Jed Wentz

Jed Alan Wentz was born on July 1st 1960 in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.. He entered Oberlin Conservatory of Music in 1977 and received his Bachelor of Music in 1981 with modern and historical flutes as his major. He there followed courses on music, European history, religion, art history and English and French literature. His postgraduate education was a specialisation in performance on 18th-century flutes at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague, where Barthold Kuijken was his teacher.

Jed Wentz has been a teacher himself since 1988. He taught at the Conservatory of Hilversum, Conservatoire National de Région de Caen, the Royal Academy of Music in London. He currently teaches courses related to early music at the Conservatory of Amsterdam and the Royal Conservatory of the Hague. Besides this, guest teaching, master classes and lectures have been given by him at a.o. the Hochschule für Künste Bremen, The Curtis Institute, University of North Texas Denton, Oberlin Conservatory of Music, University of California at Los Angeles, The Royal College of Music, London and The Juilliard School, where he is a regular guest lecturer.

He was a member of Musica Antique Köln and he was the founder of, performer with and conductor of Musica ad Rhenum. He has also performed with a number of other ensembles like De Nederlandse Bachvereniging, Les Musiciens du Louvre, and the Barockorchester Stuttgart.

As a conductor he was involved in performances and productions of Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro and Entführung aus dem Serail, Handel’s Arianna in Creta, Purcell’s Masque from Timon of Athens and Dido and Aeneas, and Rameau’s Hyppolyte et Aricie.

Jed Wentz has attended and organised many conferences, especially on the theme of music, timing and gesture, at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, Edinburgh University and at St. Hugh’s, Magdalen and New Colleges, Oxford. He has himself organised numerous conferences, including, since 2010, the annual STIMU symposium at the Utrecht Early Music Festival.

He has published on topics relating to declamation, gesture and dance in The Eighteenth-century Novel, The Cambridge Opera Journal, Music in Art and Journal for Eighteenth-century Studies. He has published on the 20th-century Early Music revival in Early Music and the Basler Jahrbuch für historische Musikpraxis and contributed an essay of Gilbert Austin’s Chironomia to Theatrical Heritage: Challenges & opportunities (Leuven University Press: 2015). As a member of the workgroup Performing Premodernity ( http://performingpremodernity.com ) he coached the actors for the 2015 production of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Pygmalion that took place in the historical theatre in Cesky Krumlov. His score for Paul Wegener’s Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam, created together with pianist Olga Pashchenko, was premiered at the Utrecht Early Music Festival in 2014 and will be repeated in 2015 in the Amsterdam film museum Eye. He is currently artistic advisor to the Utrecht Early Music Festival.

His docARTES doctoral defense took place on December 9, 2010 at Leiden University.