Mag.a Dr.in Elisabeth Reisinger, BA
Senior Scientist
Principal Investigator (Senior Postdoc) – FWF-funded project “Performers as Commissioners of New Music in the Twentieth Century” | Secretary General of the Austrian Society for Musicology (ÖGMw)
Zimmer LS 01 36
Lothringerstraße 18, A-1030 Vienna
Research Topics
- Promotion/funding of music by performers (20th cent.)
- Encounters of diverse musical genres, especially "classical" music and jazz (20th cent.)
- Austrian musicians in exile and emigration in the US (20th cent.)
- Performance, reception and context of Franz Liszt's music in Rome (19th cent.)
- Court/aristocratic music culture in the German-speaking region (18th/early 19th cent.)
- Cultural and social history of music
Short Bio
Elisabeth Reisinger studied musicology and history at the University of Vienna, where she was engaged in several research projects on music at the Bonn Court in the late eighteenth century (2013–2018). In 2019, she was a postdoc fellow at the Austrian Historical Institute in Rome and subsequently at Harvard University’s Department of Music. In August 2020, she returned to the University of Vienna to complete her FWF-Schrödinger-project on Benny Goodman. Before she started her current position at the mdw, she held a short term research fellowship by the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel. Since 2017, she has been Secretary General of the Austrian Society for Musicology.
Reisinger’s research articulates a relational conception of music as a vibrant and dynamic sociocultural practice, driven by a specific interest in the relationships, networks, and agencies of musical actors, as well as the dynamics in the field of patronage. While in her diploma thesis she dealt with the institutional structures and economies in which musicians were embedded in the early nineteenth century, her dissertation was positioned in the field of patronage research and focused on Maximilian Franz of Habsburg-Lorraine, Elector of Cologne, as a musical actor and patron in the second half of the eighteenth century. In an additional research project on Franz Liszt, Reisinger further focused on one performer and broadened her research scope in the fields of performance and reception history. In her current project, she highlights the economic and creative involvement of performers in processes of musical creation and repertoire formation.
Upcoming Lectures / Conference Papers / Events
“Ways and Limits of Transcending Traditional Roles at the Harpsichord: Sylvia Marlowe (New York, 1908–1981) and Antoinette Vischer (Basel, 1909–1973)” (paper at the International Musicological Conference “Transcending Traditional Roles: Female Musicians on the Path to Artistic Freedom, ” Ljubljana, 21-22 Nov. 2024)
For a report about the International Workshop “Historical Perspectives on Musical Commissions”, May 17, 2024, see the project's website
» complete list of lectures and conference papers
Recent Publications
“‘Some Sort of Machine Without a Body’ György Ligeti and Antoinette Vischer Explore the Modern Harpsichord,” Studia Musicologica 64/1-2 (2023), 75-91
“More Than One ‘Double Life’: Artistic Conceptions, Networks, and Negotiations in Benny Goodman’s Commissions to Paul Hindemith and Darius Milhaud,” Journal of the Society for American Music 17/2 (2023), 101–125
“‘To realize in America what has become impossible in Europe’: Excavating Erich Simon’s Life for Music (1907–1994),” Journal of Austrian-American History 6/1 (2022), 44–73
» complete list of publications