Jacobs professor Wendy Gillespie recognized for excellence in early music field

Jacobs School of Music Professor of Music (Viola da gamba) Wendy Gillespie has been named the winner of the Thomas Binkley Award from Early Music America, the national service organization for the field of early music.

The award recognizes outstanding achievement in performance and scholarship by the director of a university or college early music ensemble.

It is named for lutenist and educator Thomas Binkley, who taught at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis and served as founding director of the Early Music Institute at Indiana University from 1979 to 1995.

In addition to this award, Gillespie will receive an Alumnae Achievement Award from Wellesley College in February 2012. The award is the highest honor given to alumnae for excellence and distinction in their field and has been presented annually since 1970. Previous winners include Hillary Clinton, Madeleine Albright, Phyllis Curtin, Nora Ephron, Judith Martin and Diane Sawyer.

Gillespie began playing violin in third grade with the encouragement of her maternal grandfather and her mother, who were both music lovers. She had been asked to participate in orchestras and chamber music from very early on, so it was very natural for her. 

“My parents were both lawyers, and I think they hoped that one of their children would do law,” Gillespie said. “Luckily I have a brother who has done that.”

Gillespie has been a faculty member of the Early Music Institute at the Jacobs School since 1985. She teaches early bowed strings, performance studies and reading from early notation.

Gillespie was interested in many things throughout childhood and early adulthood, but stayed with music throughout.

“I was a child of the 1960s, when one could aspire to anything,” Gillespie said. “I chose to go to a liberal arts college and not a music conservatory because there were lots of things about which I was curious. But even in college, people were paying me to play music, and not so much anything else, so I more or less fell into it.”