Patrick Macey earned the Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1985, and joined the Eastman faculty in the same year, teaching until his retirement in 2016. He served as chair of Eastman’s Musicology Department from spring 2007 to 2012, and in 1990 he was honored with the Eastman’s Eisenhart Award for Excellence in Teaching. From 1990 to 2004, he conducted the Eastman Capella Antiqua.
One facet of Patrick Macey’s research addresses social and political functions of Florentine music under Lorenzo de’ Medici and the reforming friar Girolamo Savonarola. His book, Bonfire Songs: Savonarola’s Musical Legacy (Oxford, 1998), received the Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Award from the Renaissance Society of America. A 1992 Renaissance Quarterly article on Savonarola and the lauda received the RSA’s William Nelson Prize. In 1999 A-R Editions published his volume of Savonarolan Laudas and Motets. Another facet of Macey’s research involves study of patronage and musical rhetoric in the motets of Josquin des Prez. His articles on Josquin have appeared in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Early Music, and Early Music History. For the New Josquin Edition, he edited Josquin’s Psalm motets, and his chansons for six voices and five voices.
He has served on the editorial boards of the New Josquin Edition, Early Music History, Renaissance Quarterly, and Eastman Studies in Music. He was a member of the board of directors for the American Musicological Society and the Renaissance Society of America, and has served on advisory boards for Villa I Tatti in Florence, The Josquin Project, and the Lost Voices Project.