Golan Gur, PhD, is a musicologist specializing in aesthetics and cultural history of music, with a particular emphasis on nineteenth- and twentieth-century German culture and the intersection between historical and interdisciplinary research approaches. Born inIsrael, he attendedTelAvivUniversitywhere he earned his bachelor and master degrees. He pursued further graduate studies at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and completed his doctoral dissertation at the Humboldt University of Berlin in 2012. He taught atTel-AvivUniversity, atHumboldtUniversityand at Berlin University of Arts. He was a visiting scholar at the Simon Dubnow Institute of theUniversityofLeipzigand the Paul Sacher Stiftung,Basel. His research was supported by fellowships and grants from the City Council of Munich, the Minerva Foundation (Max-Planck-Gesellschaft), the German National Academic Foundation (Leo Baeck Fellowship Programme), theArnoldSchoenbergCenterinVienna, and more. He is currently a Royal Society & British Academy Newton International Fellow at theUniversityofCambridgewhere he works on a postdoctoral project dealing with musical and aesthetic culture in the German Democratic Republic, with an emphasis on Jewish memory. His other research interests include social and intellectual histoty of music, theories of musical meaning, Jewish/Israeli ethnomusicology, Marxist aesthetics, and historical theory and methodology.
Recent academic publications
Book:
Orakelnde Musik. Schönberg, der Fortschritt und die Avantgarde . Kassel et al.: Bärenreiter 2013
Articles:
“Re-Inventing Cultural Musicology: New Musicology and the European Heritage”. In: Markus Grassl and Cornelia Szabó-Knotik (ed.), Die Rückkehr der Denkmäler. Aktuelle retrospektive Tendenzen der Musikwissenschaft (= Reihe Musikkontext 6). Vienna: Mille Tre Verlag 2013, pp. 91-104
“Music and ‘Weltanschauung’: Franz Brendel and the Claims of Universal History”. In: Music & Letters 93.3 (August 2012), pp. 350-373
“Deconstructing Musical Modernism: Narratives and Aesthetic Ideology”. In: Sandra Danielczyk, Christoph Dennerlein, Sylvia Freydank et al. (ed.), Konstruktivität von Musikgeschichtsschreibung. Zur Formation musikbezogenen Wissens (= Studien und Materialien zur Musiwissenschaft 69). Hildesheim:Georg Olms Verlag 2012, pp. 33-47
“Social History”. In: Music in the Social and Behavioral Sciences: An Encyclopedia, SAGE Publications, Inc.
“The Sword and the Pigeon: Comradeship and Patriotism in the Songs of the Israeli Military Bands, 1950-1975”. In: Gwyneth Bravo et al. (ed.), Music and War.London: Routledge
“Composing Trauma: The Holocaust and the Moral Commitments of the Avant-Garde in Chaya Czernowin’s Pnima...ins innere”. In: Scores of Commemoration. The Holocaust in Music
Orakelnde Musik. Schönberg, der Fortschritt und die Avantgarde
His dissertation project deals with the Jewish composer Arnold Schoenberg and avant-garde notions of musical progress. The study asks when and why modern composers, especially those influenced by Schoenberg, thought of their music in terms of progress and how this is linked to broader intellectual and social developments in the twentieth century.
