Eric Rice, PhD

Assistant Professor of Music (History)

(860) 486-2482
Eric.Rice@uconn.edu
Personal website: http://web.uconn.edu/erice

Eric Rice is an active scholar, performer, and advocate of early music. He serves as assistant professor of music history and director of the Collegium Musicum at the University of Connecticut and as artistic director of the Connecticut Early Music Festival. He holds a doctorate in musicology and a certificate in medieval and Renaissance studies from Columbia University. A specialist in music of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, in his scholarship he focuses primarily on music of the Western liturgy and its relationship to architecture, politics, and secular music. As music director and tenor in the Boston-based period vocal ensemble Exsultemus from 2003 to 2009, he developed several concert programs involving liturgical reconstructions based on his research. The ensemble performed these to great acclaim in the U.S., Belgium, and Germany, and his solo performances of plainchant were hailed as "expertly rendered" by Goldberg Magazine.

Rice has presented his research at national and international conferences in musicology and medieval studies, and his publications have appeared in Current Musicology, the Journal of Musicological Research, the Revue de Musicologie, and Viator. He has received fellowships from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to pursue archival research at churches in Aachen, Germany, and in Paris. He is the co-editor of Young Choristers, 650-1700 (Boydell & Brewer, 2008), the first scholarly volume dedicated to the history of professional child singers. Current projects include Music and Ritual at Charlemagne's Marienkirche in Aachen, a monograph to be published by Merseburger Verlag, Kassel, Germany, and an article on Spanish identity in the music of Tomás Luis de Victoria.

Selected Publications

Young Choristers, 650 – 1700, ed. Susan Boynton and Eric Rice, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Music 7, Boydell and Brewer, Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK, 2008

“Two Liturgical Responses to the Protestant Reformation at the Collegiate Church of Saint Mary in Aachen, 1570 – 1580,” Viator 38.2 (2007), 291 – 318

“Canonic Technique in a L'homme armé Mass by Pierre de la Rue (?)” in Canons and Canonic Techniques, 14th – 16th Centuries: Theory, Practice, and Reception History. Proceedings of the International Conference, Leuven, 4 – 6 October 2005, edited by Katelijne Schiltz and Bonnie J. Blackburn (Analysis in Context. Leuven Studies in Musicology, 1; Leuven-Dudley: Peeters Publishers, 2007), 125 – 140

Book review: Singing Early Music — The Pronunciation of European Languages in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Timothy McGee et al., Current Musicology 64 (2001): 159 – 168

“Zur Musik und Musikpraxis für das Karlsfest im Aachener Dom” in Federstrich: liturgische Handschriften der ehemaligen Stiftsbibliothek (Aachen: Domkapitel Aachen, 2000): 45 – 55

“Representations of Janissary Music (Mehter) as Musical Exoticism in Western Compositions, 1670 – 1824,” Journal of Musicological Research 19 (1999): 41 – 88

“Tradition and Imitation in Pierre Certon’s Déploration for Claudin de Sermisy,” Revue de Musicologie 85/1 (1999): 29 – 62