24 mai 2012

“Up and Down, Up and Down”
Jazz and Polyphony; Ellington and Strayhorn; Notation and Improvisation

Prof. Dr. Walter van de Leur

“Polyphony has been developed for centuries as a theoretical, historical and educational concept in music theory and musicology, as well as a metaphor,” according to Rokus de Groot, in the flyer that announced this year’s colloquium series. In the final colloquium, Walter van de Leur will look at polyphony as a musical practice in jazz, but also as a metaphor for the working methods of jazz composers Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn. Part of the presentation will be the close-reading of an Ellington autograph score in comparison with the final recording, to investigate how the two practices -- notation and performance -- relate to each other

Jazz-musicologist Walter van de Leur received his Ph.D. from the University of Amsterdam in 2002, for his research on Billy Strayhorn, published as Something to Live For: The Music of Billy Strayhorn (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002; winner of the 2003 Irving Lowens Book Award for Distinguished Scholarship from the Society of American Music). He conducted extensive research at the Duke Ellington Collection under two consecutive Smithsonian Institution Fellowships, in Washington DC, and furthermore researched and catalogued Billy Strayhorn’s musical legacy in the repository of his Estate, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Since 2001, Van de Leur teaches at the Conservatory of Amsterdam, and as of September 2007 he is Professor of Jazz and Improvised Music at the University of Amsterdam. From May 2010 until May 2013 he serves as Principal Investigator and Senior Researcher for Rhythm Changes: Jazz Cultures and European Identities, a project financially supported by the HERA Joint Research Program.