Biography

Benjamin Ory received his Ph.D. in musicology from Stanford University in 2022, where he is a postdoctoral fellow in music and the digital humanities. He has since served as visiting assistant professor in musicology at Williams College. His research examines the origins of mid sixteenth-century musical style and its twentieth-century reception. He is editing a volume of motets for the Adrian Willaert collected-works edition with the American Institute of Musicology and is preparing several articles for publication on the early history of Renaissance musicology.

Project Summary

Sometime between 1520 and 1530, a new aesthetic paradigm for European art music took hold on the Italian peninsula. Although simple enough to describe in general terms, scholars have long been unsure exactly how, when, and where these stylistic changes occurred, owing to limited information about composer biographies and a fuzzy understanding of seminal musical sources from the 1520s. As a result, historians have tended to tell an oversimplified story that prioritizes the major composers of the early sixteenth century, or those of the mid sixteenth century, at the expense of those in between. Ory’s The 1520s Project aims to meet this challenge by making available more than 350 scores ca. 1510–40. This project will be expanded to have control over music transmitted in a handful of crucial Italian manuscripts from the late 1520s and early 1530s. Ory will create elegant data visualizations to capture the shift in musical texture. Corpus analyses, taking advantage of musical, textual, and source evidence, will reveal how a family of stylistic features were popularized and came to dominate both sacred and secular repertoires for more than forty years.