Alexander Rehding

Alex Rehding is a musicologist and music theorist with a broad interest in questions of sound and listening. Educated at Hamburg and Cambridge Universities, he joined the music department at Harvard University in 2003 and holds the Fanny Peabody Professorship of Music. A former editor of Acta Musicologica (the journal of the International Musicological Society), he is now editor-in-chief of the Oxford Handbooks Music Online series. His research is located in the history of music theory and the cultural history of music, focusing primarily on the nineteenth century and the ancient world. His book publications include Hugo Riemann and the Birth of Modern Musical Thought (2003) and Music and Monumentality (2009). His forthcoming Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (2017) explores the significance of the symphony this side of the millennium in contemporary digital culture. Rehding’s awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Dent Medal of the Royal Musical Association. A grant from the Andrew Mellon foundation allowed him to convene the John E. Sawyer seminar on “Hearing Modernity” in 2013. While at the Max Planck Institute, Rehding is researching the nineteenth-century tax collector, astronomer, and polymath Friedrich Opelt and the innovative music theory he developed on the basis of the mechanical siren. Other ongoing projects include a cross-cultural study of music theory and a multimedia project exploring the Golden Record included in the Voyager space mission.