Benjamin Ory

I’m a music historian with interests in early music, historiography, and the digital humanities.

I’m a Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (FWO) junior postdoctoral fellow at KU Leuven in Belgium. I received my Ph.D. in musicology from Stanford University in 2022 and have since served as a Digital Humanities Fellow at Harvard University’s Villa I Tatti, as visiting assistant professor in musicology at Williams College, and as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford.

See my research page and my CV for more details.

news

Oct 30, 2025	Two articles of mine hot off the press! My article, “Financial Incentives for Music Scholarship: The Case of Armen Carapetyan and the American Institute of Musicology,” has been published with the Journal of Musicology. I show how one man’s financial resources and aesthetic preferences shaped and continue to shape the stories we tell about Renaissance music. A second article in the Troja Jahrbuch, “Alfred Einstein’s Scholarship, the Italian Madrigal, and The Italian Madrigal,” puts Einstein’s monumental publication in dialogue with surviving biographical and scholarly archival materials.
Aug 08, 2025	I am so delighted that my article, “Edward Lowinsky and the Divisive Politics of the New Josquin Edition,” has just been published in the Journal of the American Musicological Society. My essay draws on over five years of archival research and conversations with senior scholars in the field. I’m thankful to those who shared their memories, insights, and documents, and to the archives whose holdings made this work possible. I hope it sparks fresh discussion about the historiography of musicology and the complex legacies of its major figures.
May 08, 2025	My digital humanities resource, The 1520s Project, has just reached the milestone of 500 pieces of European polyphonic music, ca. 1510–40. All of the scores can be downloaded for computational analysis from my GitHub.
Dec 17, 2024	My review of Jane Bernstein’s Printing Music in Renaissance Rome has been published by the Journal of the American Musicological Society. As I write, it’s a great book about an important–if understudied–center of music printing during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
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.