Our Team – Academy for Musicology and Musicianship

Walter van de Leur

Walter van de Leur is professor of Jazz and Improvised Music at the University of Amsterdam, on behalf of the Conservatory of Amsterdam, where he is research coordinator. His work focuses on jazz historiography, reception, and meaning.

He is the author of Something to Live For: The Music of Billy Strayhorn (Oxford UP 2002), Jazz and Death: Reception, Rituals, and Representations (Routledge 2023), and the founding editor of the forthcoming five-volume Oxford History of Jazz in Europe (Oxford UP).

Barbara Titus

Barbara Titus is an Associate Professor of cultural musicology at the University of Amsterdam. She is the author of two books Recognizing Music as an Art Form: Friedrich Th. Vischer and German music criticism, 1848-1887 (Leuven University Press, 2016), and Hearing Maskanda: Musical Epistemologies in South Africa (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022).

Barbara studied musicology at Utrecht University and gained her doctorate from Oxford University in the United Kingdom (M.St. Lincoln College [2000], D.Phil. St Anne's College [2005]). After her engagement with the Hegelian philosophical impact on 19th-century German music criticism for her doctorate, she shifted her attention from German metaphysics to South African street music (maskanda) in 2007, with the explicit aim to question the polarity that these two fields of investigation still seem to represent.

Her articles have been published in journals such as Acta Musicologica, Ethnomusicology, SAMUS: South African Music Studies and the Dutch Journal of Music Theory. Barbara is a fellow at the African Studies Centre Leiden (ASCL) Community. She is co-editor of the journal the world of music (new series), and is a member of the advisory board for the journal Music Theory and Analysis.

From 2008 to 2013, Barbara worked as an assistant professor teaching European music history post-1800 at Utrecht University. During two extensive field trips for her research into maskanda in 2008 and 2009, she was a visiting professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa. In the winter semester 2013-14, she was a guest professor at the Georg-August-Universität in Göttingen, Germany. In the spring of 2016, she was a researcher in residence at the University of Vienna in Austria as a Balzan Visiting Scholar.

Barbara is the curator of the Jaap Kunst Sound Collection at the University of Amsterdam. In this capacity she is the Project Leader and First Principal Investigator of the JPICH-funded project Decolonizing Southeast Asian Sound Archives (DeCoSEAS) that renegotiates established understandings of heritage curation.

Otto Stuparitz

Otto Stuparitz is a cultural musicologist, postdoctoral researcher at the KITLV, and a lecturer of Cultural Musicology in the Musicology Department at the University of Amsterdam. His primary research interests include transnational musical histories, music and violence, and the traditional, sacred, popular, and vernacular musics of colonial and post-colonial Indonesia. More broadly his work is concerned with ethnographic archives, transmission and sustainability, and cultural politics. His current book project focuses on cultural practices related to jazz in Indonesia, and their connections to the Netherlands and the United States, through emerging forms of circulation and preservation shaped by grassroots archivists and the embodied listening of intergenerational archival users.

Educated in interdisciplinary programs interested in the anthropology of music, Stuparitz’s research understands music as culture. He received his B.A in Musicology from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology at the University of California, Los Angeles. His scholarship has long been interested in issues of cultural transmission, preservation, and sustainability. He was introduced to gamelan during his bachelor’s program and soon performed a concert blending Balinese gamelan and jazz at the Bali Arts Festival in 2008. He went on to research the social paradoxes of Balinese gamelan pedagogues transmitting religious, cultural, and environmental knowledge while also participating in a capitalist labor market. He became a longstanding performer with traditional and post-traditional gamelan ensembles in Southern California and has performed at venues such as Disney Hall and the California Institute of the Arts. He contributed to the album Mujo (2023) by Gamelan Merdu Kumala and the film Bali Beats of Paradise (2018). He has worked as a bassist, composer, and arranger with West Javanese jazz fusion musicians on the album Bluesukan (2020).

Maya Verlaak

Maya Verlaak is a Belgian composer (Ghent, 1990). She describes her compositional process as a scrutinising compositional position in which the creative process is guided by the context. This results in the development of different compositional techniques for each creative endeavour. She develops novel approaches for each situation, never taking anything for granted. This way of working opens up her compositional practice towards new methods, creative solutions and playfulness. Sharing her creative process is important to her so she develops new notation systems to communicate her concepts. Her compositions are written in such a way that the performers have insight into the compositional process.

Maya's works has been commissioned and performed worldwide. Her music appears on NMC Recordings (Next Wave, 2014), Birmingham Record Company (Trace, 2024; Tape Piece, 2020) and Another Timbre (All English Music is Greensleeves, 2020). She is a founding member of the Post-Paradise concert series and Acid Police Noise Ensemble, and is currently a member of iii (instrument inventors initiative).

Maya studied composition with a minor in sonology at the Royal Conservatoire of The Hague (NL). In 2019 she was awarded a PhD from Royal Birmingham Conservatoire (Birmingham City University, UK) funded by the AHRC Midlands3Cities Doctoral Training Partnership. She has been a principal subject composition teacher at the Conservatoire of Amsterdam (NL) since 2018.

Julia Kursell

Julia Kursell is professor and chair of the Institute of Musicology at the University of Amsterdam. She studied musicology, Slavic philology and comparative literature in Munich, Moscow and Los Angeles, and completed her doctoral studies at Munich University with a thesis on music in the early Russian Avant-Garde. Before coming to Amsterdam, she was assistant professor at the Slavic Department of Munich University, and research fellow at the Center for Literary and Cultural Studies, Berlin. From 2004 to 2011 she worked as research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, where she was a member of the research group “Experimentalization of Life”. In 2013, she received the Habilitation (professorial degree) in musicology and history of science from Technical University, Berlin, for her book Epistemologie des Hörens: Helmholtz' physiologische Grundlegung der Musiktheorie. Her research interests include 20^th and 21^st-century composition, the history of musicology and the relation between music and science. She is co-director of the UvA's Vossius Center for the History of Humanities and Sciences (http://vossius.uva.nl) and a founding editor of the journal History of Humanities (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/hoh/current).

Michiel Schuijer

Michiel Schuijer is head of Research at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam and study leader of the Composition and Music Theory department. Schuijer focuses his research on the juncture of music theory, historical musicology, performance, and heritage. His book Analyzing Atonal Music: Pitch-Class Set Theory and Its Contexts (University of Rochester Press, 2008) was awarded the Emerging Scholar Award of the American Society for Music Theory in 2010. With John Koslovsky, he edited a volume titled Music Performance Encounters: Collaboration and Confrontations (Routledge, forthcoming). He is the project leader of the Academies for Musicology and Musicianship in Amsterdam (AMMA) and Utrecht (AMMU): two study programs offered jointly by a conservatory and a university.

John Koslovsky

John Koslovsky is a teacher and researcher in music theory and musicology. He is department chair of the music theory and history department at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam, and is an affiliate researcher in the humanities at Utrecht University. His research interests include the history of music analysis, Schenkerian and linear-graphic methodogies, intertextuality, performativity, and the history of ideas in Western music more generally. Within the AMMA he engages with students and his fellow teachers about a wide range of societal, aesthetic, and contemporary cultural topics, which touch upon aspects of race, gender, artistic quality and meaning, and modes of understanding music from "structural" and "post-structural" points of view.