Utrecht team member Ulrike Hascher-Burger passed away

It is with great sadness that we announce the death of Utrecht team member, Dr Ulrike Hascher-Burger. Ulrike was a pioneering musicologist and a pivotal member of the Sound Memories project. She will be sorely missed.

Members of the SoundMe team made this video tribute to Ulrike:

Ulrike Hascher-Burger (1955-2020) was a musicologist and a medievalist. The quality and quantity of her publications attest to her expertise in codicology, in the devotio moderna and its music, as well as the great interest and pleasure she had in collaborating with other scholars. In the SoundMe HERA project, Ulrike was an expert, a colleague, a supervisor, and a friend. She put her gigantic bibliographical knowledge at the service of the Utrecht team and offered her critical thinking to the whole project. She actively connected musicology and musical performance, bringing the repertoire of her expertise to a lively and critical sounding experience.

Ulrike was devoted to her work and, more importantly, she succeeded in finding a proper work/life balance. Ulrike was a very warm woman, smiling, encouraging, open to different perspectives and always willing to share her findings – whether these were the discovery of a new musical fragment or the mixing of red wine with orange juice.

With a beer or a cup of tea, in a library or in her cosy study room, during a project meeting or during a supervision meeting, during a conference or after a concert, about singing nuns or about medicinal plants, discussions with Ulrike were always enriching. She will be remembered as a highly knowledgeable and truly joyful woman.

This short video commemorates Ulrike. The photographs were made during the SoundMe conference in Utrecht at the end of May 2018. The video about the conference with the appearance of Ulrike can be found → here.

Manon Louviot

A full-scale obituary by Karl Kügle will appear in the 2020 issue of the Tijdschrift van de Koninklijke Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis (TVNM).