Dr. Carolann Buff is a scholar, teacher, and musician, regarded for both her research on late medieval motets and expertise in historical performance. Her principal research interests include 14th- and early 15th-century musical style, but she is equally at home in the study of sacred music repertoires from all eras, and popular music as well. Her dissertation, “Ciconia’s Equal-Cantus Motets and the Creation of Early-Fifteenth Century Style,” and her essay, “The Italian Job: Ciconia, Du Fay, and the Musical Aesthetics of the 15th-Century Italian Motet,” (forthcoming in Qui musicam in se habet: Essays in Honor of Alejandro Enrique Planchart), explore the motet genre in the period between the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the musical Renaissance. She has presented papers internationally including at the Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society, the International Congress on Medieval Studies, and the Medieval and Renaissance Music Conference.
Dr. Buff is a specialist in historical performance and appears frequently with several early music ensembles and as a soloist with numerous period instrument orchestras. She is a founding member of the internationally renowned medieval trio Liber unUsualis, and with the ensemble recorded two critically acclaimed CDs of 14th-century polyphony, Unrequited: Machaut and the French Ars Nova and Flyleaves: Music in English Manuscripts. With the Boston Camerata, Ms. Buff has toured around the world in the ballet Borrowed Light, a stunning collaboration with the Tero Saarinen Dance Company. She has recorded with the Renaissance choir Cut Circle and can be heard on their much admired CD, De Orto and Josquin: Music in the Sistine Chapel around 1490, and appears on their forthcoming recording of Du Fay’s cantus firmus Masses. Dr. Buff has also performed with the women’s ensemble Tapestry, and can be heard on their CD Sapphire Night, which received the 2005 ECHO Klassik prize in Germany.
Dr. Buff joins the faculty of Westminster Choir College in 2015 as an Assistant Professor of Musicology in the Department of Conducting, Organ, and Sacred Music. She holds a PhD and MA in Musicology from Princeton University, an MM in Early Music Performance from Longy School of Music, and a BM in Vocal Performance from the University of California at Santa Barbara.