Honey Meconi

Professor of Music, the College, University of Rochester
Professor of Musicology, Eastman School of Music
Direcotr, Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender and Women's Studies
honey.meconi@rochester.edu
Courses: Music History, Musicology
Todd Union 203
(585) 275-9399
Ph.D., Harvard

A specialist in music before 1600, Honey Meconi joined the faculty of the University of Rochester in 2004 as Professor of Music in the College Music Department and Professor of Musicology at the Eastman School of Music. She became Director of the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender and Women’s Studies in 2007.

She is an expert on the music of Hildegard of Bingen, the twelfth-century polymath, poet, and composer, and is director of The Hildegard Project, a long-term undertaking to perform all of that composer’s music. In 1998 she organized the interdisciplinary conference “Constructing Hildegard: Reception and Identity 1098–1998.” Her latest book, Hildegard of Bingen, will be published by the University of Illinois Press, inaugurating their “Women Composers” series. Other books include Pierre de la Rue and Musical Life at the Habsburg-Burgundian Court (Oxford University Press, 2003) and the commentary volume to the facsimile edition of Brussels, Royal Library, Ms. IV.90 (Patrimonio Ediciones, in press) as well as Early Musical Borrowing (editor, Routledge, 2004) and Fortuna desperata: 36 Settings of an Italian Song (editor, A-R Editions, 2001).

Her shorter work has appeared in the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Journal of Musicology, I Tatti Studies, Tijdschrift van der Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis, Early Music, Journal of the American Musicological Society, the Lockwood and Kellman Festschriften, the revised New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, the 1987, 1992, and 1997 International Musicological Society Conference Proceedings, the Busnoys, Ockeghem, Alamire, and Petrucci Conference Proceedings, and numerous other venues. She has been a Fulbright Fellow, Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, and Fellow at the Villa I Tatti, and has received multiple grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and other agencies. Recipient of a 2006 Alumna Award from the Pennsylvania State University College of Arts and Architecture, she has served on the Board of Directors of the American Musicological Society (also serving on the Committee on the Status of Women), Pegasus Early Music, and Houston Early Music. In 2006–2007 she was an organizer of the panel/lecture/concert/workshop series “Women and Music: Looking Back, Looking Forward” co-sponsored by the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender and Women’s Studies and the University of Rochester Humanities Project.

A performer as well as a scholar, she began directing early music groups while a student at Indiana University. She has since founded and directed ensembles at Harvard University (where she received her Ph.D.), Rice University (where she directed the Medieval Studies Program), and now at the University of Rochester. As a singer of post-1600 music she has performed with, among others, the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, the professional Ensemble Vocal de la Radio-Télévision belge de la communauté française, and the Houston Symphony Chorus. She is currently a member of Concentus Women’s Chorus. With Vox Early Music Ensemble she was recipient of the 2006 Noah Greenberg Award given by the American Musicological Society “for distinguished contribution to the study and performance of early music.”

Research interests include Pierre de la Rue and contemporaries; manuscripts, especially chansonniers; women and music, especially Hildegard; Habsburg-Burgundian court music and manuscripts; borrowing; and extreme singing. Courses include Women and Music, Colloquium in Women’s Studies, Hildegard of Bingen, Opera, Shakespeare and Music, Medieval and Renaissance Music, Baroque Music, and numerous other subjects.