Golan Gur
© IFK

Golan Gur

Univ.-Ass. Dr.
Deputy Head of Department

 

E: gur-golan@mdw.ac.at
T: +43 1 71155 3617


Office hours: please make an appointment
                                                                  

Golan Gur holds a PhD in musicology and is currently university assistant (post-doc) in the Department of Music Sociology at mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. He studied musicology at the University of Tel Aviv and at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. He completed his PhD at the chair of music sociology/social history of music at the Humboldt-Universität in Berlin. His dissertation was supported through fellowships by the Minerva Stiftung (Max Planck Society) and the German Academic Scholarship Foundation (Leo Baeck Fellowship Programme).

After the completion of his PhD, Gur was a Newton International Fellow of the British Academy at the University of Cambridge for two years. In addition, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, a Research Fellow at IFK Vienna and an academic staff member at the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz. In 2020-2022, he led the FWF research project „Proletarian Voices“ at the mdw. In 2022-2023, he was a postdoctoral research fellow of the UKRI at Royal Holloway College, University of London.

 

Work and Research Areas

  • Sociology and Aesthetics of modern and contemporary music

  • Arnold Schönberg and the Avantgarde

  • Music and politics in the 20th century

  • Music, science, and technology (especially cybernetics)

  • History of the philosophy of music

  • Jewish musical culture in Israel and in the German-speaking area

 

Selected Publications and Talks

Talk “The War after the War: Political Narratives and the Genre of Folk Music in Nazi Germany and the GDR” at the conference Music and Conflict in Austrian and German Contexts: The Politics and Escapism of Wartime Culture, Institute of Austrian and German Music Research, Department of Music and Media, University of Surrey, May 2023 

“Socialist Realism or Cybernetics? Music, Information Theory, and Posthumanism in the German Democratic Republic,” The Musical Quarterly 105.3-4 (2022), 357-405

“Karl Goldmark zwischen jüdischem Wagnerismus und deutschem Orientalismus,” Carl Goldmark: Werk – Leben – Rezeption, edited by Peter Stachel. Vienna: Hollitzer, 2022, 149-160

Talk “Political Autonomous Music? David Josef Bach and the Reception of the Austro-German Classical Tradition in Red Vienna” at the conference Revisiting Austrian and German Music, Institute of Austrian and German Music Research, Department of Music and Media, University of Surrey, Sep. 2021

Talk “Music and Narratives of Empowerment” at the conference Narrating Musicology: Fachgeschichte(n) der Musikwissenschaft, University of Bern, Sep. 2021

Talk “Beethoven and the Topos of Heroism in the Austrian Workers’ Music Movement” at the conference isaScience 2021: Heroes, Canons, Cults. Critical Inquiries, mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna/Reichenau an der Rax, Aug. 2021

Talk „Neue Musik dem Neuen Menschen“ at the conference Musik/-Theorie und Zukunft in der Vergangenheit und Gegenwart, Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg, May 2021

“Israel: Music in History, Culture, and Geography,” SAGE Encyclopedia of Music and Culture, edited by Janet Sturman. London et al.: SAGE Publications, 2019, 1207-1209

Military Songs as Popular Music: War, Memory, and Commemoration in the Songs of the Israeli Military Bands,Lied und Krieg/Music in War, edited by Knut Holtsträter, special issue of Lied und populäre Kultur/Song and Popular Culture: Jahrbuch des Deutschen Volksliedarchivs 63 (2018), 93-109

Talk “Hearing Plants, Reasoning Nature: Art and Science as Media of Knowledge” at the conference The Global Composition: Conference on Sound Ecology and Media Culture, University of Applied Sciences Darmstadt, 2018

Talk “In Defence of Grand Theory: The Theory of Social Systems and the Prospects of Music Sociology” at the conference Thinking Musicology Today: Objects, Methods, and Prospects, Philharmonic of Paris, Nov. 2017

Talk “Avant-Garde and the Popular Front: Hanns Eisler and the Aesthetics of Socialist Realism” at the conference Music and Socialism since 1917, University of Nottingham, July 2017

“The Other Marxism: Georg Knepler and the Anthropology of Music,” Musicologia Austriaca: Journal for Austrian Music Studies 1 (2016). [online]

“Zwölftonmusik,” Enzyklopädie jüdischer Geschichte und Kultur, edited by Dan Diner. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 2016, vol. 6, 580-584

“Volksmusik,” Enzyklopädie jüdischer Geschichte und Kultur, edited by Dan Diner. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 2016, vol. 6, 309-311

Talk “Political Thought and Identity in East German Music Aesthetics and Historiography” at the workshop Jewish Political Thought beyond Borders, Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania, Dec. 2016

Talk “Schoenberg, Adorno and the Making of Critical Composition” at the Eskolot Festivals for Contemporary Jewish Culture, Goethe Institute/Stanislavsky Electrotheatre, Moscow, Jan. 2016

“Classicism as Anti-Fascist Heritage: Realism and Myth in Ernst Hermann Meyer’s Mansfelder Oratorium (1950),” Classical Music in the German Democratic Republic: Production and Reception, edited by Kyle Frackman and Larson Powell. Rochester: Camden House, 2015, 34-57

“From Byzantine Music to Dodecaphony (and back). Egon Wellesz on Ancient and Modern Music,” Die Wiener Schule und die Alte Musik: Bericht zum Symposium (= Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Center 11/2015), edited by Reinhard Kapp and Markus Grassl. Vienna: Arnold Schönberg Center, 2015, 266-277

“Composing Trauma: The Holocaust and the Moral Commitments of the Avant-Garde in Chaya Czernowin’s Pnima...ins innere,Partituren der Erinnerung: Der Holocaust in der Musik/Scores of Commemoration: The Holocaust in Music, edited by Béla Rásky and Verena Pawlowsky. Vienna: New Academic Press 2015, 279-290

“Schönberg and the Concept of Political Art: Reanimating the Expressionism-Realism Debate,” Journal of the Arnold Schönberg Center 12 (2015), 189-197

Talk “Music, Army, and the Media: The Israeli Military Bands and the Challenge of Statehood” at the conference War of Media – Media of War, University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna, Nov. 2015

Talk “‘Die alten Gesänge im Geiste unserer Zeit’”: Sulzer, Lewandowski and the Politics of Assimilation in Jewish Liturgical Music” at the conference Jewishness & the Arts: Music and Composers in 19th-Century Europe. Accademia Filarmonia Romana, Rome, Oct. 2015

Talk “The Other Marxism: Georg Knepler and Philosophical Anthropology as a Paradigm of Historical-Materialist Musicology” at the Current Musicology 50th Anniversary Conference, Columbia University, New York, March 2015

“Social History,” Music in the Social and Behavioral Sciences: An Encyclopedia, edited by William Forde Thompson. London et al.: SAGE Publications, 2014, 1019-1023

Review of Arnold Pistiak, Essays zu Hanns Eislers musikalischem und poetischem Schaffen (Berlin: Edition Bodoni 2013), Das Argument: Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Sozialwissenschaften 56.4 (2014), 582-584

Review of Ernst Helmuth Flammer (ed.), Fortschritt, was ist das…? (Hofheim: Wolke 2014), Positionen: Texte zur aktuellen Musik 101 (2014), 47-48

Talk “The Other Marxism: Adorno, Lukács, and the Debate over Materialist Music Aesthetics in East Germany” at the conference Music, Marxism, and the Frankfurt School, Dublin School of Music, University College Dublin, July 2014

Talk “‘Sag nie, du gehst den letzten Weg’: Lin Jaldati and the Revival of Yiddish Music in the German Democratic Republic” at the conference Continuities and Ruptures: Artistic Responses to Jewish Migration, Internment and Exile in the Long Twentieth Century, School of Music, University of Leeds, July 2014

Talk “Georg Knepler and the Formation of Post-Stalinist Marxist Musicology in the German Democratic Republic” at the 4th Annual Conference of the Royal Musical Association Music & Philosophy Study Group, King’s College London, June 2014

Orakelnde Musik: Schönberg, der Fortschritt und die Avantgarde (= Musiksoziologie, vol. 18). Kassel et al.: Bärenreiter, 2013

Talk “Beyond the Boycott: Richard Wagner and Jewish Identity in Music” at the conference WagnerWorldWide: Reflections, Bayreuth, Schloss Thurnau and Nurnberg, Dec. 2013

Talk “Musical Experience in the Age of Technique: Günther Anders’ Existential Phenomenology of Music” at the Annual Conference of the American Musicological Society, Pittsburgh. Nov. 2013

Talk “Zwischen Zionismus und Assimilation. Schönberg und seine jüdische Identität” at the lecture series Deutsch-Jüdische Kultur und die Musik, Berlin University of Arts/Berlin-Brandenburg Center for Jewish Studies, July 2013

“Music and ‘Weltanschauung’: Franz Brendel and the Claims of Universal History,” in: Music & Letters 93.3 (2012), 350-373

Talk “Schoenberg and Narratives of Progress: Towards an Intellectual History of Modernist Identity” at the 19th congress of the International Musicological Society (Musics, Cultures, Identities), Rome, July 2012

“Music of the Race: Jewish Ethnomusicology and the Idelsohn-Lach Connection,” Musicologica Austriaca: Jahresschrift der Österreichischen Gesellschaft für Musikwissenschaft 30 (2011), 123-149

“The Spectre of the End: Musical Avant-Gardism and the Philosophical Turn,” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 42.2 (2011), 267-284

“Body, Forces, and Paths: Metaphor and Embodiment in Jean-Philippe Rameau's Conceptualization of Tonal Space,” Music Theory Online 14.1 (2008) [online]