Dr. Áurea Dominguez is a scholar of historical performance practice. She is author and co-author of numerous academic publications such as Bassoon Playing in Perspective (2013) and Escribir sobre Música (Barcelona 2016), a monograph written in collaboration with Dr. Luca Chiantore and Dr. Silvia Martinez. Her background as a professional musician specialized in historical double reed performance allows her to approach her research not only from a theoretical perspective, but also a practical one, combining experimental practices with traditional historical source criticism.
After studying modern bassoon performance at the EsMUC (Barcelona College of Music), she continued her research into historical performance practice, earning a doctorate from the University of Helsinki in 2013. In 2018, her work on nineteenth-century performance practice was recognized by the prestigious Internationale Gesellschaft zur Erforschung und Förderung der Blasmusik (IGEB).
From 2017 to 2023, she worked as a senior researcher at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis on several research projects regarding the organological and musicological aspects of historical bassoons. These include two projects funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) “Fagottini and tenoroons: Small forgotten giants” (2017–2019) and “Out of the bass register” (2020–2023). In 2020, she participated in “Neue alte Klangkörper”, a project in the field of museum and archival studies whose main objective was the reconstruction of original instruments using 3D modeling technology. The elaboration of instrument catalogues and open-source datasets, as well as the utilization of standards and latest developments in the field of 3D-computed tomography, has direct application in the 3D printing of musical instruments. Her work has been recognized by colleagues in the field and led to her appointment as technical advisor to the Museo de la Música de Barcelona in a project regarding the tomographic scanning and 3D printing of several instruments from the museum collection.
Áurea Dominguez’ current research in historical sound technologies, in which she is engaged at the Institut Klassik of the Hochschule für Musik Basel (FHNW), builds directly on her innovative approaches to organology. Parallel to her work with wind instruments, she has acquired an expertise in the history, operation, and maintenance of phonographs and gramophones. She has organized festivals, given lectures, and hosted gramophone-related events throughout Europe. In 2023, she was awarded the Richard Taylor Bursary Grant from the City of London Phonograph and Gramophone Society to research the role of women in the phonograph and gramophone industries. Here, her research explores the key role that women played in the early development of the recorded music industry, focusing on the period between the 1890s, when Edison’s phonograph first experienced commercial success, until the Great Depression of the early 1930s. Following this line of work, Áurea is currently engaged as principal investigator in the SNSF-funded project “Voices in Wax: Recording the Acoustic Era”. This project explores the earliest developments in commercially-recorded music and phonograph recording technology (c.1885–1915) from a technical perspective, using hands-on experiments to contextualize historical recording sources.