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Faculty of Music

 
Dr Daniel  Trocmé-Latter

Roles

Affiliated Lecturer
Director of Studies, Homerton College
Director of Music, Homerton College
Director of Studies, Magdalene College
Early music
Liturgy and music
Reformation
Film music

Biography

Daniel is College Associate Professor of Music, Director of Music, Director of Studies in Music, and a Fellow at Homerton College, as well as Director of Studies in Music at Magdalene College. His studies were undertaken 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 This involved scrutinising treatises, hymnbook prefaces, and unpublished archival material in order to improve our understanding of why music was deemed crucial by the first Protestant reformers.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 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 a chapter in the pipeline 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. 

He enjoys travelling, and is an organist and conductor. His role as Director of Music at Homerton involves overseeing extra-curricular musical activity in the College, including directing the Charter Choir. His performances have been broadcast on BBC Radio 3, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Classic FM, and Radio Television Hong Kong.

Publications

Key publications: 
  • The Strasbourg Cantiones of 1539: Protestant City, Catholic Music (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2023). The Cantiones quinque vocum selectissimae (Strasbourg: Peter Schöffer the Younger, 1539) is a collection of 28 Latin five-voice motets. My book considers the historical circumstances surrounding the publication of the Cantiones - including the nature of the connection between Schöffer and Werrecore, and why a Protestant publisher based in Protestant Germany would try to sell Latin music that was endorsed by a Catholic monarch and emphatically had no chance of being performed in its place of publication. A performing edition of the scores is also available at imprimis.uk.
  • The Singing of the Strasbourg Protestants, 1523-1541 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015; repr. Routledge: Abingdon, 2016). This book explores the part played by music in the unfolding of the Protestant reforms in Strasbourg. It considers both ecclesiastical and ‘popular’ songs in the city, examining how both genres fitted into people’s lives during this time of strife. Drawing in particular upon a range of sources - including liturgical orders and hymnals, polemical songs, chronicles of the Reformation and text manuscripts - the book explores the methods by which hymns were introduced in Strasbourg churches.
  • 'A Disney Requiem? Iterations of the “Dies irae” in the score to The Lion King (1994)’, Journal of Music and the Moving Image, 15 (2022), pp. 38-66. In Hans Zimmer's score, the “Dies irae” melody not only functions as a standard shorthand for death (as in many scores) but is also of underlying structural importance in several of the film's cues. Thus, the tune retains a sense of secularized association with death while reclaiming some of its spiritual associations with the Requiem Mass.
  • (trans. W. Fuhrmann) ‘Religiöse Identitäten in Gesang und Kirchenmusik im Jahrhundert der Reformation’, in W. Fuhrmann, ed., Handbuch der Musik der Renaissance: Das Musikleben der Renaissance (vol. 4) (Laaber, Regensburg: Laaber-Verlag, 2019 [forthcoming]). A forthcoming book containing this chapter, which contrasts church music in two religiously reforming cities, Strasbourg and Basel‘Music, Heretics, and Reformers’, in G. McDonald and D. Burn, eds., Music and Theology in the European Reformations (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018). This forthcoming chapter looks at the language used by medieval heretical figures Hus, Wycliffe, and Savonarola, and contrasts it with that used during the Reformation by Luther and others.
  • ‘Thieves, Drunkard and Womanisers? Perceptions of Church Musicians in Early Reformation Strasbourg’, in A. Noblesse-Rocher and R. G. Hobbs, eds., Bible, histoire et société (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), pp. 383-399. This essay explores attitudes toward the behaviour and morality of church musicians in Strasbourg during the first half of the sixteenth century, from the point of view of the Protestant reformers.
  • ‘The Psalms as a mark of Protestantism: The Introduction of Liturgical Psalm-Singing in Geneva’, Plainsong and Medieval Music, 20, no. 2 (2011), pp. 149-167. This article explores the significance of Genevan reformer Jean Calvin’s interest in the Psalms as theological material, and outlines his views on music and the ways in which his plans for psalm-singing were implemented from the 1540s onwards.
  • ‘"May those who know nothing be content to listen": Loys Bourgeois’s Advertissement to the Psalms (1551)’, Reformation and Renaissance Review, 11, no. 3 (2009 [published in 2011]), pp. 333-345. This is a translation of and commentary on the preface to the 1551 Genevan Psalter by the cantor of Geneva, Loys Bourgeois.

Reviews

  • Review of T. A. Fudge, The Memory and Motivation of Jan Hus, Medieval Priest and Martyr (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), Journal of Religious History, 41 (2017).

  • Review of Jean Servin, ed. J. Porter, Psalmi Davidis 1579 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014) and I. His, ed., Dix Pseaumes en forme de motets de Claude Le Jeune, 1564 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), published in Early Music, 45 (2017).

  • ‘Venice, Rome, Naples, Ferrara’, Early Music, 45 (February 2017) [forthcoming]. [Review of sacred music by Zarlino, Merulo, Gesualdo, and Victoria.]
  • ‘Bach keyboard music’, Early Music, 41 (May 2013), pp. 358-361. [Review of 18 recent recordings of Bach's music on organ and harpsichord.]
  • ‘Psalms and Vespers’, Early Music, 40 (November 2012), pp. 705-708. [Review of several recordings of psalms in the Reformed and Roman Catholic traditions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.]
  • Review of J. I. Haug, Der Genfer Psalter in den Niederlanden, Deutschland, England und dem Osmanischen Reich (16.19. Jahrhundert) (Tutzing: Schneder, 2010), published in Music and Letters, 93, no. 1 (2012), pp. 138-140.
  • ‘Singing a new song’, Early Music, 38 (May 2010), pp. 282-284. [Review of R. Weeda, Itineraires du psautier huguenot (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009).]
Other publications: 
  • Accompanying notes to The Mysterious Motet Book 1539, CD released by Siglo de Oro (dir. Patrick Allies) (Delphian, 2022).
  • Accompanying notes to 'Till all the place with music ring, CD released by the Charter Choir of Homerton College (2019).
  • Accompanying notes to Audite Finem, CD released by the Charter Choir of Homerton College (EM Records, 2014).