Music professor wins the celebrated Otto Kinkeldey Award for 2019

Professor Laurie Stras was selected for the award, bestowed by the American Musicological Society, for her acclaimed book, ‘Women and Music in 16th Century Ferrara’

A DARK, dramatic and large-scale masterpiece by one of the most important composers of the Renaissance has been rediscovered and reconstructed by a University of Huddersfield professor.  She has now recorded it with the professional choir of female singers that she co-directs and the disc has swiftly earned critical acclaim.

Also, Professor Laurie Stras has received an important U.S. award for her book on women musicians in Italy during the 1500s.  Judges described it as ground-breaking and inspirational.

During her researches among musical manuscripts in Florence from the mid-16th century, Professor Stras concluded that an unattributed work in one of them contained the full version of a set of Lamentations for Good Friday composed by Antoine Brumel, a renowned composer who was active in the earlier 1500s.

A much-curtailed version also appears in another Florentine choirbook of the same period.  In this manuscript, Brumel is given as the composer, so Professor Stras realised that he was also responsible for the full set of Lamentations she had encountered.  When she transcribed the work for its first modern performances she discovered its dramatic structure and sheer scale.  A full performance lasts for 45 minutes.

Professor Stras co-directs the leading choir Musica Secreta, and the ensemble devoted three days to recording Brumel’s rediscovered work, alongside other works from a manuscript by the same scribe that was made for a sixteenth-century Florentine convent.

“It was only when we started to perform the piece that the dramatic structure started to reveal itself,” says Professor Stras.  She compares the rescue of this “exquisite” music from posterity to “bringing it from darkness into light” or “helping it break the surface after years of being submerged”.

She provides an account of her research in the booklet note that accompanies the new recording, titled From Darkness Into Light.  The Musica Secreta website also has a detailed essay from Professor Stras.

The disc was released at the start of November and quickly attracted attention.  A review by the influential Opera Today describes the project as “a compelling fusion of scholarship, instinct, creativity and hypothesis”, adding that “this is a recording that will delight scholars and laymen, theorists and practitioners alike.”

The Otto Kinkeldey Award

Musica Secreta have begun to give live performances of the Lamentations, and the schedule includes a concert at the University of Huddersfield on 9 March, 2020.  Professor Stras has also collaborated on a short documentary film describing her researches and featuring the manuscripts in which she made her discoveries, plus location shooting in Florence.  This can be seen on the Musica Secreta website.

The acclaim surrounding the new recording comes at the same time as an announcement that Professor Stras has been selected as the 2019 winner the Otto Kinkeldey Award, bestowed by the American Musicological Society.  Named after a former president of the society, it was inaugurated in 1967 to recognise the most distinguished book in musicology published during the previous year.

Laurie Stras’s Women and Music in 16th Century Ferrara was selected as the latest recipient of an award that is globally regarded as one of the most prestigious in its field.

The Otto Kinkeldey Award judging panel stated that Professor Stras’s book is a “ground-breaking volume that brings to life an entire century of female creativity”.

It adds that: “Extensive new archival discoveries and reconstruction of unfamiliar repertories and performance practices are woven into a searching analysis of people, music, music-making, and relationships, honed by the author’s expertise as both performer and scholar.  Her diverse approaches enable a thorough, rigorous, and lively musical and social history of an extraordinary century of female music-making.  The book offers insights and inspiration not only to musicologists and historians, but also to creative writers, performers, and composers.”

Professor Stras said: “It is an immense honour to receive this award from the American Musicological Society, and I’m even more pleased that for the first time, a book explicitly about women and music has been selected.  It feels right that I can celebrate this at the same time as our CD release because my wonderful collaborators in Musica Secreta have been so much part of my research and my musical life throughout the many years it took to write the book!”