Thomas Batelaan

Hi, I'm a musicologist and writer from Amsterdam. Since 2023, I've been at Cambridge to pursue my PhD with Professor Bettina Varwig.

In my research, I ask how it came to be that today, Bach's music is regarded as some of the most scientific, objective, technical in the classical repertoire. In the past few years, this reception has become even more palpable; computer engineers, both at universities and private companies, among which some of the largest tech companies in the world, have tried to imitate Bach's musical style using machine learning. In the age of ChatGPT, it seems a good time to ask why Bach's music seems to have such an affinity with computational intelligence.

My PhD shows that this is not merely a result of technical development; the fantasy of automating Bach's music predates these actual attempts. In the past eighty years, I argue, Bach's music has drifted into dialogue with science and technology, giving rise more and more to an image of his music as systematic, dehumanized, and fundamentally modern. More broadly, my research has brought me face to face with essential questions about the way we 'do' reception history, the way we conceive of musical style, and the way societal discourse positions Western 'classical' music.
My work is generously supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and Corpus Christi College. I also received a grant from Het Cultuurfonds, a Dutch national funder of the arts.

Before my PhD, I got my research MA in Musicology from Utrecht University. I made regular and incidental contributions to various public media, such as the Dutch newspaper of record NRC, the literary journal Tirade, and Dutch national public radio. I also worked on the Netherlands Bach Society's recording project All of Bach.

If you'd like to get in touch, feel free to drop me a line at tfpb2@cam.ac.uk. I'd love to hear from you