Bart Demuyt studied at the Lemmens Institute in Leuven (LUCA School of Arts Campus Lemmens), where he specialized in early music and singing. After a career as a professional musician with renowned ensembles such as Collegium Vocale Gent, Capilla Flamenca, La Chapelle Royale de Paris and La Petite Bande, Bart Demuyt successively became a member of the artistic team of Musica, Impulscentrum voor Muziek, General Director of the Flanders Festival Musica Antiqua Brugge and Artistic Director of Concertgebouw Brugge.

In 2008, he became Director of the Alamire Foundation, which is affiliated with the Musicology Research Group at KU Leuven. A year later, he also became General and Artistic Director of AMUZ (Festival van Vlaanderen Antwerpen), for which he still curates the annual early music festival Laus Polyphoniae. Since 2016, Bart Demuyt was appointed Senior Innovation Manager of Musical Heritage at KU Leuven. With Prof. David Burn, Bart Demuyt is General editor of the series Leuven Library of Music in Facsimile.

Countertenor Stratton Bull studied singing at the conservatory in his birthplace, Toronto, then in The Hague with the tenor Marius Van Altena and in Amsterdam with the baritone Max van Egmond. He has performed with leading ensembles such as Tafelmusik Toronto, Hesperion XXI, Cantus Cölln and Capilla Flamenca, and with conductors including Andrew Parrott, Sigiswald Kuijken and Bernard Labadie.

He has a particular interest in the performance of Renaissance music from the source and the interpretation of early music notation. He can indulge this love to his heart’s content with the ensembles Cappella Pratensis and Thamyris, in which he takes on the role of both singer and conductor. Stratton Bull is a staff member of the Alamire Foundation and teaches Renaissance music courses.

David J. Burn is a professor of musicology and the head of the Early Music Research Group at KU Leuven. His research focuses mainly on the latter part of the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries, particularly on Heinrich Isaac and his contemporaries, on interactions between polyphony, Gregorian and liturgy in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance, on fifteenth and sixteenth century music and institutions in the Holy Roman Empire, and on source studies, text criticism and analysis of early music.

He co-edits the Journal of the Alamire Foundation with Sarah Ann Long, and co-edits the Leuven Library of Music in Facsimile with Bart Demuyt.

Antonio Chemotti studied musicology at the University of Pavia where he received his Master’s degree with a critical edition of the Kyrie settings in the manuscript Trent 93 from the Biblioteca Capitolare in Trento. As a research fellow at the Ludwig Maximilian Universität München, he completed a dissertation on early modern polyphonic music for the Liturgy of the Dead. Since 2016 and until last year, Antonio’s home base was the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, where he worked as a postdoctoral researcher on the HERA project ‘Sound Memories: The Musical Past in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe’, and where he was also part of the editorial board of the journal Muzyka. In 2020, he was awarded the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship of the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, which allowed him to work at the Villa I Tatti in Florence in 2020-2021.

As a mandate holder of the FED-t-WIN programme ‘From Script to Sound. Connecting Heritage and Art through Research and Technology’, Antonio is joining the teams of both the Alamire Foundation and the KBR. The project frames a longterm collaboration between the Alamire Foundation and the KBR, and thus strengthens the already existing ties between the two institutions. ‘From Script to Sound’ aims to unlock and valorize musical heritage from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance through multidisciplinary and innovative research.

Stef Coninx boasts an extensive and varied career in the music sector. As a young musicologist (KU Leuven) he took over teaching duties from Herman Baeten in academies and schools in the North of Limburg. After that, he worked for the Culture Department of the City of Hasselt for several years and then worked parttime as a music programmer in CC Strombeek-Bever and in the VRT audiotheque. From the 1990s on, Brussels would be his base for a number of exciting jobs: product manager and marketing manager classics at PolyGram/Universal Music, director of Muziekcentrum Vlaanderen and staff member of International Relations & Classical Music at Kunstenpunt.

Within the international activities of the Alamire Foundation, Stef is now putting his knowledge and experience to use in a specific project within the Integrated Database for Early Music (IDEM). The numerous manuscripts (including chansons, madrigals, and motets) that have been digitized by the Alamire Digital Lab in recent years, contain not only music but also text material in various languages. These texts are in themselves often fascinating research material, both in content and in form. The project 'Lost in Translation' aims to provide a practical solution for finding a way through the maze of centuries old texts and their translations via IDEM.

Born in 1997 in Sever do Vouga, Vasco is a Portuguese harpsichordist and fortepianist. Having learned music as a self-taught student, it was in 2016 that he decided to leave his degree in Electronic Engineering and Telecommunications and pursued his greater ambitions by entering first place in ESMAE (Escola Superior de Música e Artes do Espetáculo do Porto) in Bachelor of Early Music - Harpsichord - with Ana Mafalda Castro. Since then, he has participated in numerous concerts and Masterclasses in Portugal and abroad, not only discovering but also participating in the evolution of the world of early music.

After graduating in Porto, he is now continuing his studies in Brussels at the Koninklijk Conservatorium Brussel with Bart Naessens in the Master of Harpsichord and, simultaneously, Piet Kuijken in the Master of Pianoforte; also with Catalina Vicens as professor of Renaissance music for keyboards and María González in Basso Continuo.

Henry T. Drummond is a postdoctoral researcher who specializes in digital musicology, with a disciplinary focus on late-medieval song and early modern liturgical chant. His postdoctoral project uses innovative research to analyze and valorize liturgical plainchant of the Low Countries through digital technology. Henry is part of the FWO-funded 'Sound of Music' project team, which combines the expertise of KU Leuven, the Alamire Foundation, and McGill University. The goal of this project is to use digital humanities to examine large bodies of chant repertoire through manuscript digitization, digital document retrieval, optical character recognition, optical music recognition, electroacoustic engineering, and machine learning.

Prior to his postdoc, Henry completed his DPhil at Merton College, Oxford under the supervision of Prof. Elizabeth Eva Leach. His research at Oxford focused on the Cantigas de Santa Maria, a vast collection of Galician-Portuguese song written at the court of Alfonso X of Castile in the late-thirteenth century. During his doctoral studies, Henry T. Drummond researched text-music relations, intertextual dialogue, refrain-based forms, and song subjectivity in vernacular song on the Iberian Peninsula. His doctoral studies also included an Erasmus + traineeship at the Institució Milà i Fontanals (CSIC) in Barcelona, under the mentorship of Prof. Tess Knighton and through her Marie Curie project, "Urban Musics and Musical Practices in Sixteenth-Century Europe". It was at this research posting that he became fascinated by archival research, sound studies, and digitization of fragile documentary sources in the Barcelona archives. Prior to his graduate studies, Henry read music at Jesus College, Cambridge, and studied historical performance (viola da gamba) with Alison Crum at Trinity College, London and Hille Perl at the Hochschule für Künste, Bremen.

He has just finished his first monograph, titled The Cantigas de Santa Maria: Power and Persuasion at the Alfonsine Court. He has published with Music Analysis and Medium Ævum, and has a forthcoming article with the Journal of the Royal Musical Association. Henry also teaches musicological subjects from all periods between 1100 and 1800, with particular specialisms in digital musicology, musical analysis, music theory, text-music relations, and musical court culture.

Rudi Knoops worked as a media producer and editor at the Audiovisual Department of KU Leuven. At the same time he developed his artistic practice, doing freelance work for Behoud de Begeerte and VRT, among others. At LUCA School of Arts he was a lecturer in Media theory, Experimental media, and Media archaeology. In 2017, he received his doctorate in the arts from LUCA School of Arts / KU Leuven / UAntwerpen. In the context of that practice-based and media-archeological research, which focused on the seventeenth-century media technology known as cylindrical anamorphosis, he created the installation Speculum Musurgica. This  work, commissioned by the Alamire Foundation, premiered in 2015 as part of the exhibition Petrus Alamire - Polyphony in the Picture and was exhibited internationally.

In early 2019, he started working for the Alamire Foundation as coordinator of the Library of Voices and as a staff member for Media, Technology, and Innovation. In this position, Rudi is setting out a number of lines of research which are both an extension of his doctoral research and also take further steps in the field of mixed reality. This research forms part of such projects as the FWO/Strategic Basic Research ‘The Sound of Music’, which focuses on musical life in the Habsburg-Burgundian Low Countries through the study and valorization of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century plainchant sources.

Brett Kostrzewski is a Ph.D. student at Boston University, currently visiting KU Leuven and the Alamire Foundation on a fellowship from the Belgian American Educational Foundation (BAEF). Brett arrived in Leuven last March to complete his dissertation on the motets of Josquin des Prez in the years around 1500, with a special emphasis on music at the French royal court during those years and the role Josquin’s music may have played in certain stylistic developments there.

In addition to his dissertation work, he has additional ongoing research projects surrounding notation, codicology, and the circulation of music in late fifteenth-century Europe. Brett has published an article on Josquin’s Missa La sol fa re mi in the Journal of Musicology. He co-edited (and contributed to) a themed section on L’homme armé for the Foundation’s own Journal of the Alamire Foundation with his wife, Rachel Carpentier. Brett and Rachel also co-founded the ensemble Sourcework, which rehearses and performs fifteenth- and sixteenth-century polyphony from original notation and has given concerts in the United States and Europe.

Margarita Salas Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Valladolid and Associate Researcher at KU Leuven.

Research project: Musical exchange between Spain and the Low Countries in the 16th-17th centuries.

Duration: 1 January 2022 - 31 December 2024

Project supervisors: Soterraña Aguirre Rincón (University of Valladolid) and David Burn (KU Leuven).

Pieter Mannaerts studied musicology and philosophy at KU Leuven and the Technische Universität Berlin and obtained a Ph.D. in musicology (2008) with a dissertation on the Tongeren plainchant manuscripts. He specializes in plainchant from the Low Countries, with a focus on historiae, chant reform, and music from Flemish beguinages. Besides his focus on early music, he has a research interest in the music of the 1920s and 30s, and has published on symphonic music at the Belgian radio, Flemish composers, film music, and jazz heritage from the interwar period. Pieter is an amateur singer and pianist.

Pieter Mannaerts has held various positions, including lecturer (Tilburg Conservatory), early music and young audience programmer, communication manager, and translation co-ordinator. As a staff member of the Alamire Foundation since 2020, he has worked as a communication and research co-ordinator and has contributed as a co-ordinator to IDEM. Currently, Pieter is a postdoctoral research fellow (KU Leuven / Alamire Foundation) on the project Lost in Translation? Multilingualism in Early Song Repertory (1350-1550), which aims to contribute to a better understanding of multilingualism from a specific historical perspective: medieval and early modern song in the Low Countries. A multidisciplinary collaboration will focus on mapping out multilingualism in the songs’ material sources, within the song repertory itself, and in the circulation of both.

Paul Newton-Jackson is an FWO Junior Postdoctoral Fellow with the Early Music Research Group at KU Leuven in Belgium. At present, he is leading a project entitled “Creating Many-Voice Polyphony in Sixteenth-Century Scotland”, in which he analyses compositional practices and liturgical contexts in sacred music for large vocal ensembles, focusing on Scottish connections with musical practices in the Low Countries. In 2023, he was a Centre for Research Collections Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh, carrying out a project tracing the journeys of colonial materials such as ebony, mahogany and ivory in eighteenth-century keyboard instruments. In 2022, he completed a PhD at Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge, with a thesis entitled Georg Philipp Telemann and the Invention of “The Polish Style”: Musical Polishness in the Early Modern German Imagination, and has since published on the myth of “Polish rhythms” in early modern Polish dances such as the polonaise and mazurka. He has also published on the relationship between theoretical and practical understandings of musical time in eighteenth century Germany, particularly in relation to a corpus of unusual works in mixed meter by Telemann and his contemporaries.

Ryan O'Sullivan started his doctoral research in 2018 on the Leuven Chansonnier, an exceptional songbook with polyphonic chansons from the late fifteenth century that was recently rediscovered. His research focuses, among other things, on the Leuven Chansonnier as a material object, the content of the songbook, the unica, the provenance of the source, the poetry, and also the reassessing of related sources.

In addition, Ryan also works on the Lost in Translation research project.

Lynda Sayce studied music at the University of Oxford, followed by postgraduate studies in lute, and a Ph.D. in musicology. As a lutenist Lynda is associated with such ensembles as La Serenissima, Ex Cathedra, and The King’s Consort, and directs her own ensemble, the lute quartet Chordophony. As continuo player, she is a regular guest with Le Concert d’Astrée, Les Talens Lyriques, and the Berlin Philharmonic. A lifelong interest in photography and a love of manuscripts led her into digitization, which she has combined with her performing career since 2004.

As research associate of the Alamire Foundation, Lynda has operated the mobile Alamire Digital Lab since its inception and has travelled the world with it. In addition to significant digitization programmes in Flanders and Brussels, she manned the Alamire Digital Lab in projects in the Vatican City, Halifax (CA), Delft (NL), and Gdańsk (PL), among others. Lynda is leaving shortly for an important ADL mission in Warsaw (PL).

Karolien Selhorst works on the further development of the Integrated Database for Early Music. Karolien studied musicology and business language at KU Leuven from 1991 to 1996. After completing her studies, she worked for Mallemuze/Musica, where she coordinated summer music courses, music projects for children and teenagers, masterclasses, several editions of the Day of Early Music (Alden Biesen), and Laus Polyphoniae. She combined this with a parttime function at the music publisher Alamire, editing the magazines Musica Antiqua and Contra.

Her work with the publisher brought her in contact with the Alamire Foundation, in connection with the editions of Monumenta Flandriae Musica and the Yearbooks of the Alamire Foundation. She then studied information management while working in a music store and at the Study Centre for Flemish Music, where she managed a composer database, did editorial work, and catalogued nineteenth-century songs in manuscripts and prints. After this intense period of professional activity in publishing, organizing, and facilitating music, Karolien moved to Montreal, where early music moved slightly to the background but didn’t disappear completely. She returned to the “Old World” in 2020, and started an exciting new chapter as staff member at the Alamire Foundation since 2021.

After lessons in oboe, piano, and cello at her local music academy, Aletheia Vanackere started her studies in musicology at KU Leuven in 2015. An Erasmus year at the University of Newcastle and an exciting internship at the opera house La Monnaie provided a broad musical field of interest ranging from the polyphony of the Low Countries, to opera and contemporary pop music. She then integrated an analysis of the fascinating relationship between the classical and popular repertoire in her master's thesis on the operas of Philippe Boesmans.

In February 2020, Aletheia joined the Alamire Foundation as part of the team working on the inventory of the documentation centre. She then worked as a research staff member on various projects, including the project on the Leuven Chansonnier, the Guide to Early Music and the development of several documentaries and docu-concerts for alamire.tv. Aletheia also writes the monthly newsletter and helps with the communication strategy.

Barbara Van den Abeele joined the Alamire Foundation team at the beginning of June 2023. After studying Archaeology and Art History at KU Leuven, she started her career as a public relations officer at the Royal Museum of Art and History. She then worked for a number of years in the publishing world as editorial manager, but the love for history and heritage always remained.

In 2021, she took another step into Leuven's cultural heritage field as she helped set up several ateliers and working groups of the not-for-profit group Erfgoedlabo. At the Alamire Foundation, Barbara will help monitor and support both administration, communication, and publications.

Peter Van den Borre worked as a location manager on film productions at home and abroad for some fifteen years, including three films by Dominique Deruddere, Rosie by Patrice Toye, Villa des Roses by Frank Van Passel, and Angel by François Ozon. Peter has been a faithful visitor to the early music festival in Saintes (FR), his favourite festival, offering performances not only by Collegium Vocale Gent but artists from all corners of the world and musical genres from the Middle Ages to today. 

In 2007, he seized the opportunity to become production manager at Collegium Vocale Gent. He worked there on international projects ranging from eight to eighty musicians. In May 2023, Peter joined the Alamire Foundation. He takes on logistical and production tasks: organizing the Voices of Passion festival, directing the lab activities in the House of Polyphony, coordinating international exhibitions and polyphonic events, managing the instrument collection, and planning film productions for alamire.tv, ...

Maarten Vanderlinden joined the Alamire Foundation three years ago. He brings to the Foundation a passion for books, history, and literature. He started his professional career with us after studying classical languages and artificial intelligence at KU Leuven. As a staff member for documentation, he is responsible for the management of both the physical library collections of the Library of Voices, and the digital collections of music manuscripts and prints that the Alamire Foundation makes available through the Integrated Database for Early Music. This year he is taking an additional postgraduate course in ‘Information Management in Libraries’ at Erasmus Brussels University and is doing an internship at the Royal Library of Belgium.

Laurent Vanderstokken graduated in 2019 as Master of Film Direction from the RITCS School of Arts in Brussels. His Master’s work was the historical short film Papa brengt de wereld mee, which has subsequently received awards and selections at several festivals, including Osaka, Oslo, and Leuven. In 2016, he founded his own company. Besides projects around (historical) fiction–his great passion–he also directs multi-camera shoots, advertisements, and documentaries. In 2019 he set up 'Studio Vanderstokken', a physical location that offers both young creators and established names a flexible place to film. Laurent believes very interesting things can happen at the intersection between fact and fiction.

Since 2021, with the filming for the series MISSE JOSQUIN, Laurent has been the permanent film director of the Alamire Foundation. His background in history and his feel for music has proved to be a winning combination for exploring the audiovisual potential of polyphony, drawing on the knowledge and research available through the Alamire Foundation.

He is currently working on several projects for alamire.tv that will appear soon.

An Verbeeck joined the Alamire Foundation in April 2020 as Personal Assistant. An supports the management team, planning appointments and activities, and ensuring the general daytoday running of the organization. She is well acquainted with the Foundation and its operations from her previous work as administrative assistant with the organization from 2010 to 2017. An obtained a masters in applied linguistics and has a degree in corporate communication. She completed a thesis on scientific communication, with a specific focus on the workings of the Alamire Foundation. In her free time An sings in the pop choir Vocalicious, plays guitar, and takes singing and piano lessons.

Miriam Wendling studied historical musicology at Northwestern University and medieval studies at the University of Toronto. In 2012 she completed her Ph.D. in music at the University of Cambridge with a thesis entitled 'Musical Notation in Bamberg, 1007-1300'. From 2012 to 2015 she held postdoctoral scholarships in Hamburg.

Until 2021, she was working on new research at KU Leuven and the Alamire Foundation. Miriam is fascinated by the use of liturgy to tell stories about the lives and deaths of people who lived in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern era. In her research on the 'Cantors and Catafalques' project she looked at writings from Medieval and Early Modern nuns and clerics alongside known (and unknown) liturgies.

Until 2021, Marianne Gillion worked on the research project According to Antwerp, Reformed to Rome: Music, Liturgies, and Identities in the Bishopric of Antwerp (1559–1801). The project focused on the production, practice and performance of plainchant during this period in the main institutions in the bishopric of Antwerp: the Cathedral of Our Lady and the Church of Saint James (1559-1801).

Karin Lagergren is associate professor in musicology at Linnaeus University (Sweden) and Research Associate at the Alamire Foundation. Her research is primarily focused on early music and Gregorian chant, with a special interest in plainchant from medieval Scandinavia and the chant tradition in the Order of Saint Birgitta of Sweden, especially as it developed in the Low Countries. Karin is currently preparing a monograph on chant and liturgy in the Order of the Birgittines: Birgittine Chantscapes. Chant and Liturgy in the Order of St Birgitta of Sweden Fourteenth – Twenty-First Centuries to be published by IRILIS. She is also a music teacher and singer and is active as a freelance musician and pedagogue in the area of early vocal music. She frequently gives lectures and workshops outside the world of academia. Sinds 2006 she is the artistic leader of the vocal ensemble Gemma that specializes in medieval chant from the Scandinavian countries.

Musicologist and historian Grantley McDonald focuses on the place of music within learned discourse in the fifteenth and sixteenth century, especially its connections with philosophy, theology, and medicine. As a research fellow for the universities of Vienna and Oxford, he has been working on the music of the Habsburg courts in the hundred year period from 1440 to 1540 for the past five years.

Grantley has been closely connected to the Alamire Foundation since 2010, first as a postdoctoral researcher, then as a research associate and more recently as a staff member. Starting October 2021, he coordinated the VGP-Foundation funded project focussed on the famous Basses Danses-manuscript of Margaret of Austria (B-Br 9085) for one year. The Alamire Foundation and the KBR have decided to carry out thorough research on this manuscript and to publish a new, high quality facsimile in the series Leuven Library of Music in Facsimile.

Prof. Dr. Bart De Moor is a full professor at the STADIUS Centre for Dynamic Systems, Signal Processing and Data Analysis of the Department of Electrical Engineering of KU Leuven and a visiting professor at IMEC and the University of Siena. Professor De Moor has been Chief of Cabinet for Federal Minister of Science Policy Wivina Demeester, Science Advisor to Flemish Minister-President Luc Van den Brande, Head of the Socio-Economic Cabinet of Flemish Minister-President Yves Leterme, Vice-Rector for International Policy at KU Leuven and Scientific Director of the Medical Information Technology Department at iMinds.

Prof. Dr. Bart De Moor is a full professor at the STADIUS Centre for Dynamic Systems, Signal Processing and Data Analysis of the Department of Electrical Engineering of KU Leuven and a visiting professor at IMEC and the University of Siena. Professor De Moor has been Chief of Cabinet for Federal Minister of Science Policy Wivina Demeester, Science Advisor to Flemish Minister-President Luc Van den Brande, Head of the Socio-Economic Cabinet of Flemish Minister-President Yves Leterme, Vice-Rector for International Policy at KU Leuven and Scientific Director of the Medical Information Technology Department at iMinds.

Prof. Dr. Bart De Moor is a full professor at the STADIUS Centre for Dynamic Systems, Signal Processing and Data Analysis of the Department of Electrical Engineering of KU Leuven and a visiting professor at IMEC and the University of Siena. Professor De Moor has been Chief of Cabinet for Federal Minister of Science Policy Wivina Demeester, Science Advisor to Flemish Minister-President Luc Van den Brande, Head of the Socio-Economic Cabinet of Flemish Minister-President Yves Leterme, Vice-Rector for International Policy at KU Leuven and Scientific Director of the Medical Information Technology Department at iMinds.

David J. Burn is a professor of musicology and the head of the Early Music Research Group at KU Leuven. His research focuses mainly on the latter part of the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries, particularly on Heinrich Isaac and his contemporaries, on interactions between polyphony, Gregorian and liturgy in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance, on fifteenth and sixteenth century music and institutions in the Holy Roman Empire, and on source studies, text criticism and analysis of early music.

He co-edits the Journal of the Alamire Foundation with Sarah Ann Long, and co-edits the Leuven Library of Music in Facsimile with Bart Demuyt.

Bart Raymaekers is Vice-Rector for Humanities, Culture, Arts and Heritage of KU Leuven and also a member of the Alamire Foundation's Board. He is also a professor at the Higher Institute for Philosophy of KU Leuven. Professor Raymaekers holds a PhD in Philosophy and has already taken on several policy positions within KU Leuven. From 2013 to 2017 he was Dean of the Higher Institute of Philosophy.