Lisa Urkevich

Lisa Urkevich is Professor and Chair of the Department of Music and Drama and former Division Head of Arts and Humanities at the American University of Kuwait. As a musicologist and ethnomusicologist she specializes in the music and rituals of the Arabian Peninsula and also Northern European Renaissance music. She is the recipient of the 2015 University of Maryland Alumna of the Year Award in Visual and Performing Arts, and was appointed a Harvard University Fellow, 2015-2016.
Urkevich obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Maryland in 1997 and went on to teach 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 was a US Senior Fulbright Scholar in Kuwait in 2003 after which she officially joined the newly opened American University, serving as the first Division Head of Arts and Humanities (Dean). She has done extensive fieldwork in the Peninsula, beginning in 1994 when she initially lived in various regions of Saudi Arabia. She has traveled widely throughout the Peninsula and continues to work closely with regional musicians in Saudi Arabia, the Persian Gulf, and the greater Arab World. She has developed courses on Peninsula music and regularly teaches and lectures on Arab as well as western music.Urkevich is the author of Music and Traditions of the Arabian Peninsula and founder and former director of the center "The Arabian Heritage Project" and the Kuwait Al-Kout Festival, which celebrated regional intangible heritage.
Urkevich is also well known for her work on Renaissance music. For years she was the director of the Boston University Collegium Musicum Early Music Ensemble. 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].
"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...."
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. .

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.