Benjamin Ory

I received my Ph.D. in musicology from Stanford University in 2022 and have since served as visiting assistant professor in musicology at Williams College and a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford. My interests include sixteenth-century music, digital humanities, and the historiography of early music.

I’m the founder and director of the digital humanities resource, The 1520s Project, an open-source repository of 400 scores, ca. 1510–ca. 1540.

See my CV for more details.

news

Apr 22, 2024	I’m delighted that my article, “A Motet Wrongly Attributed to Adrian Willaert,” has just been published in the Journal of the Alamire Foundation. I describe a problematic scholarly tendency to assume that an attribution in a given source can apply to works other than the one to which it is attached. Closer examination of Nigra sum makes clear that it is—contrary to what we’ve thought—a three-voice motet by an anonymous composer, with two si placet (additional) voices added later.
Mar 06, 2024	My contribution on Edward Lowinsky and the 1971 Josquin-Festival Conference has been published in the 2021 Troja Jahrbuch, “Josquin-Bilder im langen 20. Jahrhundert.”

Apr 22, 2024

I’m delighted that my article, “A Motet Wrongly Attributed to Adrian Willaert,” has just been published in the Journal of the Alamire Foundation.

I describe a problematic scholarly tendency to assume that an attribution in a given source can apply to works other than the one to which it is attached. Closer examination of Nigra sum makes clear that it is—contrary to what we’ve thought—a three-voice motet by an anonymous composer, with two si placet (additional) voices added later.

Mar 06, 2024

My contribution on Edward Lowinsky and the 1971 Josquin-Festival Conference has been published in the 2021 Troja Jahrbuch, “Josquin-Bilder im langen 20. Jahrhundert.”