Angelica Pinna studied musicology and musical heritage at the Universities of Bologna (BA) and Milan (MA). She has been exchange student at the Université Libre de Bruxelles and visiting scholar at the South African College of Music, University of Cape Town, where she researched European musical instruments in the Kirby Collection. She completed her PhD in the Structured Doctoral Programme “Music Matters” in 2025, where she investigated music-related exhibitions in contemporary Vienna, focusing on the underlying curatorial practices, contextual factors and resulting heritage constructions. Since June 2025 she has been curator of the Collection of Historic Musical Instruments (Sammlung alter Musikinstrumente) at the Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien.
For well over a century, music has been a defining feature of Vienna’s cultural identity, shaping the collective image of the city both in Austria and internationally. From the turn of the twentieth century, Viennese museums, like other public institutions, served as tools of political propaganda, processes of identity formation, urban development and cultural reconstruction, particularly in times of political and social transformation. These processes leveraged both Vienna’s and Austria’s musical culture and heritage, consolidating the images of Musikstadt (‘city of music’) and Musikland (‘land of music’). From the late 1980s, major shifts in national politics, alongside emerging European cultural discourse, subverted Austria’s relationship with its past. Simultaneously, the paradigm of the ‘new museum’ emerged, redefining the role of museums in and for communities as ‘spaces of memory’. From the 1990s, Vienna’s museum landscape responded to these changing contexts with new music-related exhibitions.
Grounded in critical heritage studies and memory studies, the dissertation conceptualises exhibitions as media of cultural heritage and memory and examines curatorial practices as acts of heritagisation and remembrance. By examining a range of music-related permanent and temporary exhibitions, the study investigates how museums, collections and other displaying cultural institutions have been re-mediating musical culture and heritage through exhibitions in contemporary Vienna. Through a combination of empirical methods, multi-level analysis and contextual interpretation, the study aims to illuminate the continuous process of remediation, its mechanisms and the contextual factors underlying construct(ion)s of musical heritage, culture and past, including the Musikstadt and Musikland images. Finally, it highlights the role of exhibitions as media that construct and shape notions of musical heritage and identity, which can inherently offer new narratives and representations by actualising – or performing – what Jan Assmann calls potentiality.
Supervisory Core Team: Markus Grassl, Dagmar Abfalter, Andrea Glauser