Prestigious Award for Southampton Music Professor
Professor Laurie Stras (Music, University of Southampton) is the recipient of the 2016 Noah Greenberg Award of the American Musicological Society with her project to record motets associated with the convent of Corpus Domini in Ferrara with her ensemble Musica Secreta.
The Noah Greenberg Award is intended as a grant-in-aid to stimulate active cooperation between scholars and performers by recognising and fostering outstanding contributions to historical performing practices. It was presented to Professor Stras on Saturday, 5 November at the AMS Business Meeting and Awards Presentation during the Society's Annual Meeting in Vancouver and brings an impressive recognition of her practice-led research into Renaissance polyphony.
The official award citation reads as follows: 'The Noah Greenberg Award goes to Laurie Stras, for her project of recording, with her ensemble Musica Secreta, motets from a 1543 Scotto imprint associated with the convent of Corpus Domini in Ferrara. Straus's forthcoming book Women and Music in Sixteenth-Century Ferrara argues that one of the composers is likely Suor Leonora d'Este, the only daughter of Lucrezia Borgia. That discovery, she writes, 'pushes back the date of published convent polyphony by fifty years and establishes a reference point for all later female-voice polyphony in both sacred and secular repertoires'.
The CD is planned for release on International Women's Day, 8 March 2017.