Congratulations to recent PhD graduate Adrian So who has been awarded the Albi Rosenthal Visiting Fellowship in Music at the Bodleian Libraries, Oxford.

Photo of Adrian So by Mr Boron Li

Adrian’s project at the Bodleian will investigate the origins of manuscripts of church music by Johann Pachelbel (1653-1706) in the Tenbury collection, seeking to understand how these sources reached England. His project also analyses the musical style of selected German sacred vocal concertos by Pachelbel in this collection, in order to understand their place within the German Lutheran repertory.

Adrian recently earned a PhD from Royal Holloway, University of London, with a dissertation entitled ‘Johann Kuhnau’s Church Cantatas: Background, Text, Compositional Process, and Style’. Through studying the manuscripts of Kuhnau’s cantatas and the printed text booklets documenting the libretti of now-lost cantatas, Adrian’s research has illuminated the compositional processes and stylistic features of Kuhnau’s cantatas within the context of Lutheran debates about theatrical styles in church music.