Bas Cornelissen

Musical education

Bas Cornelissen began singing in the Dutch National Children’s Choir. At a young age he appeared on major stages with for example numerous performances of Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra conducted by Riccardo Chailly (Decca, 2004), as well as live television broadcasts such as John Adams’s On the Transmigration of Souls (2003).

He later set singing aside to study piano and guitar, rediscovering his voice nearly a decade later in the VU Chamber Choir. In 2018 he began classical voice studies with Karin van der Poel at the Utrecht Conservatory, continuing with Xenia Meijer, and in 2025 he completed his master’s degree in Early Music Singing at the Conservatory of Amsterdam. During his studies he was coached by Sinan Vural and took lessons and masterclasses with, among others, Margreet Honig, Andreas Wolf, and Georg Nigl. He is currently coached by Vitali Rozynko.

Performance & repertoire

During his studies, Bas regularly sang with Consensus Vocalis, appearing in the chorus of the Reisopera in productions such as Bruid te Koop, Die Zauberflöte, Fidelio, Orphée et Eurydice, and Das Wunder der Heliane.

He now focuses primarily on solo singing and is frequently heard in oratorio repertoire ranging from Buxtehude’s Membra Jesu Nostri and the cantatas and passions of J.S. Bach to Brahms’s Ein deutsches Requiem and Vaughan Williams’s Dona Nobis Pacem. In 2024 he made his solo debut at the Concertgebouw with Mahler’s Das klagende Lied.

In addition, Bas performs lied repertoire with historical instruments—from virginals to fortepianos—and is organizing solo projects, including those with his ensemble Elegia.

Musical projects

In 2021, Bas was involved in the founding of the vocal ensemble Fonos, with which he appeared on Dutch national television in Podium Klassiek. In 2023, together with Leenke de Lege, he co-organized the Dutch première of a large-scale, long-neglected choral work: Passion Week (Stille Week) by Maximilian Steinberg.

In 2024, Bas was one of the initiators of Tempera Mente, an early-music collective of five singers and continuo. Their debut programme was warmly received at the Festival Oude Muziek Utrecht (Fringe) and praised in the German press for its “outstanding mastery” of seventeenth-century repertoire.

In the 2026–27 season, Tempera Mente is part of Sustainable EEEmerging, a European programme supporting emerging ensembles. The group will appear at Festival TAMIS in Saarbrücken, the Händel-Festspiele in Göttingen, in residencies in Riga, Göttingen, and Görwihl, and in concerts throughout the Netherlands.

Research

At university, Bas completed a bachelor’s degree in Bèta-gamma and a master’s degree in Logic, both with a specialization in mathematics. He graduated with a thesis on models of language evolution and continued with doctoral research at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation.

Scientific questions about language and music are closely related, and his PhD research therefore focused on the measurement of musical structure: modes in Gregorian chant, contours of folk melodies, rhythmic patterns in music and birdsong, and the practically algorithmic music of Arvo Pärt. His work was awarded a Best Paper Award by the International Society for Music Information Retrieval, and his dissertation received attention in national media.

More recently, he has been exploring connections with biology, asking whether ideas from music research can help to better understand vocalizations in other species.

Design

Throughout his research, data visualization has played a central role, sometimes combined with interactive web experiments. One example is his work on TuneTwins, for which he designed a new version of the interface that also functions as a scientific experiment.

Already during secondary school, Bas co-founded a creative studio for graphic design and web development together with his brother. He later continued this work independently under the name Studio Metrum, designing visual identities and websites for clients such as the Municipality of Amsterdam and the University of Amsterdam, as well as for student organizations, start-ups, and musical ensembles.

In recent years, photography has become an additional part of his practice. His photographs have appeared on an album cover and—on one rare occasion—even in international media.