Completed PhDs

The concept of Historically Informed Performance Practice (HIPP) plays a prominent role in contemporary music scene. While initially focused on Early Music, this approach is now increasingly applied to music from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Central to HIPP is the pursuit of historically aware performances, a practice that remains relatively uncommon in the field of saxophone music. This doctoral research aims to explore this underexplored area by focusing on the historically...

This research focuses on gesture and its extraction from a performer's perspective, in the works for solo guitar.s by the French-Lebanese composer and visual artist Zad Moultaka (*1967, Lebanon). Based on the history of gesture and various currents of thought surrounding it since the 1930s, and on its expansion until the 2020s with the work of the IRCAM in France in particular, the author describes the gesture from a performer's perspective. He thus highlights the notion of an...

The performing and conducting of the chamber opera Julie of Philippe Boesmans combined with Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda of Claudio Monteverdi in an adaptation of Frederik Neyrinck were the starting point of the PhD in the Arts of Bart Bouckaert.

This research project assesses new ways to advance in practice and performance of demanding contemporary percussion music.

Joseph Jongen was born in 1873 and died in 1953 at age 70. He is generally considered as one of the most prominent Belgian composers after César Franck.  Particularly known for his organ and chamber music works, he also composed more than fifty art songs.The complete set of songs encompasses a wide scope of styles, from strophic romances to impressionist or Straussian-like songs, setting to music texts by various poets and writers -  some famous ones such as Baudelaire, Hellens or Verhaeren,...

This project aims to uncover the interferences between the seventeenth-century visual regime, the knowledge-theoretical context of the time and the artistic praxis of Baroque theatre. The starting point for this research is the life and work of John Wilmot (1647-1680), nicknamed The Monkey and also Earl of Rochester at the court of Charles II. Various researchers with an artistic and/or scientific background will try to reconstruct the mental, intellectual and tactile universe of the Monkey...

A performance is maybe the only art-form that emerges directly from the dimension of passing time. Probably this is the source of a performance’s potential: it is made out of burnt moments and whatever remains belongs solely to memory. Like a sculptor who chisels a sculpture with clay, the performer chisels an interpretation with passing time-moments.What happens when we observe a performance?

While continuously making an effort to improve performance quality, performing musicians don’t cease to challenge their own physical and artistic possibilities.  Two different approaches are widely spread: the “artistic approach”, often accused to lack uniformity and objectivity, and to be trial and error based, is an individual oriented method focusing on the whole playing apparatus with conclusions formulated in a personal terminology.  The “scientific approach”, often accused to have...

During 1920s and ‘30s the guitar underwent a renaissance in Spain, which brought with it the creation of modernist repertoire written for guitarists Miguel Llobet, Andrés Segovia, Regino Sáinz de la Maza, and Emilio Pujol. This PhD project presents my historically inspired performance of this repertoire. It  focuses on canonical works by such giants as Manuel de Falla, as well as a wealth of music that only recently resurfaced after long being buried in the turmoil of the Francoist regime. 

Enlightened Sound Moving; towards a media-independent intermedial method for intermedia art. In collaboration with FWO, Koninklijk Conservatorium Brussel, Vrije Universiteit Brussel and ChampdAction (2010-2014). Prof. Dr. Jean Paul Van Bendegem, Prof. Dr. Kathleen Coessens, Prof. Dr. Peter Swinnen.

The research carried out by Peter Holman and Rodolfo Baroncini in the 1990s has made it possible to recover from the oblivion of history the Compagnie di violini – ensembles of three to six instruments from the violin family. In the Sixteenth Century, these groups of violini were comprised of professional instrumentalists assembled into guilds and took part in many festive, secular and religious activities.

Historically, the conventional understanding of the classical pianist was almost exclusively confined to playing on the keyboard. This conception has been expanded and challenged in recent years with the emergence of a new repertoire that has expanded piano practice, transforming the pianist into a multi-skilled instrumentalist. This expansion has taken a number of directions, including special instrumental techniques focussing on other aspects of the instrument (e.g. strings, frame, pedals,...

Interdisciplinary Body is an artistic research, situated around the concepts of body and interdisciplinarity in the field of audiovisual arts, with the focus on the two types of cinema – fiction and non-fiction – on the one hand, and the subject of cinema – the body or the human portrayed – on the other hand. Both concepts converge themselves in the spectator, who is perceiving and therefore connecting with or reflecting at what s/he is watching. The relationship between the three elements:...

This PhD project by Jeremias Iturras aims to find a “creative technical convergence” between music and cinema. To elucidate this convergence, Iturras will first analyse certain film techniques (design, construction, structure, aesthetic ideas, etc.) based on specific examples from directors and films to see if it is possible and plausible to apply the “same” technical methods to a musical composition. He will look for the creation of “technical musical concepts” that will have as their origin...

Composition based on microtonal scales is enjoying increasing popularity. Xenharmonic composers  have usually limited themselves to one scale. However, the combination of microtonal scales has so far remained mostly unexplored. In "Le Sacre du Printemps" Igor Strawinsky combined modes based on the western tuning system. This approach is called polytonality. It would seem likely that the different microtonal scales can also be combined in compositions. This results in a multiplication of...

The doctoral research of Tomasz Konieczny explores the symbolic dimensions of the music of Hugo Wolf,Alexander Scriabin, and Claude Debussy. It is centralized around the symbolic Night, arguably a crucial nodein the web of symbolic interrelations. In the Romantic view, the nocturnal darkness, covering the appearances of the world, enables intuitive insights into the fundamental, metaphysical Wholeness of theworld. Tomas Konieczny demonstrates how music contributes to sucha revelation… and how...

This PhD in the Arts offers an in-depth reflection on the thoughts and creative process of his film N, The Madness of Reason.

Reflections on more than 40 years’ intensive practice of Early Music.

My research is about a lot of things, but most importantly, it’s about music. It’s about my relation to music. It’s about performing, composing. It’s about emotion, expression, and the soul. It’s about a musician’s thoughts, ideas, and inspiration.

As a musician, one is always a researcher. In so-called classical music or in any other style, the musician cannot escape the "research" aspect.

For this very own ‘teatro dell’ascolto’ – not in wood, but on paper and above all, in sound – the structure of ‘Prometeo’ and the idea of Camillo’s ‘Teatro della Memoria’, set the tone, as it were, as did the Prometheus trilogy (which has not survived complete) and the town plan of La Serenissima. The search through this theatre is intermingled with the Venetian labyrinth:  it has become a mosaic of proprietary texts that have accompanied my own activities as a performing musician for the...

How can one learn to improvise convincingly within the context of nineteenth-century piano repertoire? And why is it important to improvise on this repertoire in the twenty-first century? Using the music of Robert Schumann as a starting point, Bobby Mitchell’s doctoral research, Playing Schumann Again for the First Time, answers these questions through methods for a pianistic practice driven by experimentation that strives to find ever more layers where improvisation can take place, both in...

After the Fall PhD research is part of a long-term project in the field of documentary theatre aimed at addressing the political and social upheavals which have occurred over the last 30 years – from the fall of communism and the emergence of neoliberalism as dominant global ideology, to its recent descent into ultra- conservatism and neofascism. My research will follow two main lines of inquiry:

This research project is about the search of the lost musical language of the simple system flute.

It is well known that in his 1928 film adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's novella "The fall of the house of Usher", Jean Epstein not only drew on this masterpiece of so-called "fantastic" literature, but cleverly intertwined it with another novella by the same author, "The Oval Portrait". Yet these two stories are not enough to fully understand Epstein's images. Indeed, a closer look at the various scenes reveals subtle references to other texts by Poe, including "Ligeia" and "The Pit and the...

George Enescu (1881-1955) is considered one of the most prominent figures of twentieth-century Romanian music.

Sigurd Raschèr (1907-2001), born in Germany and emigrated to America just before the Second World War, is one of the most important pioneers and one of the most influential classical saxophonists of the 20th century. He built an international career as a soloist and encouraged many contemporary composers to write works for saxophone especially for him. In this way, he expanded the saxophone repertoire considerably.  Also as a pedagogue he developed a tradition that he passed on to his...

Since 2012, Jan Van Landeghem has been working on an artistic product, a transversal multimedial composition on texts of Emile Verhaeren: “Chansons de fou”. These seven socially engaged poems typify the misery of the rural population at the end of the 19th century. The crops failed, there was a grinding poverty, the discrepancy between the poor and the rich became bigger and bigger. People saught solutions in the factories of the new cities. Unfortunately, this situation would lead to World...

The Film Director as Archivist, a doctoral project in the arts, investigates with the aid of existing archive material the relationship between factual and artistic representations of history. At the root of the study is the collection of archive film about Brussels held by Cinematek, the Royal Belgian Film Archive. I have used that archive material in my artistic research in a variety of ways.

Performer-audience communication can easily be regarded as one of the biggest and therefor most debated problems the contemporary computer musician faces in a live performance situation. This can be accredited to a disassociation between the performative gestures and the sounds they produce. This notion of disconnection, which is absent in most traditional instruments, is intrinsic to the computer musician’s instrument. Furthermore, it’s inextricably linked to the idiomatic nature of the...

1. INTRODUCTION - Why Cole!?When glancing at the life and work of American composer and society figure Cole Porter (1891-1964), one soon comes to the conclusion that, nearly 50 years post mortem, the man's legacy and memory are not in bad shape.However, more in-depth research shows that things are not entirely rosy. Of the seven hundred songs of which both music and text - both by Porter - are still available, the 35 ones that are recorded are invariably the same.The question arises whether...

Unlike non-idiomatic improvisation with human improvisers, it is more difficult to create intense and surprising music when interacting with a computer. Also, the concept of improvisation as a musical dialogue is difficult for a computer to recognize. In this doctoral research, Peter van Bergen aims to translate his aesthetic views on musical improvisation and composition, as well as his musical experiences in interacting with human improvisers, into an environment where human musical...

The research was into the perception of orchestral timbres applied to the piano repertoire to enrich tone and to intensify the multi-interpretable aspects of a composition. Experimental investigation into this, influenced by the imagination (of the performer), represents a unique approach and leads to a totally new perspective for the performer.

Filmmaker Ellen Vermeulen stayed in Kurdistan, Turkey, during the city wars of 2015 to prepare a film about young people on the threshold to armed resistance. The film aimed to explore what drives someone to make such a radical choice and to depict the conditions leading to a departure to the mountains. 

Les Synthétistes was a collective of Belgian composers (René Bernier, Francis de Bourguignon, Gaston Brenta, Théo De Joncker, Robert Otlet, Marcel Poot, Maurice Schoemaker, and Jules Strens) who united in 1925 on the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of their celebrated teacher, Paul Gilson. Their intention was to synthesize various trends in music from 1925 onwards. During this period in Belgian music history, the concert band was an important tool for composers, especially because of the...

I’m an Artist / filmmaker and otaku. Otaku is a Japanese term for people with obsessive interests, commonly Anime, Manga and Japanese pop/sub-culture. It has been compared with mental sickness: ‘They’ say we’re perverted by imagery and moe, we lack basic social skills, empathy, even self-awareness.

I am writing a 'manual for documentary makers'. This is challenging, it would mean that there are methods, advices, rules for the 'good' documentary. It goes without saying that the manual is rather a book full of questions and concerns. An attempt to approach the documentary in a holistic way. The documentary: 'The history of the pig (within us)' is included in the handbook as a 'case'; and is analogous to the handbook in the sense that also in the documentary a holistic approach is at...

During four years, in order to obtain a PhD in the Arts at RITCS/VUB, experimental filmmaker Maurits Wouters has been researching the subject of fading collective memories in relation to the aesthetics of analog film. Wouters started his research with a collection of home videos made by the derelict  community around 'Het Bels Lijntje'; the popular name of the Tilburg - Turnhout train line, constructed in 1865 and shut down in 1973. The family history of Maurits Wouters is closely linked to...

The continuing evolution of the marimba’s modern performance practice has ushered myriad challenges to the current generation of performers. One uniting issue is that the marimba is an idiophone at its core. The sound is created by a mallet touching a wooden bar and making it vibrate. The impact is fast and the contact happens in a split second. The performer has no direct contact with his instrument while playing and has no direct influence on the resonance, which is often seen as a limiting...