Jesse Rodin strives to make contact with lived musical experiences of the distant past. 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 the Schola Cantorum (Basel, Switzerland), the University of Vienna, the Centre d’Études Supérieures de la Renaissance (Tours, France), and Princeton University.
Rodin is Professor of Music at Stanford University. His second monograph, titled The Art of Counterpoint from Du Fay to Josquin (Cambridge University Press, January 2025), presents a new theory of how polyphonic music from the long fifteenth century happens in time. Published works include a volume in honor of Joshua Rifkin (2024), The Cambridge History of Fifteenth-Century Music (2015), Josquin’s Rome: Hearing and Composing in the Sistine Chapel (Oxford University Press, 2012), a volume of L’homme armé masses for the New Josquin Edition (2014), and many articles. An in-progress co-edited book is titled Josquin: A New Approach.
Two projects in the digital humanities strive to make the period as a whole more accessible. Rodin directs the Josquin Research Project (josquin.stanford.edu), a digital tool for exploring a large corpus of Renaissance music. And he co-directs the international project Mapping the Musical Renaissance, which facilitates basic understanding as well as serendipitous discovery.
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. He has been featured in a variety of public forums, including The New Yorker. He prepares new editions of all the music Cut Circle performs; these are freely available through the Josquin Research Project.
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 Okeghem, 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.