PhD projects

Musical intertextuality and learned counterpoint: a case study of the music composed and collected by John Baldwin

My PhD project will explore and evaluate concepts such as intertextuality and transtextuality to describe aspects of interconnectedness between works of composers of late Renaissance England, looking particularly at the music collected by the musician and copyist John Baldwin (c.1560-1615).

Baldwin is unique in the way he collected and copied music into his own scorebook (sometimes called his "commonplace" book). The repertory is eclectic: secular madrigals are copied next to mass movements and motets. There is also a section of the book containing what seems to be didactic pieces or etudes. It is in these pieces of "learned" counterpoint that Baldwin seems to have been particularly influenced by his colleagues, whose pieces he copied next to his own.

By describing the similarities (also exploring the question "what is similarity in music") between Baldwin's pieces and those of his colleagues, and by discussing the border-like territory between what could be described as a common musical "grammar" and a particular style or genre, I hope to gain a clearer understanding of Baldwin and his professional network of musicians.

During World War II, when most of Sweden was set on war footing, Swedes were forced to concern themselves with emergency preparedness and supply problems. Not only public administration, businesses and nonprofit Sweden were forced to a time out from normal living and working circumstances, also the cultural sphere halted pending the outcome of the war. When peace finally came Sweden, as well as Western countries in general, saw a prolonged boom that in some respects lasted until the early 1970s. The state took one initiative after another and made large investments in education, public welfare and infrastructure.

My thesis is examining a post-war phenomenon of precisely this nature, namely the professionalization of violin teaching violin at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm. He is also looking into how an entirely new profession, that of violin pedagogues for the community music schools, arose at the Royal College at the same time, and how this was critical for the long-term improvement of standards in the violinist profession. A special case study is devoted to the violinist and pedagogue Sven Karpe, whose work as a teacher at the Royal College from 1950 and at summer courses for talented young violinists in Kall in Jämtland from 1954, came to be highly influential in the development of violin teaching methods. The emphasis of the thesis is on the possible interaction between the state initiated reform policy within higher music education and the work led by Sven Karpe to identify teaching methods that would promote sufficient teaching outreach to allow for real top level results in Swedish violin playing.

A presentation of my project will be available shortly.

In my PhD research I am looking to gain a greater understanding for the ways in which Italian opera was introduced in Sweden in the mid eighteenth century and how that can be connected to the various claims to power that different individuals and groups had during the weak monarchy of the age of liberty. Who imported Italian opera to Sweden and why?

Queen Lovisa Ulrika's opera productions in the 1750s have been the object of previous research, but the existence of arias and operas in other social context, such as public concerts and plays or in private music collections, was likely of great importance for the broader diffusion of opera and lay the foundation for its development in Sweden during the latter part of the eighteenth century and the nineteenth century.

Through studying previously unexplored source material, we can gain a better understanding of the role of opera in Sweden during the Age of liberty and of how Italian opera might have been used both inside and outside the court in order to strengthen political interests or the status of certain individuals. This can provide new perspectives to the use of opera seria and contribute to the ongoing discussion of the social function of opera in Europe during this time, as well as shed light on the processes of cultural exchange and appropriation and the role of music as a marker of status and identity.

My project studies the negotiation of Russian identity from 1990 to 1999 through the perspective of Russian rap. Foregrounding the aesthetics of rap, both musical and textual, as well as their relationship with the context of the period, by studying the ways in which post-Soviet identity loss and reconstruction was handled through rap provides an advantageous method of understanding how rap can act as a mediator of discourses which are then filtered through the perspective of the rapper and subsequently reflected in aesthetic choices.

Taking a look at three case studies, namely Bad Balance's 1994 album "Bad B. Raiders," Black and White's 1991 album, "Childhood," and the D.O.B. Community's 1997 album, "Rushun Roolett," the project focuses on how identity negotiation was aesthetically handled. At the time, rap was a new cultural form for Russia, having previously been introduced as early as 1979, although more famously by the mid-1980s thanks to Mikhail Gorbachev's social-economic policy of "Perestroika." Once the Soviet Union fell, Hip Hop culture helped remedy the radical transformation and destabilization of Russian life. Through rap, youth could find, negotiate, critique, and/or endorse a middle-ground between Western adoption and domestic identification. 

Building upon previous studies on Russian rap's connection to identity negotiation and budding research on "Russianness" in rap, as well as the more comprehensive analysis of rap as music, this project will focus on how the concepts of authenticity and "chernukha" (late-Soviet concept to describe a deromanticized look at society's underbelly and previously censored aspects) are aesthetically exemplified in 1990s Russian rap.