Duke Music Welcomes Elise Kolle as Curator Serving the Duke University Musical Instrument Collections

The Duke Department of Music is thrilled to welcome Elise Kolle as the new Curator serving the Duke University Musical Instrument Collections.

A musician, scholar, museum professional, and lifelong lover of musical instruments, Elise arrives at Duke with the kind of curiosity that makes historical objects feel alive. For her, instruments are never just things to be stored, studied, or displayed. They are storytellers. They hold clues about sound, culture, craftsmanship, technology, performance, and the people who once gathered around them.

Now, as she begins this new chapter at Duke, Kolle is eager to help bring those stories into conversation with students, faculty, researchers, performers, and the broader Duke community.

Welcome to Duke

For Kolle, the decision to come to Duke was immediate and electric.

“When a colleague of mine sent me the job description when the Curator position became available, I immediately knew this would be the ‘dream job’! Musical instruments are my life’s passion, and the opportunity to steward a collection of this caliber is a huge privilege.”

That sense of excitement is matched by what she sees as the special promise of working in a university setting. At Duke, the Collections can serve not only as historical resources, but as active participants in teaching, research, performance, and discovery. In a department filled with composers, performers, scholars, graduate students, and curious undergraduates, Kolle sees tremendous potential for collaboration.

She is especially looking forward to learning what is already taking shape across the Department of Music: what faculty are exploring, what Ph.D. candidates are researching, and what students are eager to understand more deeply. Her goal is not only to care for the Collections, but to help activate them as a resource for the people and ideas moving through Duke Music every day.

Her first impressions of Duke have already sparked that imagination. On her visit to campus, Kolle was struck by the beauty of Duke’s grounds, the lush greenery, and the instruments themselves, including square pianos, clarinets, and other objects that immediately piqued her curiosity.

Musical Journey & Personal Background

Kolle’s path into music began early. She grew up in a family of professional classical musicians, with parents and an older brother who helped shape her earliest understanding of music as both a discipline and a way of life.

“I grew up in a musical family - my parents and my older brother are classical musicians by profession. I suppose it was inevitable that I would be in music. My brave parents allowed me to take harp lessons after a couple of years of persistence! Since the age of 9, playing or studying the harp has been the central aspect of my life, more or less.”

That childhood persistence became the foundation for a career that now bridges performance, scholarship, and collections work. The harp, in particular, has remained central to how Kolle understands musical history. It has been her instrument, her scholarly entry point, and the lens through which she began asking larger questions about how instruments change over time.

As both a musician and a scholar, Kolle brings a dual perspective to her work. Performance taught her how to communicate, interpret, and express ideas. Scholarship taught her how to investigate, search for answers, and ask better questions. Together, those approaches give her a rich framework for thinking about instruments not only as objects, but as tools for understanding human creativity.

“The harp has been my reference point for everything in my research. Especially with string and keyboard instruments, they are much more related than we may think!”

Scholarship, Research & Museums

Kolle’s interest in historical instruments grew out of her efforts to better understand eighteenth-century music. As a student, she became interested in historically informed performance, a field that depends on knowing the instruments for which music was originally written. Because harps have changed significantly since the eighteenth century, Kolle found herself drawn into the technological details of the instrument: how it was built, how it functioned, how it sounded, and how those details shaped performance. From there, her curiosity expanded.

Musical instruments, Kolle explains, can tell us far more than what notes were played. They can reveal what people valued, what materials they prized, what objects they placed in their homes, what sounds surrounded them, and how music intersected with class, gender, ceremony, communication, and design.

“Musical instruments are not only a tool for making sound, but historically, they’ve also served as art pieces, religious items, furniture, and countless other things. I’m drawn to the interdisciplinary aspect of musical instruments, and how they can teach us things about a culture that we would perhaps not know otherwise.”

One of Kolle’s most meaningful experiences as a researcher came through a deeply personal project: purchasing and restoring her own eighteenth-century harp. The instrument, built around 1790 in Paris, took two years to find. It had to be stable enough to restore to playing condition, and the restoration process opened a new world of technical discovery, from varnish thickness on strings to the recalibration of pedal rods.

That harp is now her most prized possession.

Her work also reflects a fascination with the colorful, surprising, and sometimes dramatic lives behind historical instrument making. Among the figures who have captured her interest is the eighteenth-century French violin maker Leopold Renaudin, who was known not only for his instruments, but for his startling role during the French Revolution. It is exactly the kind of unexpected story that shows how instruments can open doors into political, social, and cultural history.

Connecting Scholarship and Performance

For Kolle, university collections provide a multitude of unique benefits. They are not only preserved for specialists. They can become part of a student’s intellectual life, a performer’s creative process, a faculty member’s teaching, or a researcher’s discovery.

That closeness matters. In many museum settings, visitors encounter instruments from a distance. At a university, students may have opportunities to spend sustained time with objects, look closely, ask questions, and think through what an instrument can reveal.

“University collections serve a special purpose, in that students can get very close to instruments in an environment that fosters their investigative thinking. Students can sit with instruments for a long time and interact with them in a way that would be inaccessible through a museum.”

That kind of access can change how students understand music history. Instead of imagining the past as distant or fixed, they can see it as something built by real people, through real materials, with real sounds in mind.

Kolle hopes students will recognize their own musical lives in that history. People have been gathering to listen to music for centuries, and the instruments of the past can help students see today’s musical interests as part of a much longer ancestry of sound.

The Person Behind the Curator

Beyond the archive, the classroom, and the museum, Kolle brings a wonderful mix of scholarly intensity and offbeat charm to Duke.

She is an avid fan of Cameron Carpenter, whom she calls “a true master of the organ.” She reads detective fiction religiously and has read every single novel by Agatha Christie. If she had not become a musicologist, she says she might have become an art historian, especially focused on the Northern Renaissance and the works of Jan Van Eyck.

She also has a tiny dog named Brioche — “like the bread” — with whom she spends much of her time. Kolle hopes Brioche gets to know the music department very well.

After several years in New York, she is looking forward to some very practical North Carolina pleasures: owning a car, not hauling groceries up a fourth-floor walkup, and having her own dishwasher. Still, at least one New York habit may follow her south: walking most places and, as she admits, “unfortunately, jaywalking.”

And then there is the matter of Duke basketball. Asked what might be more intimidating — her first day as Curator or her first Duke-UNC basketball game — Kolle had a confession:

“I have never seen a basketball game, so probably that? What does one do at a basketball game?”

Duke Music may have to add “basketball orientation” to her onboarding.

Looking Ahead

As Kolle begins her first year at Duke, she is thinking expansively about what the Duke University Musical Instrument Collections can become for the university community. She sees opportunities for exhibitions, performances, teaching collaborations, research projects, and cross-campus partnerships that invite more people into the world of the Collections.

“I am very excited about the possibility of presenting performances and exhibitions - the combination of live music and curated instrument showcases installed on other parts of campus will be a great way to bring the Duke community into the world of the collection.”

That vision captures much of what makes her arrival so exciting. Kolle is not only interested in preserving instruments. She is interested in what happens when people encounter them: when a student notices a detail, when a performer hears the past differently, when a researcher finds a new question, or when an audience member realizes that an old instrument still has something fresh to say.

Her advice to students interested in careers that combine music, research, and cultural heritage is simple and fitting: “Find your niche and never give up. Cultural heritage careers are made from love and perseverance.”

As she begins her work at Duke, Kolle is ready to bring that love and perseverance to a new community, a new campus, and a remarkable set of instruments waiting to be explored.

“I'm excited to give Duke students and faculty a window into the world for which these important instruments serve as testimony. I believe that Duke will benefit enormously from what this collection has to offer!”

Rapid Fire: Music Edition

Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, or Bach?
For sure Bach. I’m a purist…

Vinyl record or Spotify playlist?
Spotify. I can’t listen to an LP on the subway.

Live performance or studio recording?
Live.

Classical concert or museum exhibition?
Exhibition - even better, one with live performance incorporated!

Album listener or singles listener?
I like to listen to an entire body of work, like all the Brandenburgs at once.

Morning practice session or late-night inspiration?
Late night, always.

Metropolitan Museum of Art or Metropolitan Opera?
That is too hard! I can’t pick!

Bagels or biscuits?
Bagels… but maybe NC can change my mind!