Musicologist and choral director Michael Noone came to Boston College after a career embracing a variety of teaching, research and performance posts at universities in five countries on four continents. A graduate of Sydney University, he went on to receive a doctorate in music from King’s College, Cambridge, before being appointed Head of Musicology at the Australian National University’s School of Music. He subsequently held positions at Cornell and at the University of Hong Kong.
He has recorded more than a dozen 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. Their recently-released 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 some of Europe’s most important International Festivals are consistently acclaimed. The Ensemble has been chosen by the Fundación Caja Madrid to record a series of CDs of sacred music by the great Spanish Renaissance priest-composer Tomás Luis de Victoria. Victoria was educated by the Jesuits in both his native Ávila and at the German College in Rome. Indeed, he 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.
Michael counts among his awards a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of New South Wales, a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship at Cornell, a research fellowship at the Fundación Valparaíso in Spain, a research fellowship at Cornell’s Society for the Humanities and a fellowship at the Jesuit Institute at Boston College. 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, Reales Sitios, Scherzo, Musicology Australia, Goldberg, and Notes. Noone’s first book, Music and Musicians in the Escorial Liturgy under the Habsburgs, was hailed as “trailblazing’ and his more recent El Códice 25 de la catedral de Toledo (described as ‘spectacular’ by Robert Stevenson) presented important codicological work that unveiled hitherto unknown works by Morales, Guerrero, Lobo and many other 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.