Oracular Music

I am a musicologist specializing in the aesthetics and socio-cultural history of music. I have held positions in several academic institutions, including the University of Cambridge, Tel Aviv University, Berlin University of the Arts, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, and mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna.

My research focus is music and musical thought from the late nineteenth century to the present, with a particular emphasis on central Europe, music and political thought, sound art and technology, and the history of music theory and philosophy. Being a native speaker of Hebrew, I am also interested in Jewish and Israeli art and popular music. Underlying my diverse studies is an abiding interest in music as a medium of knowledge and emotional expressivity. I received various grants and awards in support and acknowledgment of my academic work, including the Austrian Musicological Society’s Publication Prize.

I studied at Tel Aviv University and at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. I completed my doctoral studies at Humboldt University in Berlin under the supervision of Christian Kaden with a dissertation on Arnold Schoenberg and avant-garde notions of progress in music history (published as a book by Bärenreiter). My doctoral research was sponsored by fellowships from the Minerva Foundation of the Max Planck Society, the German Academic Scholarship Foundation (Leo Baeck Fellowship Programme), and by a research grant from the Arnold Schönberg Center in Vienna. As a postdoctoral researcher, my first appointment was as a Newton International Fellow at the University of Cambridge. I also served as a research fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies and at IFK International Research Center for Cultural Studies. I pursued further postdoctoral research under the aegis of the FWF Lise Meitner Programme.