Started: 01-09-2007
PhD supervisor: Prof. dr. E. Wennekes, day-to-day supervisor: dr. Marina Frolova-Walker

Nineteenth-century Russian music occupies a remarkable place in music historiography. Based on the conviction that the emergence of a ‘national school’ was the most important musical achievement in this period, music critics and musicologists have developed the habit of assuming that all music written by nineteenth-century Russian composers should be somehow related to the development of a national idiom. Western listeners, moreover, have tended to value Russian music for its exotic features, and consequently, a lack of stylistic traits clearly marked as ‘Russian’ has often been portrayed as a shortcoming and strong affinities with foreign genres as signs of valuelessness or inauthenticity.

Although, fortunately, these attitudes towards Russianness have by now been critically examined, the traditional prejudices and misconceptions still cast their shadow over the current state of research on Russian music. The bulk of the literature consists of older Western and Soviet studies that remain invaluable sources of information, but contain many assumptions and conclusions that require a critical re-evaluation. Music in Russia, moreover, is a field of research that has usually been practiced within a national frame of reference—a situation that tends to propagate a view of Russian music as an insular tradition.

This research aims to critically examine and refine traditional interpretations of nineteenth-century Russian opera by studying it from an emphatically international perspective. The main questions are how the operas of various Russian composers between c.1830 and 1900 relate to contemporary foreign trends and how different opinions on Russian opera have been shaped by this positioning.

With this analysis, I aim not only to investigate to what extent Russian composers were led by Western developments, but also how certain Western examples and conventions have been adapted, transformed or scrupulously avoided. Considerable attention will be given to the reception of the operas, which can reveal how the relation between the operas and national identity was perceived and constructed by audiences both in Russia and in the West.

Started: 01-10-2007
PhD supervisor: prof. dr. Karl Kügle

The last decade saw the appearance of numerous collaborative projects in the field of the performing arts which proclaim as their intention to advance intercultural dialogue. Often motivated by a felt need to resist what is considered the homogenizing effect of globalization, initiators hope to achieve a form of collaboration that ensures – as one of my interviewees phrased it – a “truly profound, enduring and equal exchange.” Although challenges to the professed objectives (e.g., religious fundamentalism and ethnocentric separatism) receive ample attention, the notion of intercultural ‘dialogue’ or ‘collaboration’ remains insufficiently theorized. Who wishes to collaborate with whom, for what reasons, and to serve which interests? How is music, or culture in general, being employed by (non-)governmental and private organizations for the purpose of promoting “intercultural dialogue”? And what are the effects of commercial and political forces on the success of projects that aim to transcend exoticism?

By means of field and historical research, this study aims at mapping and assessing the political and economic dynamics within and surrounding intercultural collaborative projects, in particular those that refer to the Eurasian land mass comprising the historical “Silk Road(s).” The eponymous ensemble of the renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma is only the most prestigious of such intercultural collaborations, putting musicians and composers from various ethnic backgrounds to work in a highly acclaimed enterprise that performs, commissions, records, and successfully markets music with the stated aim of “discovering transnational voices that belong to one world.” How does this cosmopolitan ideal, promoted by a romanticized concept of the ancient system of trans-Asian trade routes, relate to today’s (renewed) internal and external competition of (geo)political and economic interests in Central Asia?

Reflecting global processes of music production and consumption at large, intercultural ensembles embody tensions between cosmopolitan idealism and everyday reality, tradition and modernization, ‘oral’ and ‘written’ music practices, and elite and popular tastes. Drawing on the practice theory of Pierre Bourdieu, today’s political and commercial manifestations of ‘interculturalism’ will be evaluated for their dependency on an (unspoken) poetics of blending musics as well as a political economy that has long shaped, and continues to shape, global perceptions of selfhood, otherness, and togetherness. As such, this research intends to contribute to a wider debate on cultural globalization and cosmopolitanism.

Started: 01-09-2007
PhD supervisor: Prof. dr. Karl Kügle

Guillaume de Machaut is widely regarded as one of the foremost poets and composers of fourteenth-century France. His creative output, including twenty-five lyric lais, of which nineteen have monophonic music settings, is considered the climax of a longstanding tradition created and cultivated by the troubadours and trouvères. Machaut's lais occupied a significant place within his own oeuvre: in five out of the six Machaut single-author manuscripts surviving today, the music section opens with the lais, a genre that Machaut single-handedly brought to unprecedented levels of sophistication. Thus, the lai was explicitly placed by Machaut at the top of his musical genre hierarchy, a move that might be interpreted as a personal way for him to claim his place within the lineage of the troubadours and trouvères. Notwithstanding such hints, however, Machaut's lais have received surprisingly little scholarly attention so far.

This research project aims to reconsider the entire corpus of fourteenth-century lyric lais with music, with a special focus on Machaut's lais and their relationships to earlier repertories. Besides Machaut, considerable attention will be given to the four lais from the early fourteenth-century version of the Roman de Fauvel transmitted in the manuscript Paris, BNF fr. 146. By means of textual and musical analyses combined with codicological research, I shall investigate aspects of text-music relationships, including deliberate references to earlier independent lyric lais as well as to certain lyric insertions from Arthurian narrative romances, known as Arthurian lais. I argue that there is substantial evidence permitting us to re-interpret Machaut's lais as a consciously retrospective fourteenth-century look at the troubadour and trouvère traditions. Such a reading opens up a range of new questions on the complex history of the lai and its reception in the later Middle Ages.

Started: 01-09-2008
PhD supervisor: Prof. dr. Karl Kügle

With the exception of a small number of men with unusually high and women with unusually low voices, one can easily assert that a person’s voice is a very accurate indicator of his/her gender. However, when the speaker’s voice fails to meet culturally specific expectations imposed on his/her body, particularly in pitch, the listener may be puzzled and identify it with the opposite gender. From this it follows that perceptions of the human voice and perceptions of gender are interconnected. This is the central premise of this project which aims to explore the complex interplay between vocal timbre, pitch and various constructions of gender, using as a focal context the operatic castrato and the onnagata—a male actor specialising in female roles in Japanese kabuki theatre.

Castrati and onnagata are two fascinating phenomena of early modern Europe and Japan, not only as performers of protagonist roles in two famous and popular forms of theatre, Italian baroque opera and kabuki drama respectively, but also as distinct members of two patriarchal societies whose conceptions of sex, gender, sexuality, and the human body strikingly differed from our modern ones. As such, both societies provided a cultural climate and an ideological framework enabling both groups of performers not only to 'survive' but also to be admired as artists and oftentimes desired as sexual partners, by men and women alike. The differences between pre-modern and modern conceptions of sex and gender are clearly reflected in the fact that soon after the arrival of the binary thinking to Europe and Japan, operatic castrati became extinct while onnagata stopped with the practise of living as onnagata in everyday life.

As paradigmatic examples of gender and vocal ambiguity both on and offstage, operatic castrati and Edo-period onnagata as established gender/performance categories provide two ideal case studies for a context-based investigation of the interconnection between voice and gender. What role does the voice play in the never-ending process of gender construction? What kind of gendered meanings does it convey? How does it affect perceptions of gender (ambiguity)? To what extent are answers to these questions socio-culturally determined, dependent on specific contexts, and varying from an individual to individual? By studying the way the voices of castrati and onnagata were perceived by their contemporaries and further developing the theoretical framework set out in my MA thesis, I intend to answer these questions and provide exciting new insights into the variety of meanings conveyed through every single human utterance.

PhD supervisors: Prof. Karl Kügle and Prof. Margaret Bent (All Souls College, University of Oxford)

The two manuscripts Faenza, Biblioteca Comunale Manfrediana 117 and London, British Library Add. 29987 contain virtually the entire corpus of the surviving instrumental music of late medieval Italy. The latter includes a series of monodic estampies and dances, the former some fifty polyphonic, intabulated diminutions on sacred and secular models datable to the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Both sources have been intensely discussed and both have been edited in facsimile and several critical transcriptions. However, while Lo 29987 has been the subject of two thorough codicological enquiries, a detailed codicological study of Fa 117 is still missing. The vast bibliography on the manuscript was focused instead on its organological, stylistic, repertorial and historical implications – but almost totally neglected the central importance of physical evidence.

The present study aims at filling this gap in several ways: First, it thoroughly scrutinizes the source’s preparation, compilation, early usage and gradual corruption. Newly identified palimpsests and a detailed discussion of chemical offsetting, gall-ink corrosion and surface-damage will allow to revise some long-held views on the manuscript’s structure, destination and early use. Second, a general discussion and collation of all concordant sources of every single piece will be presented, reconsidering and partially refuting existing scholarship both from a philological and an analytical perspective. Third, it reconsiders and refines the hypotheses on the possible historical background of the repertoire, based on new archival findings.

Finally, the research introduces some new methodological approaches in the fields of codicology and philology of music manuscripts. It also typifies the manuscript’s exemplars, mapping – where possible – the processes of transmission and circulation of this particular repertoire within the universe of late medieval polyphony on the Italian peninsula.

Started: 01-09-2005
PhD supervisors: Dr. Hing-yan Chan (The University of Hong Kong), and Prof. dr. Karl Kügle (Universiteit Utrecht)

The qin, a type of zither, has long been considered China's pre-eminent musical instrument. In my M.Phil. thesis, "Early Qin Music: the Manuscripts Tokyo, Tokyo Kokuritsu Hakubutsukan TB1393 and Hikone, Hikone-jo Hakubutsukan V633", I investigated various aspects of the two oldest sources of qin music surviving today. In particular, the first detailed codicological description of the two scrolls was provided, followed by reconstructions of the biographies of selected contributors of text and music to the scrolls, and an exploration into the historical inquiries about qin music carried out in eighteenth-century Japan.

Rather than illustrating microscopic aspects of the repertoire by investigating the origins of several individual treatises and qin compositions, the aim of my PhD project will be to retrace the history of the entire repertoire of early qin sources, both practical and theoretical. With the exception of the Tokyo and Hikone scrolls and several late manuscript copies of two Song compilations, all early qin sources are lost in their originals and survive only in form of quotations in reference compilations and other relevant works. The loss of the originals means that most early qin sources exist in a fragmentary state. If we want to assess those books further, probing beyond the intermediate sources more deeply into the past, we face the task of reconstruction, entailing as it does questions which are both practical and theoretical, and ultimately even philosophical. To achieve the aims of the proposed study, i.e., to chart the nature, transmission and mutual interrelationships of these sources precisely, various methodologies ranging from textual criticism and editing to bibliographic and philological reconstructive techniques will be applied. In particular, the following steps will be taken: 1) to accumulate the bibliographical data of early qin writings; 2) to reconstruct the lost early qin works, both practical and theoretical, by way of philological reconstructive techniques, inasmuch possible; 3) to retrace the history of each early qin work, and its transmission; and 4) to consider the mutual interrelationships of these works with each other.

The transmission of qin sources itself is not a wholly random process, by which some books happen to succumb to destruction and neglect, while others miraculously happen to escape those fates. Qin works, especially practical treatises, are transmitted only because someone wants to transmit them. The failure of later times to deliver most of the early qin sources to us through normal means of transmission is not a matter of indifference, or merely of the randomness of manuscript survival, but
rather - at least to a significant extent - the consequence of a number of profoundly interesting changes in attitude, which may in turn be subject to scholarly investigation. In other words, continued transmission implies continued appreciation. Based on the bibliographical references collated under each title in the critical index, we can therefore observe (within limits) from what time an early qin work fell out of fashion and favor. And from the texts reconstructed in the study, we may (if in somewhat speculative form) attempt to seek out the ideological reasons behind the fates undergone by the various texts. The enterprise of uncovering such kind of information will sharpen our picture on the changes and the historical development undergone by qin playing in the early periods, especially during the transition from the period of full-ideogram notation to the age of abbreviated notation.

Bouterse, M.C.J., Nederlandse houtblaasinstrumenten en hun bouwers, 1660-1760.
PhD supervisor: prof. dr. C. Vellekoop.
PhD degree: 19-01-2001

Davies, M.G., The Masonic Muse. Songs, music and musicians associated with Dutch Freemasonry: 1730-1806.
PhD supervisors: prof. dr. P.M. Op de Coul and dr. R.A. Rasch.
PhD degree: 24-01-2003

Elferen, I. A. M. van, Von Laura zum himmlischen Bräutigam. Der petrarkistische Diskurs in Dichtung und Musik des Deutschen Barok.
Started: 01-01-1999
PhD supervisor: prof. dr. P.M. Op de Coul, co-supervisor: dr. A.A. Clement.
PhD degree: 26-09-2003.

Gessel, J. van, Een vaderland van goede muziek. Een halve eeuw maatschappij tot bevordering der toonkunst (1829-1879) en het Nederlandse muziekleven.
Started: 01-01-1998
PhD supervisor: prof. dr. P.M. Op de Coul.
PhD degree: 14-12-2001.

Hascher-Burger, U., Gesungene Innigkeit. Studien zu einer musikhandschrift der Devotio moderna (Utrecht, Universiteitsbibliotheek, ms. 16 H 34, olim B 113). Mit einer Edition der Gesänge.
PhD supervisor: prof. dr. C. Vellekoop.
PhD degree: 25-04-2002.

Kleinhout, G.W.H., Jazz als probleem. Receptie en acceptatie van de jazz in de wederopbouwperiode van Nederland 1945-1952.
PhD supervisors: prof. dr. J.W. Bertens and dr. J. Verheul.
PhD degree: 01-09-2006

Leahy, A., Text-music relationships in the ‘Leipzig’ chorales of Johann Sebastian Bach.
PhD International
PhD supervisors: prof. dr. C. Vellekoop and prof. dr. P.M. Op de Coul.
PhD degree: 28-11-2002.

Lieffering, A., De Franse comedie in Den Haag 1749-1793. Opera, toneel en het stadhouderlijk hof in de Haagse stedelijke cultuur.
Started: 01-04-1995
PhD supervisor: prof. dr. P.M. Op de Coul, co-supervisor: dr. R. Rasch.
PhD degree: 16-11-1999. 

Loos, J.F.H. de, Duitse en Nederlandse muzieknotaties in de 12e en 13e eeuw.
Started: 01-03-1989
PhD supervisor: prof. dr. C. Vellekoop.
PhD degree: 19-01-1996.

Raasveld, P.P.M., Pictura, poesis, musica. Een onderzoek naar de rol van de muziek in embleemliteratuur. Met een geannoteerde corpusbeschrijving van embleemboeken met liederen en van emblemen met muzikale notatie in de picturae.
Started: 01-01-1991
PhD supervisors: prof. dr. M.A. Schenkeveld-van der Dussen and prof. dr. W. Elders.
PhD degree: 08-12-1995.

Randwijck, R.J.C. Graaf van, Music in context. Four case studies.
PhD supervisors: prof. dr. A.A. Clement and dr. P.H.A.M. van Emmerik.
PhD degree: 17-06-2008.

Schuijer, M.C., Pitch-class set theory and the construction of musical competence.
PhD supervisors: prof. dr. P.M. Op de Coul and dr. R.A. Rasch.
PhD degree: 25-10-2005.

Staverman, D., De toneelmuziek van Alphons Diepenbrock: concept, compositie, uitvoering.
PhD supervisors: prof. dr. P.M. Op de Coul, prof. dr. W.E. Krul and prof. dr. A.P.M.H. Lardinois.
PhD degree: 21-04-2006.

Vis, G.N.M., Gaudeamus - the life of Julius Röntgen (1855-1932).
PhD supervisor: prof. dr. E.G.J. Wennekes.
PhD degree: 17-10-2007.

Wind, T.R., Jacob van Eyck en de anderen. Nederlands solorepertoire voor blokfluit in de Gouden Eeuw.
PhD supervisors: prof. dr. E.G.J. Wennekes and dr. R.A. Rasch.
PhD degree: 29-05-2006.

Zijlstra, A.M.J., Zangers en schrijvers. De overlevering van het Gregoriaans van ca. 700 tot ca. 1150.
Started: 01-01-1992
PhD supervisor: prof. dr. C. Vellekoop.
PhD degree: 16-09-1997.