Laura Jeppesen
Senior Music Performance Faculty in Viola da Gamba and Director of Collegium Musicum
Specialist in early music string playing. Plays repertory from the medieval, Renaissance & baroque eras with internationally-known ensembles.
Laura Jeppesen, player of historical stringed instruments, earned a master’s degree from Yale University and studied at the Hamburg Hochschule and the Brussels Conservatory. She has been a Woodrow Wilson Designate, a Fulbright Scholar, and a fellow of the Bunting Institute at Harvard. A prominent member of Boston’s early music community, she has long associations with The Boston Museum Trio, Boston Baroque, The Handel and Haydn Society, the Boston Early Music Festival and Aston Magna.
Laura has been music director at the American RepertoryTheater, creating music for Christopher Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage, for which she earned an IRNE nomination for best musical score. In 2015, she was part of the BEMF team that won a Grammy for best opera recording.
Laura has performed as soloist with conductors Christopher Hogwood, Edo deWaart, Seiji Ozawa, Craig Smith, Martin Pearlman, Harry Christophers, Grant Llewellyn, and Bernard Haitink. She has an extensive discography of solo and chamber works, including the gamba sonatas of J.S.Bach, music of Marin Marais, Buxtehude, Rameau, Telemann and Clerambault.
Laura teaches at Boston University, Wellesley College and Harvard University, where in 2015 and 2019 she won awards of special distinction in teaching from the Derek Bok Center. She is a 2017 recipient of an Andrew W. Mellon Blended Learning Initiative Grant for innovative teaching at Wellesley College. Her essay, “Aesthetics of Performance in the Renaissance: Lessons from Noblewomen,” appears in Uncovering Music of Early European Women 1250-1750, published by Routledge Studies in Musical Genres, 2019. Her most recent CD, “Marais at Midnight,” was released by Centaur in 2021.
Education
- B.A., Wheaton College
- M.M., Yale University