Member
Contact Information
eric.rice@uconn.eduhttps://music.uconn.edu/person/eric-rice/
Location
Hampton, Connecticut
Early Music Skills & Interests
Conductor
Early Music Affiliations
Conductor, Editor, Music/Artistic Director, Musicologist, Performer, Writer
Biography
Musicologist and conductor ERIC RICE is Professor of Music History and former Department Head at the University of Connecticut, where he teaches music history and directs the Collegium Musicum. He is the 2019 recipient of Early Music America’s Thomas Binkley Award for excellence in performance and scholarship by the director of a university early music ensemble. He also directs Ensemble Origo, praised by the Boston Musical Intelligencer as “aesthetically…top-notch” with “immaculate execution”; and by The New York Times as “a fine, flexible ensemble,” presenting concerts and making recordings reflecting the context in which early repertory was originally heard. He was previously Artistic Director of the Connecticut Early Music Festival and music director of the Boston-based ensemble Exsultemus. His scholarly focus is medieval and Renaissance liturgy and its relationship to architecture, politics, and secular music, and also representations of non-Western cultures in Western music. His books are Music and Ritual at Charlemagne’s Marienkirche in Aachen and Young Choristers, 650-1700 (co-edited with Susan Boynton), the first scholarly volume dedicated to the history of professional child singers. His articles have appeared in numerous journals, and he has received fellowships to pursue archival research in Germany and France. Raised in Brooklyn, New York, Rice discovered early music at Bowdoin College. After four years as a schooner captain at the South Street Seaport Museum, he earned a PhD in Musicology and a Certificate in Medieval and Renaissance studies from Columbia University. He taught at Brandeis University for two years before joining UConn’s faculty in 2003.
