Biography
A concert pianist and musicologist/music theorist, Mine Doğantan is regarded nationally and internationally as a leading figure in artistic research in music performance. Mine was born in Istanbul, Turkey. After graduating from the Istanbul Municipal Conservatory as a student of Verda Ün, and from Robert College, she received a BA in Philosophy from Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. Mine continued her music studies at the Juilliard School in New York with Oxana Yablonskaya and was awarded the Scholarship of the Turkish Ministry of Education for Young Artists. While at Juilliard she won the prestigious William Petschek award for piano performance. After receiving a BM and MM from the Juilliard School, she studied musicology first at Princeton University (MA), New Jersey and later at Columbia University, New York. She received an MA, MPhil and PhD in music theory from Columbia University, studying with composer and music theorist Fred Lerdahl.
Mine is the founder of the Marmara Piano Trio and the recipient of an award from the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the UK (AHRC) for her ‘Alchemy Project’, which is the first research project in contemporary performance studies to explore the nature of live performance from the perspective of professional chamber musicians in the Western classical style. Mine was an Associate of the AHRC Research Centre for Music Performance as Creative Practice hosted by the University of Cambridge, and was also awarded Visiting Professorship by the International Institute for Advanced Studies in Systems Research and Cybernetics, University of Windsor, Canada.
As a soloist and chamber musician, Mine has performed in USA, UK, Germany, France and Turkey, and participated in the Mozart Bicentennial Festival in New York. She recorded the music of JS Bach and Scriabin for WNCN, and also recorded various programs for the Turkish radio and television. Some of her practice-led research outputs have been published in Institute of Musical Research’s PRIMO archive.
Research
My main research area is music performance studies. Within this sub-discipline of musicology, I carry out both theoretical and practice-led enquiry, focusing on: the phenomenology of artistic pianism in the classical genre; pianistic touch; the musical and social dynamics of chamber music practice; piano trio performance; the epistemology of live public performance; the role of the musical instrument in developing performance interpretations; cultural discourses surrounding classical pianism; the historical-cultural contingencies that set aesthetic and stylistic interpretative boundaries for canonical pieces of music; and the theory and philosophy of practice-led research in music performance. I also research the history of music theory and analysis, and its relationship with music pedagogy, psychology and aesthetics.
