ľ¹Ï¸£ÀûÓ°ÊÓ

Louis Peter Grijp passed away on 9 January at the age of 61. Since 2011, he represented the Meertens Institute as Professor of ‘Dutch song culture: past and present’ at Utrecht ľ¹Ï¸£ÀûÓ°ÊÓ. Louis Grijp combined his role at UU with his work as Senior Researcher at Meertens as well as Artistic Leader of early music ensemble Camerata Trajectina in which he also performed on the lute. In 2003, he was elected  a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Grijp obtained his PhD cum laude from UU in 1991. In his thesis Dutch song in the Golden Age. The mechanics of contrafactum composition, he developed a method to match melodies to song texts which had survived without musical notation. His research laid the foundation for the , a database comprising 170,000 Dutch-language songs from both the Netherlands and Flanders, dating from the Middle Ages up until the present day. The database has grown to become one of the most cherished digital research tools available to Dutch musicologists, literary scholars and cultural historians.

Louis Grijp radiated enthusiasm. His curiosity was infectious, his vision legendary. Within the Musicology programme, he co-taught a course on Dutch music and song culture for many years. He also introduced countless students to computational research methods in music, using the Liederenbank as example. In addition, generations of Dutch literary scholars witnessed him bringing song texts to life in performance.

Through his methodology of identifying hidden melodies, Louis Grijp demonstrated that Dutch-texted song was often the result of a lively exchange with neighbouring countries. Hadewijch plucked her melodies from northern French trouvères, an iconic Dutch verse from Vondel’s play Gijsbrecht van Amstel was most likely sung to a melody composed by Frenchman Antoine de Boësset. Clergyman Camphuysen wrote his most exquisite hymn text to music by Englishman John Dowland.

Louis Grijp had the ability to explain even the most complicated matters to both expert and lay audiences in simple yet elegant prose. The standard work, Een muziekgeschiedenis der Nederlanden, which he edited, is exemplary in this respect.

Louis Grijp was honoured regularly for both his academic and artistic work, including two Edison Awards and the Dutch Data Award for the Humanities and Social Sciences.