Lisa Urkevich

Dr. Lisa Urkevich, 2021

Lisa Urkevich is a scholar, strategist, arts administrator, professor and founding Division Head (Dean) of the Arts and Humanities and founding Chair of the Music and Drama Department at the American University of Kuwait. Since 2017 she has served as the General Editor of the Symposium: Journal of the College Music Society, a consortium of college, conservatory, university, and independent musicians and scholars.^[1] As a musicologist and ethnomusicologist, she specializes in the heritage and music of the Arabian Peninsula (including contemporary music), and earlier, she focused on Northern European Renaissance music. She is the recipient of the 2015 University of Maryland "Alumna of the Year Award," and was appointed a Harvard University Fellow, 2015-2016.

Urkevich holds four USA degrees (BA; BS; MM; PhD) and obtained her PhD from the University of Maryland (UMD) in 1997.^{[citation needed]} She went on to teach at UMD, Millersville University, Bucknell University, and as a full-time professor at Boston University where she held a joint faculty position in the College of Fine Arts, the College of Arts and Sciences, and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. She initially moved to Kuwait in 2003 as a US Senior Fulbright scholar, after which she was invited to help lead the newly opened American University. She served as its first Division Head of Arts and Humanities and played a pivotal role in establishing the new college.

For over 20 years she undertook research throughout the Arabian Peninsula, beginning in 1994 when she lived for four years in an array of Saudi regions. Since then, she has lived in or traveled to many more locales and continues to work closely with government and industry leaders as well as musical artists in the Saudi Kingdom, the Arabian Gulf, and the greater Arab World. Based on her research and writings, she developed courses on Arabian Peninsula music, and regularly teaches and lectures on Arab as well as western music.^{[2][3] [4][5][6]} Urkevich is the author of Music and Traditions of the Arabian Peninsula ("the most comprehensive [music] book anywhere in the Middle East and North Africa").^[7] She is the founder and for seven years was the director of the center "The Arabian Heritage Project" through which she created and led the Kuwaiti Al-Koot Festival, which celebrated regional intangible heritage.^{[8][9][10][11][12][13]}

Urkevich is also well known for her work on Renaissance music. For four years she was the director of the Boston University Collegium Musicum Early Music Ensemble, and the group performed her transcriptions of the Anne Boleyn Music Book, perhaps the first performance of the pieces in over 500 years. As a musicologists she debunked the hypothesis, suggested by Edward Lowinsky, that the so-called Anne Boleyn Music Book MS 1070 of the Royal College of Music] was prepared in England in the 1530s for Anne Boleyn [Lowinsky, “A Music Book for Anne Boleyn,” in Florilegium historiale ... 1971].^[14][15]

"Urkevich presents a compelling narrative (and in many ways more interesting than Lowinsky’s) that proposes, on paleographical and reportorial evidence, that the motet book was prepared in France ca. 1505–09, and was owned and prepared for a woman, possibly Marguerite d’Angouleme (sister of Francis I), or her mother, Louise of Savoy, and given to Anne, while she was in their service in France as a young girl. ...Urkevich’s dating of the manuscript is convincing. [On her suggested provenance]...I find the many connections intriguing...."^[16]

Urkevich also re-established the provenance of the important music manuscript London, British Library, Ms. Royal 20 A. XVI, proving that it was prepared for Anne de Beaujeu (Anne of France) and her husband Pierre de Bourbon around 1488 when they gained their positions as duke and duchess of Bourbon—and was not prepared for Louis d’Orléans and Anne of Brittany as was previously purported. .^[17]

Selected publications[]

• Music and Traditions of the Arabian Peninsula: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar. New York/London: Routledge, 2015 ISBN 9780415888721
• Kuwait: Sea Songs of the Arabian Gulf: Hamid Bin Hussein Sea Band. CD and Booklet issued separately. MCM 3051. Barre, VT: Multicultural Media, 2014 ISBN 978-0-9904737-4-9
• “Anne Boleyn’s French Motet Book: A Childhood Gift,” in Ars musica septentrionalis. Eds. Frédéric Billiet and Barbara Haggh. Paris: Presses de l’université Paris-Sorbonne (PUPS), 95-120, 2011.
• “The Wings of the Bourbon: The Early Provenance of the Chansonnier London, British Library, Ms. Royal 20 A. XVI,” Journal of the Alamire Foundation Vol. 4/1 (2012): 91-113.

References[]