music fellow wins award for latest book

Professor Owen Rees, Fellow in Music and Organist, won the Robert M. Stevenson Award of the American Musicological Society for his latest book, The Requiem of Tomás Luis de Victoria (1603) (Cambridge University Press, 2019).

The Robert M. Stevenson Award recognises outstanding scholarship in Iberian and Latin American music.

Professor Rees’ book is the first detailed study of Victoria’s well-loved Requiem, exploring its genesis and impact, and placing it in the context of international repertories of Requiem Masses of the period. His multifaceted study brings together the historical and ritual contexts for the work’s genesis, the first detailed musical analysis of the Requiem itself, and the long story of its circulation and reception. He locates Victoria's music within the context of a vast international repertory of Requiems, much of it previously unstudied, and identifies the techniques which render this work so powerfully distinctive and coherent.