Daniel Trocmé-Latter’s research interests include the role of music in liturgy and ceremony, with his first monograph (The Singing of the Strasbourg Protestants, 1523–1541) investigating the attitudes and approaches to music of the Protestant reformers in 16th-century Strasbourg. He has also undertaken research on the music of the Genevan and Scottish Psalters of the Reformation, as well as the influence of late 15th-century preachers on the German Reformation’s stance towards music. His new monograph, The Strasbourg Cantiones of 1539: Protestant City, Catholic Music, 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’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.
Aside from research, Daniel’s role as Director of Music involves overseeing extra-curricular musical activity in the College, including directing the Charter Choir, which has made three full-length commercial recordings: Audite finem in 2014, Till all the place with music ring in 2019, and Psalms, Stars & Light in 2024. Several of Daniel’s own compositions appear on these recordings. Daniel supervises a variety of undergraduate modules at the University of Cambridge, in both the Music and History Triposes. At Homerton, Daniel is also Director of Studies in Music, and one of the Praelectors, whose role it is to present graduands to receive their degrees in Senate House.
Music and ceremony/liturgy
Film music
Early modern history
Monographs
The Strasbourg Cantiones of 1539: Protestant City, Catholic Music (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2023).
The Singing of the Strasbourg Protestants, 1523–1541, St Andrews Studies in Reformation History (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015; repr. Routledge: Abingdon, 2016).
Chapters in edited volumes
‘A Masked Ritual and Backwards Priests: Aural and Visual Corruption in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut’, in J. Cook, A. Kolassa, A. Robinson, and A. Whittaker, eds., History as Fantasy in Music, Sound, Image and Media (Routledge: Abingdon, 2024), pp. 102–119.
(trans. W. Fuhrmann) ‘Protestantische religiöse Identitäten in Lied und Kirchenmusik: Basel und Straßburg im 16. Jahrhundert’, in W. Fuhrmann, ed., Musikleben in der Renaissance: Zwischen Alltag und Fest – Teilband I: Orte der Musik, Handbuch der Musik der Renaissance (vol. 4) (Laaber, Regensburg: Laaber Verlag, 2019), pp. 193–221.
‘Music, Heretics, and Reformers’, in G. McDonald and D. Burn, eds., Music and Theology in the European Reformations (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018).
‘Thieves, Drunkard and Womanisers? Perceptions of Church Musicians in Early Reformation Strasbourg’, in R. G. Hobbs and A. Noblesse-Rocher, eds., Bible, Histoire et Société : Mélanges offerts à Bernard Roussel (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), pp. 383–399.
Articles
‘A Disney Requiem? Iterations of the “Dies irae” in the score to The Lion King (1994)’, Journal of Music and the Moving Image (2022), pp. 38-66.
‘Liturgical re-enactments and the Reformation’, Early Music, 45, no. 4 (November 2017 [published 2018]), pp. 665-672.
‘The Psalms as a mark of Protestantism: The Introduction of Liturgical Psalm-Singing in Geneva’, Plainsong & Medieval Music, 20, no. 2 (2011), pp. 149–167.
‘“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), pp. 333–345.
Music editions
Cantiones quinque vocum selectissimæ • Strasbourg: Schöffer, 1539 (n.p.: Imprimis, 2023): www.imprimis.uk/cantiones1539. An edition of Peter Schöffer the Younger’s 28 five-voice motet collection; a companion to my monograph about the same publication.
Editorial
Early Music, 45, no. 4 (November 2017), pp. 509–510.
