Loren Ludwig is a scholar/performer and teacher whose research explores the materiality of musical instruments and the ways that music and musical technologies (instruments, notation, and performance practices) foster social intimacy and the formation of knowledge and shared meaning. Recent publications at the nexus of musicology and the history of science investigate the intersection of music and alchemy in Michael Maier's 1618 emblem book Atalanta Fugiens (in Furnace and Fugue, winner of 2022 American Historical Association Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Creativity in Digital History) and chronicle the use of the viola da gamba as a dual scientific and musical instrument to advance new theories of musical temperament in the long eighteenth century (in BACH: Journal of the Riemenschneider Bach Institute). A related dimension of Loren's research is on the history of musical and organological revivalism—the periodic reemergence of particular European instruments and performance practices in both European and colonial contexts. Publications documenting the presence and use of the viola da gamba in eighteenth-century Maryland and Virginia (including discussion of a newly discovered manuscript of solo music for viola da gamba from Virginia dated 1739) and on Civil Rights luminary Bayard Rustin's use of Elizabethan music as part of his social justice activism offer two different visions of how Renaissance musical instruments and their associated performance practices have been refigured to serve new communities and meanings. Loren is currently at work on a monograph on a lost tradition of ensemble string playing in Colonial and Early Republic New England. “Ingenious Mechanisms”: New England Viols and Vernacular Luthiery in the Early Republic combines organology, historiography, and performance to reconstruct the New England viol consort and its contexts and has entailed restoring and learning to play New England viols of varying sizes. This research casts the viol in New England as an emblem of emergent relationships between technology and vernacular culture and interrogates how changes in the construction and use of musical instruments reshaped early republic American musical culture.

Loren's role as Program Coordinator for the Program in Arts, Humanities, & Health (based in Johns Hopkins' Institute of the History of Medicine) entails creating programming (performances, exhibits, and workshops) that leverages the arts and medical humanities to foster empowerment, equity, and community. Among its roles, PAHH works to coordinate the myriad, diverse activities at the nexus of the arts and health across Johns Hopkins and in Baltimore and surrounding communities. In collaboration with Johns Hopkins' program in Music and Medicine and the International Arts and Mind Lab, for example, PAHH created the Racial Justice Concert Series, which connects Baltimore-based musicians with local social and racial justice organizations to present regular, free musical performances for the East Baltimore campus and broader community. In Spring 2023 Loren taught "Music as Medicine," an undergraduate seminar offered as part of the Medicine, Science, and Humanities program in Johns Hopkins' Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. Students explored the intertwined histories of music and medicine with hands-on engagement with musico-medical technologies and practices (such the monochord, stethoscope, and pulse taking). Students also encountered some of the diverse and dynamic activity at the nexus of the arts and health at Johns Hopkins through class visits by musicians, researchers, and clinicians, as well as field trips to Welch Medical Library Special Collections and the Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archive.

Loren received a PhD in Critical and Comparative Studies in Music from the University of Virginia in 2011 and studied viola da gamba and historical performance at Oberlin Conservatory and as a Fulbright Fellow at the Royal Conservatory of the Hague. He has received funding from the Mellon Foundation, that American Musicology Society, and the Viola da Gamba Society of America. Loren performs and records widely on the viola da gamba, including as a founding member of critically acclaimed ensembles ACRONYM and LeStrange Viols. He can be heard on labels New Amsterdam, New Focus, BIS, VIA and on the soundtrack to Obsidian/Xbox/Microsoft’s game Pentiment (2022).