Member
Contact Information
eric.rice@uconn.edu http://www.web.uconn.edu/ericeLocation
Hampton, Hampton, Hampton, Hampton, Hampton, Connecticut, Connecticut, Connecticut, Connecticut, Connecticut
Early Music Skills & Interests
Conductor
Early Music Affiliations
Biography
Musicologist and conductor Eric Rice is a specialist in the history and performance of music composed before 1750. He is Head of the Music Department at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in music history, notation, and historical performance, and he also serves as a member of the Medieval Studies faculty. He demonstrates the relationship between scholarship and performance as director of the University of Connecticut Collegium Musicum.
In his scholarship, Rice focuses primarily on medieval and Renaissance music of the Western liturgy and its relationship to architecture, politics, and secular music. His articles 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 Germany and France. He is the author of Music and Ritual at Charlemagne’s Marienkirche in Aachen (Merseburger Verlag, 2009) and co-editor of Young Choristers, 650-1700 (Boydell & Brewer, 2008), the first scholarly volume dedicated to the history of professional child singers.
As a performer, Rice seeks to pique interest in the cultures of the distant past through the immediacy of historically informed performance. He directs Ensemble Origo, hailed by The New York Times as “a fine, flexible ensemble,” presenting concerts that reflect the context in which early repertory was originally produced and heard. As Artistic Director of the Connecticut Early Music Festival from 2007 to 2015, he served as both a curator and a performer, choosing the theme for the festival, selecting nationally and internationally known ensembles to perform in it, and conducting concerts by the Connecticut Early Music Ensemble. 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. Exsultemus’s 2012 CD release, “O rex orbis,” a reconstruction of Vespers and Compline services for the feast of Saint Charlemagne as it might have been heard in Aachen in 1582, was “highly recommended on all counts” by Fanfare and received four stars from Belgium’s Le soir, whose Serge Martin hailed it as “Magnificent and austere music, sensual in its fervor, performed with rigor by its American interpreters.”
Raised in Brooklyn, New York, Rice discovered his interest in early music as an undergraduate at Bowdoin College. After a four-year career as a schooner captain and marine educator at the South Street Seaport Museum in New York City, he returned to his music studies at Columbia University, where he earned a Ph.D. in Historical Musicology and a Certificate in Medieval and Renaissance studies. While pursuing these degrees, he also studied conducting and voice, and he sang professionally in New York City churches that feature medieval and Renaissance repertoire in their liturgies. He taught at Brandeis University from 2001 to 2003 before joining the faculty at the University of Connecticut. He lives with his wife, Anne, and their two sons, Gregory and Nathaniel, in Hampton, Connecticut.
Events
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