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 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 two dozen CDs for the DGG-Archiv, Glossa, and ABC Classics labels. In 2001 he founded, with 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. The Ensemble’s 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 the most prestigious International Festivals, especially in Europe and the UK, are consistently acclaimed. In 2011 the Ensemble released a boxed set of ten CDs of sacred music by the great Spanish Renaissance priest-composer Tomás Luis de Victoria (ca. 1540-1611) in celebration of the 400th anniversary of the composer’s death. The Boston Globe named the Victoria CDs among the “season’s best new box sets” for 2011 as did Britain’s Guardian newspaper. Similar accolades emerged from the San Francisco Chronicle and the Philadelphia Inquirer and in 2012 the Victoria CDs won the coveted Gramophone Award (sometimes referred to as the ‘Oscars of Classical Music’) in the ‘Early Music’ category. 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.
In addition to CDs, more than 350 individual tracks recorded by Michael Noone are available on iTunes and more than 40 music videos have found their way onto YouTube and Vimeo.
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 Majesy Juan Carlos I for his contribution to Spanish music through publications, concerts and recordings. In 2012, Noone was honored with the Boston College Arts Council Faculty Award for his contribution to cultural life on campus and beyond.
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.