Raquel Aranha

Raquel Aranha holds a PhD and Master’s degree in Music, as well as a Bachelor’s degree in Music, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship. She graduated in Baroque Violin from the Royal Conservatory of The Hague and specializes in Historical Dance. She also holds a postgraduate degree in the Management of Historical Musical Collections and works in the preservation of Musical Heritage, coordinating the Centro de Documentação Musical de São José dos Campos (CDM SJC).

Her education is focused on the study and practice of Early Music, and she also studied Baroque Dance as part of her specialization. She has developed extensive teaching activities in Baroque Dance for musicians at major music festivals throughout Brazil, in addition to founding the group Passos do Barroco in 2016.

In academic studies, she earned her Master’s degree in Music from University of Campinas (UNICAMP) in 2010, under the supervision of Dr. Paulo M. Kühl, conducting research on ballet in 18th-century Portuguese operas.

She obtained her PhD in Music from University of Campinas (UNICAMP) in 2016, also under the supervision of Dr. Paulo M. Kühl, with research focused on Noverre’s ballet d’action, addressing the music and poetics of dramatic dance in 18th-century operatic performance. This research included a research internship at Sorbonne University in 2015, under the supervision of Raphaëlle Legrand. Her dissertation provided a detailed analysis of one of Noverre’s ballet-pantomimes, establishing an in-depth study of the relationship between dance, libretto, and music.

Since 2018, she has been a collaborating researcher at INET-md – Institute of Ethnomusicology – Centre for Studies in Music and Dance at the NOVA University Lisbon, coordinated by Rui Vieira Nery. Her research project is part of the Historical and Cultural Studies in Music research group, in which she investigates Iberian opera and ballet librettos (1790–1830) as key documents for understanding operatic performance in 19th-century Rio de Janeiro, with special emphasis on the presence of dance in the interludes of staged operas.

In the field of Heritage Musicology, she completed the course Musicología para la Protección y Difusión del Patrimonio Artístico Iberoamericano (2012) at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando. She also completed a postgraduate specialization in the Management of Historical Musical Collections at São Paulo State University (UNESP) in 2018, under the supervision of Dr. Paulo Castagna. In 2024, she concluded a postdoctoral fellowship at São Paulo State University (UNESP), where she developed a project on technical processing and provenance studies in music collections, also supervised by Dr. Paulo Castagna.

In 2022, she founded and has since coordinated the Centro de Documentação Musical de São José dos Campos, dedicated to the preservation of musical sources in various formats, periods, origins, and musical genres.

She also works as a mandolin player, curator, and festival producer in the city of São José dos Campos. Additionally, she served as curator of the Orquestra Joseense (2022/Fundação Cultural Cassiano Ricardo) and the Coro Sinfônico (2023/Fundação Cultural Cassiano Ricardo).

Independently, she continues her research on 19th-century dance manuals, which include several ballroom dances — such as the Polka, Waltz, Schottische, and Quadrilles — that influenced the formation of Choro music.