Birgit Abels is professor of cultural musicology at Georg August University Göttingen. Her research interests include neo-phenomenological and Pacific Indigenous approaches to the performing arts. The geographic foci of her research are the Pacific Ocean, North India, and the Southeast Asian Island world. Her books include Sounds of Articulating Identity. Tradition and Transition in the Music of Palau, Micronesia (2008), recognized with the ICAS Book Prize 2009; The Harmonium in North Indian Music (2010); and Music Worlding in Palau. Chanting, Atmospheres, and Meaningfulness (2022). She is the PI of the ERC project Sound Knowledge. Alternative Epistemologies of Music in the Western Pacific Island World. ORCID: 0000-0003-0400-137X.
Drake Andersen, assistant professor in the Department of Music at Central Connecticut State University, is a composer, improviser, and technologist. His research focuses on avant-garde music, improvisation, and music technology. He has presented at national and international conferences including the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society and the World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon) and his scholarship has appeared in journals including the Journal of Music Theory, the Journal of the Society for American Music, and Organised Sound. ORCID: 0000-0002-9338-604X
Anja K. Arend, Dr. phil., is a dance scholar and musicologist with additional studies in history and theology. Currently she is teaching dance history and dance studies, as well as managing the Folkwang Dance Archive. Her research focuses on the history of dance in the 19th and 20th centuries, historical notation practices, the relationship between music and dance, and the archiving of dance. Her work is characterized by a clear interdisciplinary approach, which is reflected in her teaching and research. ORCID: 0000-0002-9739-9171
Adrián Artacho is a composer, artistic researcher and lecturer at the Contemporary Arts Practice Master (CAP) at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. As a PhD candidate at the Institute for Composition and Electroacoustics, he researches the use of technology to augment performer capabilities. ORCID: 0000-0002-0849-0580
Sophie Benn is an assistant professor of musicology at Butler University (Indianapolis, USA). Her recent and forthcoming publications center on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century dance theory, social dance in early French film, and cello literature. She also maintains an active career as a cellist and baroque cellist. ORCID: 0000-0002-2577-9212
Ivo I. Berg is Professor of Music Education at the Berlin University of the Arts. He studied instrumental pedagogy and philosophy in Bremen and completed postgraduate studies in early music in Tilburg. In 2013, he completed a doctorate in music education at the Berlin University of the Arts. From 2015 to 2018 he was a research assistant at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. Since 2018, he has been head of the artistic-pedagogical training programme at the Berlin University of the Arts. He has published on the phenomenology of music-making, on the performance practice of early music, on the history of instrumental pedagogy and on socio-political dimensions of music education. ORCID: 0000-0002-6941-3781
Ulrike Brand is a German cellist, performer and composer. She moves stylistically between composition and improvisation. As an interpreter of contemporary music, she had an intensive solo concert activity. From 1986 she lived in Italy where she both promoted and played contemporary music. In Berlin, from 2011 she is collaborating with musicians from the international improvisation scene, creating projects with visual artists and dancers, her own body becoming a creative element in the performances. Ulrike Brand is a lecturer and writer and has been teaching improvisation at the Berlin University of the Arts since 2018. ORCID: 0000-0002-7099-2178
Jeremy Coleman (PhD) is a Resident Lecturer in the Department of Music Studies, School of Performing Arts, University of Malta (UM), and Area Director for Research in the School of Performing Arts, UM. His teaching and research span various areas including music history and historiography, music theory and musicianship, performance practice, and critical and social theory. He is the author of Richard Wagner in Paris: Translation, Identity, Modernity (The Boydell Press, 2019) and has contributed to The Cambridge Stravinsky Encyclopedia (2021). Jeremy is also a collaborative pianist having performed in recitals and in larger productions across UK as well as in Ireland, Germany, Hungary, and Malta. ORCID: 0000-0002-6691-9365
Fabian Czolbe studied musicology, art history, and philosophy in Berlin and received his PhD in 2011 focussing aspects of notational iconicity in Henri Pousseur’s compositional sketches. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Musicology Weimar-Jena and habilitated at the University of Heidelberg with a thesis on compositional writing scenes. Since 2023 he is a research assistant at the Hamburg University of Music and Drama/ligeti center. His research focus is on music and music theater of the twentieth/twenty-first century, experimental and improvised music, sound art and sound performance, music aesthetics, notation, sketch studies, musical writing, and creative processes in music. ORCID: 0009-0005-7860-0860
Leo Dick studied composition and opera direction in Berlin and continued as a masterclass student of Georges Aperghis at the Bern University of the Arts (HKB). The focus of his artistic work is on forms of new music theater. Since 2009, he has been teaching in the master program Composition and Creative Practice at the HKB. Since 2017 he has been also member of the research team at the HKB. In 2019, he received a four-year postdoctoral grant (Ambizione) from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) for his research project Helvetia mediatrix: Advanced Music Theatre and Collective Identity Formation in Switzerland Since 1945. ORCID: 0000-0001-6031-6013
Barbara Dobretsberger, Dr. phil., studied at the Mozarteum University Salzburg (piano pedagogy) and the Universities of Salzburg and Vienna (German philology and musicology). She received habilitation with a thesis on Pierre Boulez and currently teaches as a professor of music theory and analysis at the Mozarteum University. Her numerous relevant publications include two textbooks on instrumental and vocal forms. She regularly travels to Europe, Asia, and Africa as a guest professor and lecturer. ORCID: 0000-0001-9725-6333
Gerko Egert is a dance and performance studies scholar. He is currently lecturer at the Ruhr-University Bochum. His research deals with philosophies and politics of movement, dance and performance, radical pedagogy, process philosophy, and (speculative) pragmatism. Gerko holds a PhD from Freie Universität Berlin Moving Relation. Touch in Contemporary Dance (published 2016, English transl. 2020). Further publications include: “Choreographing the Weather—Weathering Choreography” (The Drama Review, 2016) and “Operational Choreography. Dance and Logistical Capitalism” (Performance Philosophy, 2022). He is co-founder of Nocturne, a platform for experimental knowledge production (https://www.nocturne-plattform.de/). https://gerkoegert.com/; ORCID: 0000-0002-4887-1548
British composer and pianist Philip Feeney studied composition at Cambridge and the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome. He is most noted for his music for dance which ranges from full-length orchestral ballets to electro-acoustic soundscapes, jazz, and hip-hop scores. He has composed for many dance companies, including Northern Ballet, Cullberg Ballet, and American Ballet Theatre, and has collaborated with choreographers internationally such as Michael Pink, Alexei Ratmansky and Cathy Marston, most notably with The Cellist for the Royal Ballet in 2020. He works as a dance accompanist in London, and is composer-in-residence with Ballet Central, lecturing and improvising for dance classes and workshops. ORCID: 0000-0001-6777-1983
Christoph Flamm studied musicology, art history, and German language and literature in Heidelberg. After professorships at the Berlin University of the Arts and the Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, he taught musicology at the University of Music Lübeck from 2014-2020. Since then, he has been Professor of Musicology at the University of Heidelberg. His publications and editions concern mainly Russian and Italian music. ORCID: 0000-0002-6621-3573
Matthias Geuting, Dr. phil., is an organist and musicologist. As a soloist, he regularly accepts invitations to well-known festivals dedicated to contemporary music in Germany and abroad. In the area of improvisation, he works with renowned representatives from dance, performance and acting. In 2020 he founded the interdisciplinary PART ensemble together with Evelin Degen. Geuting teaches at various German universities and publishes mostly on 20th and 21st century music. ORCID: 0000-0003-3620-5924
Keir GoGwilt is a violinist, composer, and musicologist. He researches intersections between performance pedagogy and aesthetics, bringing together material histories of violin playing and reflections on contemporary practice. Published articles appear in the Bach Journal, Current Musicology, Naxos Musicology, and the Orpheus Institute Series. As a violinist he has soloed with groups including the Basel Sinfonieorchester, Orchestra of St. Luke’s, Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, Chinese National Symphony, Orquesta Filarmonica de Santiago, and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project. He is a resident artist with the JACK Quartet (’23-’25) and a founding member of the American Modern Opera Company. He earned his PhD in Music from UC San Diego in 2021. ORCID: 0000-0002-5664-3035
Florian Heesch holds a PhD in musicology from the University of Gothenburg. He is professor of popular music and gender studies at the University of Siegen. He is principal investigator of the project “Low Pop” within the collaborative research center (SFB) 1472, “Transformations of the Popular,” funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). His research interests include sentimental ballads, German schlager, Ghanaian highlife, gender and genre, music and mythology, popular music and learning. Among his publications are the co-edited anthologies Heavy Metal, Gender and Sexuality (2019) and “Sounds like a real man to me”—Populäre Kultur, Musik und Männlichkeit (2019). ORCID: 0000-0002-3837-066X
Leonhard Horstmeyer has written his PhD thesis on the dimensional reduction of smooth dynamical systems at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences. He subsequently worked at the Complexity Science Hub Vienna, studying systemic effects of networked systems. His current research focuses on the dialogue between complexity science and artistic practices. ORCID: 0000-0003-2948-1410
Winnie Huang is a violinist, gestural performance artist, composer and researcher. An active performer of new music, she collaborates frequently with diverse composers and international ensembles. Career highlights have included solo performances at the Berlin Philharmonie (DE), KKL Lucerne (CH), and the Elbphilharmonie (DE). Winnie’s strong interest in the performance of musical-gestural pieces is also explored frequently through her own original compositions. Academically, Winnie has consistently taught, workshopped, and guest-lectured in Europe, Asia and Australia. Winnie is currently the Associate Professor for Research in Music Performance at the Conservatorio della Svizzera italiana, Ticino, Switzerland. ORCID: 0000-0003-2141-1936
Jin Hyun Kim, PhD, is a music researcher at the University of the Arts Helsinki. Her work integrates artistic practices, digital sound and media technology, human-computer interaction, societal health, and inclusive communities, focusing on the experiential and social dimensions of embodied music-making and musical understanding. From 2019 to 2023, she led the research project Social Interaction through Sound Feedback—Sentire, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), as director of the Lab of Music Technology, Aisthesis, and Interaction (TAIM) at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. ORCID: 0000-0001-7319-7674
Stephanie Jordan is Research Professor Emeritus in Dance at University of Roehampton. She has professional and academic backgrounds in both music and dance. Publications include Striding Out: Aspects of Contemporary and New Dance in Britain; Moving Music: Dialogues with Music in Twentieth-Century Ballet; Stravinsky Dances: Re-Visions across a Century and Mark Morris: Musician-Choreographer. She has directed two analytical documentaries, one with the George Balanchine Foundation, and another with The Royal Ballet, in collaboration with Geraldine Morris on the work of Frederick Ashton. In 2010, she received the CORD award for Outstanding Scholarly Research in Dance. She is now researching the work of British choreographer Sir Richard Alston. ORCID: 0000-0003-0924-3095
Adrian Kuhl has been research group leader of the complete edition of Bernd Alois Zimmermann at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt/Main since 2016. He studied musicology, German philology, and philosophy at the Ruprecht Karls University in Heidelberg. His PhD under Prof. Dr. Silke Leopold at Heidelberg University (2013) deals with the Singspiel in northern and central Germany in the second half of the 18th century, his habilitation at Frankfurt University (2024) with the West German ballet of the 1950s as a forum for the musical avant-garde. ORCID: 0000-0001-7256-3599
Markus Kupferblum is an Austrian theater and opera director, author, and clown. He founded the first Austrian Fringe Opera Company, Totales Theater, in Vienna and is an expert on commedia dell’arte and mask theater. Currently he lives between Vienna and Boston and teaches drama at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. ORCID: 0000-0002-9920-4577
Daphne Leong’s work, which focuses on rhythm, analysis and performance, and music since 1900, appears in her book, Performing Knowledge: Twentieth-Century Music in Analysis and Performance (Oxford University Press, 2019); in journals such as Journal of Music Theory, Perspectives of New Music, and Music Theory Online; and in edited collections. Leong is an active pianist and chamber musician, whose performances and recordings include premieres of current music. She has served as Vice President of the Society for Music Theory. In 2013 she received the Excellence in Teaching Award of the University of Colorado Boulder, where she is Professor of Music Theory. ORCID: 0000-0002-6732-9885
Barbara Lüneburg, Professor of Artistic Research and Director of the Doctoral Programs at Anton Bruckner University, has appeared as a soloist and composer across Europe, both Americas, Asia and New Zealand. Lüneburg was principal artist and researcher in the artistic research project TransCoding—From Highbrow Art to Participatory Culture, and in Embodying Expression, Gender, Charisma—Breaking Boundaries of Classical Instrumental Performance Practices, and main investigator in GAPPP-Gamified Audiovisual Performance and Performance Practice (all projects funded by the FWF). http://www.barbara-lueneburg.com/; http://embodying-expression.net/; http://transcoding.info/; ORCID: 0000-0002-3259-5219
Rainer Nonnenmann studied musicology, philosophy, and German philology at the universities of Tübingen, Cologne, and Vienna. He is a lecturer at the HfMT Cologne, temporarily also at the music academy in Freiburg, and since 2018 at the IEMA at the HfMDK Frankfurt. He was publisher and editor of the journal MusikTexte until 2023, since 2024 musiktext.online, and is also editor for contemporary music of the neue musikzeitung and chief-editor of the magazine Oper und Tanz. He is author of several books and numerous articles on music, compositional technique, aesthetics, and cultural and social history of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, including publications with special emphasis on the subject “music and movement”. ORCID: 0000-0002-7033-5223
Hanne Pilgrim is a eurhythmician, pianist, and performer. Together with a multidisciplinary team of researchers she conducted the PEEK project Atlas of Smooth Spaces, funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). Currently Pilgrim is affiliated to the Trossingen State University of Music. ORCID: 0000-0003-3904-525X
Ingo Reulecke is a dancer and choreographer and, with numerous awards and scholarships, is recognised internationally. He is a professor at the Inter-University for Dance, Berlin (HZT). Together with Heike Gäßler he wrote a book entitled: Radikale Echtzeit. Tanz, Musik, Sprache als Echtzeit Komposition (Hochschulübergreifendes Zentrum Tanz Berlin/HZT, Inter University Center for Dance Berlin 2021).
David Roesner is Professor for Theatre and Music-Theatre at the LMU Munich. He previously worked at the Universities of Hildesheim, Exeter and Kent. In 2003 he published his first monograph on Theatre as Music. Recent publications include Theatre Noise. The Sound of Performance (with Lynne Kendrick, 2011), Composed Theatre. Aesthetics, Practices, Processes (with Matthias Rebstock, 2012), Musicality in Theatre. Music as Model, Method and Metaphor in Theatre-Making (2014), Theatermusik. Analysen und Gespräche (2019) and Music and Sound in European Theatre (2025). For a full list of publications and projects see: http://mhn.academia.edu/DavidRoesner. ORCID: 0000-0002-4371-1852
Simon Rose (UK/DE) is a musician-composer, researcher and writer. He’s a recognised baritone saxophonist and performs regularly in numerous collaborations in Europe. He frequently performs in interdisciplinary settings. Rose holds a PhD from Glasgow Caledonian University and has authored two books: The lived experience of improvisation: in music, learning and life (2017) and Relational Improvisation: Music, Dance and Contemporary Art (2024). ORCID: 0000-0002-4727-9606
Marta Rizzonelli studied musicology at the University of Pavia (B.A.) and at Humboldt University of Berlin (M.A.), and completed an internship in music therapy at the Neurological Hospital for Movement Disorders / Parkinson’s in Beelitz-Heilstätten, Germany. From 2019 to 2023, she worked as a research associate on the project Social Interaction through Sound Feedback—Sentire at Humboldt University of Berlin. Her research explored how the sound-based Body-Machine Interface Sentire can be integrated into healthcare settings, both with clinical and non-clinical clients. Her interests lie in music education didactics for children, music cognition, and especially therapeutic applications of music. ORCID: 0000-0002-9694-6049
Jan Schacher is an artist-researcher and educator performing on stage and other environments, working with/through sound and presence. Trained as an instrumentalist, composer and digital artists, he investigates how the musician’s body informs tangible musical actions and the intangible presence of sound. His artistic works aim at linking diverging strands into a comprehensive and comprehensible assemblage that functions both in the artistic and scholarly domains. In parallel to his practice as an artist, from 2003 onwards, Jan Schacher was an associate researcher at the at the Zurich University of the Arts and since 2021 he is Professor of Music and Technology at the Sibelius Academy of the University of the Arts in Helsinki, Finland. ORCID: 0000-0001-8196-8985
Stephanie Schroedter has been working at the intersection of music, dance and theatre/performance since completing her doctorate in musicology with a focus on dance research at the University of Salzburg (awarded with the “Dance Studies Prize North Rhine-Westphalia”). In addition to designing and conducting research projects funded by Austrian, German and Swiss Research Foundations (FWF, DFG, and SNF), she has held professorships in musicology, dance studies, theater and media studies. She habilitated at the Freie Universität Berlin (“venia” for music and dance studies) and was appointed to a professorship for the development of transdisciplinary theories/aesthetics in the field of music and movement at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna in 2021. ORCID: 0000-0003-0982-1991
Julia H. Schröder is a musicologist specialising in contemporary art music, sound art, sound studies, music and dance, as well as sound in theatre. As a postdoctoral researcher she has been exploring “theatre sounds” at Technical University Berlin, Audio Communication Group (2019-2023), as well as sound art in Mainz, and aesthetic experience in concert settings at the FU Berlin. Her doctoral dissertation has been published in German: Cage & Cunningham Collaboration (Hofheim: Wolke 2011). She is currently working at Freie Universität Berlin and teaching at University of the Arts Berlin master’s program Sound Studies and Sonic Arts. ORCID: 0000-0002-2893-1937
Gerald Siegmund, Dr. phil., is Professor of Applied Theatre Studies at the Justus-Liebig University in Giessen, Germany. He studied Theater, English, and French Literature at Goethe-University in Frankfurt am Main. Among his research interests are theater and memory, aesthetics, dance, performance and theater since the beginning of the twentieth century. He has published widely on contemporary dance including the work of William Forsythe. His most recent publications are: Theater- und Tanzperformance zur Einführung (Hamburg: Junius Verlag, 2020), Jérôme Bel. Dance, Theatre, and the Subject (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and together with Rebekah Kowal and Randy Martin The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). ORCID: 0000-0002-0705-5640
Bobbi Jene Smith is a director, choreographer and dancer who makes work for both live theater and film. She danced for the Batsheva Company from 2005-2014. Since then she has choreographed original work for the Paris Ballet, Basel Ballet, Royal Danish Ballet, Martha Graham Dance Company, Los Angeles Dance Project, VAIL Dance Festival, the Batsheva Dance Company, and others. Her dance and music theater works have been presented by the American Repertory Theater, PS122, La Mama, 92NY, Luminato Festival. Additionally, she has starred in or choreographed films including Elvira Lind’s Bobbi Jene, Georgia Parris’s Mari, and Alex Garland’s Annihilation. She has directed her own dance films including Broken Theater and Gallop Apace.
Daniel Suer studied music education and English (1st state exam, University of Siegen) and earned his M. A. in musicology at the Cologne University of Music and Dance. He completed his PhD about the relation of music and dance in heavy metal within a research project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). As part of this project, he worked as a research assistant at the chair of popular music and gender studies at the University of Siegen. Currently, he is a research assistant (postdoc) at the Nuremberg University of Music. ORCID: 0000-0001-9330-406X
John Toenjes is professor of Dance at the University of Illinois and past President of the International Guild of Musicians in Dance. “Musidance” pieces include Inventions Suite (2008), e’s of water (2007), and SoundWave Surfing (2022). His 2014 Kama Begata Nihilum featured a phone app that involved the audience in the stage action. This inspired him to establish the Laboratory for Audience Interactive Technologies (LAIT), which designed smartphone apps for theatrical use. Works using LAIT include Public Figure (2016), Critical Mass (2018), Mycelial (2018), and Alternate Reality (2019). He is now working on “Master Dancer,” a VR historical view of dancer Loïe Fuller and a dance action game designed to teach creative movement principles. ORCID: 0000-0002-1469-0730
Amy Ming Wai Tai is assistant professor of Music Theory at Indiana University-Bloomington. She finished her PhD in Music Theory at Yale University (2024), MA in Music Theory at University Wisconsin-Madison (2018), and BA in English Studies and Music at the University of Hong Kong (2016). Her research focuses on the relationship between ballet and modern dance and western art music. Her other research interests include phenomenology, narrativity in non-programmatic dance and music, and Labanotation, one of the most widely used dance notation systems. ORCID: 0000-0003-2787-2397
Dorothea Weise has been professor of eurhythmics and head of the Music and Movement Department at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK) since 2009. Her main interest in her work is the artistic-aesthetic differentiation of perception and expression in the authentic and consciously designed examination of the connection between music and movement. She is president of the International Eurhythmics Association FIER since 2023. In 2019, together with Marianne Steffen-Wittek and Dierk Zaiser, she published the volume Rhythmik—Musik und Bewegung. Transdisziplinäre Perspektiven with transcript publishing. ORCID: 0000-0003-4029-4851
Leila Zickgraf studied musicology and economics at the Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg and received her doctorate from the University of Basel. Her research project Igor Stravinsky’s ballet works: development and conception as an interdisciplinary project was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and led to stays in Russia (DHI Moscow, among others) and the USA (Harvard University and Columbia University, among others). She currently lives and works in Berlin (HU Berlin, among others), where her research focuses on the thematic spectrum Human–Machine–Music, in particular on artificial intelligence as well as on (android) automata and (mechanical) dolls in music and dance theatre during the Industrial Revolution. ORCID: 0000-0001-8654-9413
