Orpheus Instituut welcomes Shanti Nachtergaele as visiting researcher

Orpheus Instituut is pleased to welcome Shanti Nachtergaele as a visiting researcher. A double bassist and musicologist, Shanti completed her PhD in Musicology at McGill University in 2024. She is currently Assistant Professor of Music at State University of New York at Potsdam and Principal Subject Teacher of Violone at Conservatorium van Amsterdam.  She has performed with ensembles such as the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century, Tafelmusik, and Arion and taught historical double bass at the Festival de Música de Santa Catarina (Brazil) and Pass Early Music Festival (Canada).

Her research develops a sociomaterial approach to musical instruments, arguing that performers and instruments are “constitutively entangled” in the formation of musical identities. Drawing on theories of sociomateriality and related strands of thought such as Actor–Network Theory, Shanti studies how material features, technical affordances, institutions, and performers mutually shape one another. Her doctoral work, A Sociomaterial History of the Double Bass(ist), 1760–1890, combined archival research with acoustic measurements and practice-based experimentation, offering a new framework for understanding the co-constitution of instrumental technologies and artistic agency.

During her residency at Orpheus Instituut, Shanti will focus on the final case study of her forthcoming book, examining the nineteenth-century French double bassist Achille Gouffé and the adoption of the four-string double bass at the Paris Conservatoire in 1832. Gouffé was among the first French bassists to build a solo career on the newly adopted instrument, and his compositions and chamber collaborations reveal how technological change reshaped both repertoire and performance culture. By situating this transition within a sociomaterial framework, Shanti explores how tuning systems, instrument design, virtuosity, and professional identity became newly configured in nineteenth-century Paris.

At Orpheus Instituut, Shanti will further refine her conceptual framework of sociomateriality as applied to musical instruments, while engaging with researchers working on historical performance, embodiment, and the entanglement of technology and musical thought. Her residency will culminate in a study day in mid-June devoted to nineteenth-century solo double bass practice, bringing together artistic researchers at different career stages to examine Gouffé’s works and their broader cultural context.

By bridging musicology, performance, and theory, Shanti’s work contributes to ongoing conversations at our institute on how instrumental technologies shape artistic processes and knowledge production. We warmly welcome Shanti to our institute and look forward to the exchange and insights her residency will bring to our community.