The Lion and The Lute: Music at the Court of Leo X (University of Chicago)

Fr. Nathan Ford, SJC is a priest of the Canons Regular of St. John Cantius where he serves as the director of Youth Choirs, Vocations Director, and other roles.

He has been a member of the Canons Regular of St. John Cantius since June of 2011 after graduating from high school where he studied basic music theory, history, trumpet, and choral singing. He made his final profession in August of 2016 and was ordained a priest in May of 2021 after completing undergraduate studies at Holy Apostles College and Seminary in Cromwell, Connecticut, and acquiring a Masters of Divinity Degree through Mundelein Seminary.

Throughout his time with the Canons, Fr. Nathan has sung in multiple choirs, including: the Resurrection Choir and Orchestra, St. Cecilia Choir, and the St. Gregory the Great Schola Cantorum. During his time as a student at both Holy Apostles and at Mundelein Seminary, Fr. Nathan taught basic music theory and singing techniques to the seminarians. He also organized and directed multiple choral groups formed from the seminary body.

Michael Alan Anderson is a Professor of Musicology at the University of Rochester Eastman School of Music. He is an award-winning scholar and performer whose work spans centuries-old musical traditions to contemporary musical initiatives centered on community wellbeing. He specializes in sacred music from the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries, illuminating the intersections of devotion, art, and social identity in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. He is the author of Music and Performance in the Book of Hours (Routledge Press, 2022) and St. Anne in Renaissance Music: Devotion and Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2014). Anderson’s articles have appeared in various peer-reviewed journals, and he is a two-time winner of ASCAP’s Deems Taylor Award for outstanding writing about music, for articles published in Early Music History (2011) and in the Journal of the American Musicological Society (2013).

Ada Palmer is an Associate Professor of Early Modern European History and the College at the University of Chicago. She studies Ancient Mediterranean World, Cultural Early Modern Europe, Gender and Sexuality, Intellectual Islam and the Middle East, Science and Medicine. She is interested in Early modern Europe; the Renaissance, with a focus on Italy; the Reformation; longue-durée intellectual and cultural history; postclassical reception of classical philosophy; Renaissance humanism; history of the book, printing, and reading; censorship and information control especially during information revolutions; history of science, religion, atheism, deism, heresy, and heterodoxy; intellectual continuities from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment; reception of Epicureanism, atomism, Stoicism, Skepticism, Platonism, and Neoplatonism; secondary specializations in genre fiction, science fiction & fantasy, and anime & manga.

Vocal ensemble Schola Antiqua serves as the Lumen Christi Institute’s Artists-in-Residence. Lumen Christi supports Schola Antiqua in providing unparalleled offerings related to the foundations of Catholic liturgy and music. Michael Alan Anderson, the Artistic Director of Schola Antiqua and a graduate of the University of Chicago, works closely with the Institute to deliver concerts and workshops on the Church’s great treasury of sacred music.

About Schola Antiqua

Schola Antiqua is a professional vocal ensemble dedicated to the performance of music composed before the year 1600. Executing pre-modern repertory with “sensitivity and style” (Early Music America), Schola Antiqua takes pride in providing the highest standards of research, performance, and education involving many underserved repertories in the Western musical canon. Founded in 2000 under the artistic leadership of University of Notre Dame Professor Calvin M. Bower, the group has received performance invitations from the Indianapolis Early Music Festival, Chicago’s Newberry Library, the Chicago Cultural Center, the University of Chicago, the University of Notre Dame, the American Guild of Organists, and other institutions across the Midwest.

About the Artistic Director

Michael Alan Anderson was named Artistic Director of Schola Antiqua in 2008, following the retirement of its founding Artistic Director, Calvin M. Bower. Holding a PhD in the History and Theory of Music from the University of Chicago, Anderson is a founding member of the ensemble and currently serves on the musicology faculty of the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester, specializing in the sacred music of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. He has received numerous awards, including the Alvin H. Johnson American Musicological Society 50 Dissertation-Year Fellowship, the Whiting Foundation Fellowship (University of Chicago), and the Grace Frank Grant (Medieval Academy of America).