main content Music Professor Cox Receives 2025 GRAMMY-Nomination

Visiting Professor of Music John Cox has received his fourth (2025, 2022, 2021, 2019) GRAMMY® nomination in the category of Best Choral Performance for his work on the Skylark Ensemble’s album Clear Voices in the Dark. The album also received a nomination in the Best Engineered Album, Classical category. Cox has been a member of the Skylark Ensemble since 2013 and has recorded ten albums with the group during that time. This summer he will transition into the role of producer for the group’s next album, to be released in 2026.

“It is a huge honor to be recognized for this work—and it’s especially meaningful to me because of the relevance of this music to my life and my role as an artist in our current political climate,” Cox said.

The album features Francois Poulenc’s Figure Humaine, a seven-movement secular cantata setting the text of surrealist poet PaulÉluard. Written in 1943 during the German occupation of France, this relatively unknown piece is one of the most powerful anti-fascist artistic expressions from the 20th century. Poulenc dedicated Figure to his friend Pablo Picasso, whose 1938 Guernica is also on that list. The album also features popular music from the American Civil War, reflections on loss and the horrors of war, interspersed between the more harmonically dense and avant-garde music by Poulenc.

As a professional tenor and chorister, Cox has performed and recorded with many renowned professional vocal ensembles including Apollo’s Singers, True Concord, and the Oregon Bach Festival Chorus. In addition to the Skylark Ensemble, Cox currently sings with Resonance Ensemble (directed by Professor of Music and Director of Choral Activities Kathy Fitzgibbon) and Cappella Romana.

Active as a musicologist and editor of pre-modern music, Cox is a specialist in Renaissance and Baroque performance practice and advocate for forgotten repertories. Hiis recent scholarship focuses on music written for performance by nuns in Rome during the seventeenth century. His editions have been recorded by Skylark Ensemble and performed by professional and amateur choral groups across the country.