants awarded today,” said NEH Chair Jim Leach, “promote new areas of research and make the breadth of human experience more understandable and knowledge, more accessible than ever.”
In leading the NEH project, funded within the Scholarly Editions and Translations program, Calcagno is joined by Professor Giuseppe Gerbino of Columbia University as co-PI, and by an Editorial Board including scholars from the United States, Switzerland, and Italy. The goal of the project, which Calcagno started in 2004, is to make available, for the first time, a complete critical edition of the secular music of composer Luca Marenzio (ca. 1553-1599).
Marenzio was a central figure of the late Renaissance whose output had a substantial impact on early modern European culture, especially in England. He was the first composer whose secular works were published in a set of Complete Works during his lifetime. By integrating musical philology with digital technology in unprecedented ways, the online edition funded by the NEH will introduce a new model for both producing and disseminating editions of music repertoires of the Western tradition through collaborative work. Scholars and musicians will be able to study and sing Marenzio’s music from portable devices like iPads, and to download it for free from the Internet.
A substantial contribution to the project has been provided, and will continue to be offered, by the Stony Brook Music Library, directed by Gisele Schierhorst. Funding has also been provided by the FAHSS initiative (Faculty in the Arts, Humanities and lettered Social Sciences). The project will be supported by the Office of the Vice President for Research, the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and by the Office of the Provost. Columbia University will also make available numerous resources, for example its portal for Digital Collections.
Marenzio’s is the only single-author complete music edition that the NEH has funded after those of William Byrd and Giuseppe Verdi. Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the NEH supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation.
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