Jesse Rodin strives to make contact with lived musical experiences of the Renaissance. Immersing himself in the original sources, he sings from choirbooks, memorizes melodies and their texts, and recreates performances held at weddings, liturgical ceremonies, and feasts. A passionate teacher, Rodin has led seminars, workshops, and masterclasses at institutions such as Princeton University, the Schola Cantorum (Basel, Switzerland), the University of Vienna, and the Centre d’Études Supérieures de la Renaissance (Tours, France).
Rodin is Associate Professor of Music at Stanford University. He is the author of Josquin’s Rome: Hearing and Composing in the Sistine Chapel (Oxford University Press, 2012), editor of a volume of L’homme armé masses for the New Josquin Edition (2014), and co-editor of The Cambridge History of Fifteenth-Century Music (2015). He directs the Josquin Research Project, a digital tool for exploring a large corpus of Renaissance music. In a forthcoming article in Early Music, Rodin attempts to tackle the longstanding problem of the Josquin canon, classifying all 345 pieces somewhere attributed to Josquin in descending order of confidence.
An in-progress book explores how fifteenth-century polyphony happens in time. Drawing on his experiences as a scholar and performer, Rodin argues that composers activated a new collection of compositional building blocks to create a powerful and imaginative range of musical experiences (Cambridge University Press).
Rodin is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation; the Université Libre de Bruxelles; the American Council of Learned Societies; the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers; the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies; and the American Musicological Society. For his work with Cut Circle he has received the Prix Olivier Messiaen, the Noah Greenberg Award, Editor’s Choice (Gramophone), and a Diapason d’Or. He prepares new editions of all the music Cut Circle performs.
At Stanford Rodin directs the Facsimile Singers, in which students develop native fluency in old musical notation. He has organized symposia on the composer Johannes Ockeghem, medieval music pedagogy, and musical analysis in the digital age. In addition to undergraduate and graduate music courses, he teaches a class on late-medieval feasting that marries art, music, poetry, and politics with hands-on experience in the kitchen.