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 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. His forthcoming monograph, titled The Art of Counterpoint from Du Fay to Josquin (Cambridge University Press, 2024), theorizes how polyphonic music of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries happens in time. Also in-progress are a Festschrift in honor of Joshua Rifkin and the co-edited book Josquin: A New Approach. Published works include Josquin’s Rome: Hearing and Composing in the Sistine Chapel (Oxford University Press, 2012), The Cambridge History of Fifteenth-Century Music (2015), a volume of L’homme armé masses for the New Josquin Edition (2014), and more than twenty articles.
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 is the initiator of the new, international project “Mapping the Musical Renaissance,” which will use cutting-edge mapping software to facilitate both broad understanding and 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.