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.