Loren Ludwig
Treble & Bass Viol, Producer; Advisory Board
Loren Ludwig is a scholar/performer and teacher whose research explores the materiality of musical instruments and the ways that music and musical technologies (instruments, notation, and performance practices) foster social intimacy and the formation of knowledge and shared meaning. Recent publications at the nexus of musicology and the history of science investigate the intersection of music and alchemy in Michael Maier's 1618 emblem book Atalanta Fugiens (in Furnace and Fugue, winner of 2022 American Historical Association Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Creativity in Digital History) and chronicle the use of the viola da gamba as a dual scientific and musical instrument to advance new theories of musical temperament in the long eighteenth century (in BACH: Journal of the Riemenschneider Bach Institute). A related dimension of Loren's research is on the history of musical and organological revivalism—the periodic reemergence of particular European instruments and performance practices in both European and colonial contexts. Publications documenting the presence and use of the viola da gamba in eighteenth-century Maryland and Virginia (including discussion of a newly discovered manuscript of solo music for viola da gamba from Virginia dated 1739) and on Civil Rights luminary Bayard Rustin's use of Elizabethan music as part of his social justice activism offer two different visions of how Renaissance musical instruments and their associated performance practices have been refigured to serve new communities and meanings.
Loren is currently at work on a monograph on a lost tradition of ensemble string playing in Colonial and Early Republic New England. “Ingenious Mechanisms”: New England Viols and Vernacular Luthiery in the Early Republic combines organology, historiography, and performance to reconstruct the New England viol consort and its contexts and has entailed restoring and learning to play New England viols of varying sizes. This research casts the viol in New England as an emblem of emergent relationships between technology and vernacular culture and interrogates how changes in the construction and use of musical instruments reshaped early republic American musical culture.
Loren received a PhD in Critical and Comparative Studies in Music from the University of Virginia in 2011 and studied viola da gamba and historical performance at Oberlin Conservatory and as a Fulbright Fellow at the Royal Conservatory of the Hague. He has received funding from the Mellon Foundation, that American Musicology Society, and the Viola da Gamba Society of America. Loren performs and records widely on the viola da gamba, including as a founding member of critically acclaimed ensembles ACRONYM and LeStrange Viols.