Dr Daniel Trocmé-Latter

Dr Daniel Trocmé-Latter is College Lecturer and Director of Studies in Music at Magdalene, and a Fellow of Homerton College.

Daniel is College Associate Professor of Music, Director of Music, Director of Studies in Music, and a Fellow at Homerton College, as well as a College Lecturer in Music at Magdalene College. He studied at Selwyn and Magdalene Colleges in Cambridge and at the University of Southampton. His research interests include the role of music in liturgy and ceremony, especially in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. His doctoral thesis (and subsequent monograph, published as part of the St Andrews Studies in Reformation History series) investigated the attitudes and approaches to music of the Protestant reformers in sixteenth-century Strasbourg. This involved scrutinising treatises, hymnbook prefaces, and unpublished archival material in order to improve our understanding of why music was deemed crucial by the first Protestant reformers.

His new monograph appeared with the Boydell Press in May 2023. It tells the story of 28 Latin motets assembled by the Flemish/Milanese composer Hermann Matthias Werrecore and sent to the publisher Peter Schöffer in Strasbourg in the mid-16th-century. The music not only crossed the Alps, but it was cross-confessional, travelling from a staunchly Catholic city to a newly Protestant one. Daniel has also undertaken research on the Genevan and Scottish Psalters of the Reformation, the influence of late fifteenth-century English preachers on the German Reformation’s stance towards music, and a study of recordings of the music of the Reformation.

Daniel’s interest in film music has manifested itself in recent years with explorations of music’s signifying functions and the use of pre-existing music (especially early music) on screen. His article on the 'Dies irae' motif in the score to The Lion King was published in 2022, and he has also authored a chapter on the use of chant in Stanley Kubrick's last film, Eyes Wide Shut. From 2016 to 2021 he was also the Recording and Digital Media Reviews Editor for the Oxford journal Early Music.

Daniel supervises and teaches a variety of undergraduate modules at Cambridge including practical musicianship (aural and practical skills), analysis, tonal skills, and music history courses.

Research Interests

Daniel’s research interests include the role of music in liturgy and ceremony, especially in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. His doctoral thesis (and subsequent monograph) investigated the attitudes and approaches to music of the Protestant reformers in sixteenth-century Strasbourg. This involved scrutinising treatises, hymnbook prefaces, and unpublished archival material in order to improve our understanding of why music was deemed crucial by the first Protestant reformers. The thesis also addressed questions about the importance of congregational singing in Strasbourg in the dissemination of the Reformation message further afield. He has also undertaken research on the Genevan and Scottish Psalters of the Reformation, as well as the influence of late fifteenth-century preachers on the German Reformation’s stance towards music. Currently he is preparing his second monograph, the history of an edition of Latin motets, the Cantiones quinque vocum selectissimae (Strasbourg, 1539), to be published with Boydell & Brewer in 2021/22.

Qualifications

• PhD
• MA
• MMus (Southampton)
• ARCO