Currently Pranger is preparing her PhD at the Utrecht University. The title is Thinking with Musical Dis/Continuity: a Baradian Account of Musicology. Her promotor and co-promotor are Prof. Dr. Karl Kügle and Dr. Iris van der Tuin.
She explores how to think music from within the occurring, in order to grasp how music is created in-the-making. This implicates a complex problematic that touches upon musicological, philosophical, and music pragmatic issues. It challenges the ‘obstacle’ of how to represent through thinking the non-representative determination of musical becoming, one of the themes in Carolyn Abbate’s famed essay Music – Drastic or Gnostic? (2004). In her elaboration Pranger relates Abbate’s concerns with Karen Barad’s Agential Realist perspective. This entails an onto-epistemological approach that considers musicians and musicologists to be of the musically inclined world. Suggesting that to obtain knowledge of music’s dynamic being concerns the nature of relating and of being implicated in a world that moves and varies. The Baradian perspective undermines the idea of being able to separate oneself, also as a musicologist, from aesthetic, ontological, (and epistemic) concerns and then decide what musicology has to say about music. It widens the scope of an unbridgeable difference (drastic, Gnostic, or nature, culture) as posed by Abbate, into a discussion of the creative nature of relationality; of how music (and musicology) comes into being, how it matters, “intra-actively.”
Other research interests are: The elaboration of a new materialist ambition in music research and theory, Human Computer Interaction (HCI) in music related areas, musical education in the digital age, the aspects of time and space in (‘mediatized’) musical performance, and the ethical and aesthetical call, embodied within music-in-the-making.