Dr Cassandre Balosso-Bardin Awarded Fellowship at Metropolitan Museum in New York to Work on Bagpipe Collection
17 May 2022
Written by: hgamble
The Chester Dale Fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City, USA, has been awarded to a senior University of Lincoln, UK, lecturer, starting in September 2022.
The Chester Dale Fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City, USA, has been awarded to a senior University of Lincoln, UK, lecturer, starting in September 2022.
Dr Cassandre Balosso-Bardin, a Senior Lecturer in Music at the School of Fine & Performing Arts has been awarded the fellowship by the Metropolitan Museum to work on their bagpipe collection.
Leading specialist in bagpipes, Dr Balosso-Bardin is the founding director of the International Bagpipe Organisation and is co-founder of International Bagpipe Day, now celebrated across the world by thousands of individuals on 10 March every year.
Over the course of 12 months, Dr Balosso-Bardin will carry out the first in-depth study of the museum’s diverse bagpipe collection, which features 53 instruments, most of which were collected by Mary Elizabeth Adams Brown at the turn of the 20th century.
As an ethnomusicologist, she has researched the instrument through an anthropological lens, including the Bulgarian gaida (Sorbonne University, 2008), and the Mallorcan xeremies (SOAS, University of London, 2016), and with an interdisciplinary focus, looking at the mechanical movement of the bagpiper’s arm with acousticians (Balosso-Bardin & al. 2018)
Dr Balosso-Bardin is currently under contract to write a book about bagpipes of the world by Reaktion Books (London) and is completing a monograph on the Mallorcan bagpipes (Routledge).
Senior Lecturer in Music and Programme Leader at University of Lincoln, UK, Dr Cassandre Balosso-Bardin said, “I am thrilled to have been awarded a Chester Dale Fellowship to work at one of the world’s most prestigious museums, looking at their international bagpipe collection.
“While some instruments have been studied individually, the overall historical collection has not, and it will be a great opportunity to make the instruments much more visible to the general public.”
Dr Balosso-Bardin will study the collection to develop a more global overview of the instruments and delve into the history of certain objects thanks to the conservation of rarer specimens. The study will contribute to museum research and findings.
The Metropolitan has an additional 108 objects (paintings, engravings, figurines) featuring bagpipes, including a world-renowned print by Albrecht Dürer (1514).
Aligned with the Metropolitan’s ‘Crossroads’ initiative, the museum’s bagpipe representations span 800 years and extend across a vast geographical region from Myanmar to Ireland and Egypt.
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