Knowledge and culture subproject 1:

The Leiden Academic Course Center offers a large variety of short and longer music courses. The music category includes various Singing courses, but also courses such as African percussion and Musical Workshop. A number of courses are offered at different levels. At the end of the course it is possible…

The music studio is a multipurpose room measuring 9.4 x 8.9 m, with marmoleum on the floor and 40 chairs. Music system and piano available.

Music as a multi-faceted and integral part of our society.

Music can affect how we feel, think, and behave. But how do we learn about the specifics of people's responses to music so that we can apply this to health and well-being? By looking at characteristics of the music, as well as the differences between listeners, we hope to better understand as well as…

What are the critical elements in sonic materialization of fixed media electroacoustic music and how can these parameters be classified? How would interpretation be defined in performing fixed media music? What are the creative and new ways of presenting fixed media music by incorporating all the presentation…

How can classical music be restructured while still retaining the core of what we love about its repertoire and our ability to share it with audiences, while coming up with ways of making it financially viable.

Interpretation and Composition Outside the Work Concept

How do we experience electronic music? How does electronic music operate on perceptual, cognitive and affective levels? What are the common concepts activated in the listener’s mind when listening to electronic music? Why and how are these concepts activated?

From The Cognitive Continuum of Electronic Music:

From the 1920s on, popular music in Southeast Asia was a mass-audience phenomenon that drew new connections between indigenous musical styles and contemporary genres from elsewhere to create new, hybrid forms. This book presents a cultural history of modern Southeast Asia from the vantage point of popular…

Developing new methods for performing improvised music

The small piano studios at the LAK are available to rent for practice purposes. You can either rent the studios per hour or get a subscription. There are Yamaha pianos available in the studio's, but you can also use the space to practice with your own instrument.

This thesis investigated how microphones and loudspeakers could become musical instruments.

The course Popular Music: Selling Rebellion offers a unique opportunity to explore the popular music world from the point of view of its relation to both politics and the industry.

In October 2014 a new publication on artistic research has been launched. The book is called Artistic Experimentation in Music. An Anthology, edited by Darla Crispin and Bob Gilmore, and published by Leuven University Press.

Knowledge and culture subproject 1:

In the field of Western art music, improvisation has become a much discussed topic. In this interdisciplinary study I argue that in this context, improvisation is not to be seen as a quasi-autonomous skill or art form, but as an aspect of music-making in general.

The aim of this research is to define the relationship between sources of articulation for different kinds of instrument in the period between the beginning of XVI century (first extant indications) and the end of XVIII century.

This thesis proposes multiple paths towards the development of a performance practice in Computer Music.

This research will focus on the relationship between the musical structure and musical time in the performance of 19th century music.

Launched in 2017, The Importance and Power of Music in Our Society is an open online course, taught by Professor of Auditory Culture Marcel Cobussen and music philosopher Hafez Ismaïli M’hamdi and accessible to anyone with an internet connection.

In this project, we plan to combine two strands of research in speech processing: (a) the impact of prosody on speech processing and (b) the impact of musical training on speech processing. In our project we will test 8 year-old children with different degrees of musical training: (a) primary school…

“Music is about everything else,” theater director Peter Sellars said upon accepting his Polar Music Prize back in 2014. Although it is about particular musical problems, Stanimiras dissertation is about ‘everything else’, too. What and how that is, could be summed up in different ways depending on…

In the field of Western art music, improvisation has become a much discussed topic. In this interdisciplinary study I argue that in this context, improvisation is not to be seen as a quasi-autonomous skill or art form, but as an aspect of music-making in general.

Andrea Giolai defended his thesis on 3 May 2017.

Over time Dutch and Indonesian composers, performers and music scholars have inspired each other and they continue to do so. The presence of the Dutch in the Netherlands East-Indies and Indonesia, but also the existence of large diasporic communities in the Netherlands have contributed to a mutual exchange…

For several years, contemporary composed music has been critiqued among others by funds, sponsors, and festival organizers for having lost contact with their audiences. This music has increasingly become a pursuit of a privileged, well-situated, and higher educated public, and is most often confined…

This study, Calypso, The Trinidadian Experience, has sought to establish links between calypso music and the construction and maintenance of identities, and to locate the genre as a mechanism (or as part of a broader mechanism) that has exerted on-going social influence within Trinidadian society…

What is the role of memory in contemporary music?

I would like to investigate what are the philosophical and practical consequences a reappraisal of the 17th-and 18th-century concept of taste may have for general and historical performance practice.

Composer Paul Craenen (1972) is actually a pianist, but as part of his PhD ceremony, he performed a composition on PVC pipes. Craenen studies the position and role of the body in music. ‘I am interested in what precedes the resulting sound’.

Vertrekkend vanuit een communicatief perspectief en concentrerend op mediatiseringsprocessen, formuleert deze dissertatie een alternatief voor het probleem van equivociteit binnen de studie naar populaire muziek.

How is it possible to play a song that is part of the rituals of other people? How to transpose an idea to the stage while maintaining respect for indigenous communities? Are these performances a way of throwing light on these indigenous communities looking for a strategy of decolonization? How is it…

What are the precise identities, possibilities and current practice examples of the various time frames in music and what bearings do they have individually and in combinations on the speed of the music?

Promotor: C.J. ten Cate

What type of violones were used to perform Bach’s music in his time? And which octaves and tunings are appropriate for his stringed bass instruments?

What was the relationship between women and modern media in different parts of Asia in the 20th century? Under what historical and social conditions did women achieve prominence in popular music in Asia?

Promotor: Prof.dr. S. Haring

Online cursus The Importance and Power of Music in our Society

What kind of attentional focus can enhance learning and performance for musicians?

This book collates thematic reflections on Cameroon music exalting Manu Dibango, one of the first-generation Cameroonian musicians, who bowed to Covid-19 on 24 March 2020.

How can we enhance inspiration in metric modal improvisation and subsequently, in modal composition?

If, as the works of John Cage suggest, there is “no such thing as silence,” then what are the markers that show us we are experiencing silence? - what are the performative cues during musical silence? - what are the auditory and visual bookends of silence in performance, i.e. what anticipates and…

Knowledge and culture subproject 1:

Are there elements of the lost performance practice of the nineteenth century that we can rediscover and use to shed new light on the performance of Brahms’ music for orchestra today?

Performances of solo keyboard repertoire can sound more or less polyphonic depending on the performer’s use of divergence in expression.

How can historically-informed performers step outside the confines of the work-concept?

'Audible locality' is the first thorough study on the cultural ramifications of recording technology on ethnic sensibility in Southeast Asia. Exploring chronologically the representation of Indonesia's regional culture through recording media, it recounts the Dutch East Indies colonial society's initial…

Artistic research has come of age, and with it the Orpheus Institute. Founded twenty years ago, the Institute’s purpose from the start has been to pursue research through the practice of musicians.