Scott Metcalfe

Scott Metcalfe is widely recognized as one of North America’s leading specialists in music from the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries and beyond. He is the director of Blue Heron, acclaimed by The Boston Globe as “one of the Boston music community’s indispensables” and winner of the 2018 Gramophone Classical Music Award for Early Music. From 2010-2019 Metcalfe was music director of New York City’s Green Mountain Project (Jolle Greenleaf, artistic director) and he has been guest director of TENET (New York), the Handel & Haydn Society (Boston), Emmanuel Music (Boston), the Tudor Choir and Seattle Baroque, Pacific Baroque Orchestra (Vancouver, BC), Quire Cleveland, the Dryden Ensemble (Princeton, NJ), and Early Music America’s Young Performers Festival Ensemble., in music ranging from Machaut to Bach and Handel. Metcalfe also enjoys a career as a baroque violinist, playing with Les Délices (dir. Debra Nagy), L’Harmonie des Saisons (dir. Eric Milnes), and other ensembles. He has taught vocal ensemble repertoire and performance practice at Boston University and vocal ensemble performance at Harvard University, and has served as director of the baroque orchestra at Oberlin Conservatory. Metcalfe’s scholarly activities include research on the performance practice of English vocal music in the 16th and 17th centuries, some of which will be published as two chapters in Music, politics, and religion in early seventeenth-century Cambridge: the Peterhouse partbooks in context (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, forthcoming in 2019). He has also edited a motet by Francisco de Peñalosa for Antico Edition and the twelve unique songs in the newly-discovered Leuven chansonnier for the Alamire Foundation, and he is preparing a new edition of the songs of Gilles Binchois (c. 1400-1460). He received a bachelor’s degree from Brown University (1985), where he majored in biology, and a master’s degree in historical performance practice from Harvard (2005).