Musikwissenschaftliches Seminar

Sarah Avischag Müller, MSt. | research assistant (2015–2022)

About Me

1. Why did you to study musicology?
Music has always been my great love. Since my childhood and youth I have been making music a lot, I play the violin, the piano and I sing. Also I have been an obsessive music listener and concert goer. But it was never enough for me just to make music, but I also wanted to learn more about it, how it works, how it developed historically, how the great musical works are able to touch me. When I first learned you could study music as a scientific discipline, I was immediately hooked, even if I did not have a comprehensive idea about the scope of the subject.

2. What does researching music mean to you?
During the course of my studies I have come to know music as a diverse and complex practice that has strong connections to life, to historical sitations, to the social relationships of its contexts. Today, researching music does not mean only to analyse my favourite music, but to look for new insights about the meaning, the function and the relationships of music and its connection to other areas of knowledge and practice. Researching music means to reflect on its place in society, to grasp the different persepctives, values and properties with which people approach music, how they position themselves, their identities and practices in respect to music.

3. What can students of musicology in Göttingen learn with you?
Working with students, we strive to enlarge our reflective horizons. Students will continuously draw up connections in their perspectives on musical works, musical disourse and social ceontexts in music practice. Thus they will learn to embed music in history, in social agency and in aethetic thought. It is my goal to enable students to critically examine the role of music and of actors within musical practices and to widen their concept of the meaning of music. I also hope to show students new approaches to material that is worth studying, to sources, questions and topics that will lead them to their own research interests.



Bachelor of Arts in musicology, German literature and cultural studies at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, completed in 2012. Master of Studies in musicology at Oxford University, completed in 2014. Dissertation: "For Amateurs and Connoisseurs: The Musical Anecdote in the first years of the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung".
Research assistant at the chair of historical musicology at the musicological seminar Göttingen from September 2015 until August 2022.
Doctoral project: "music, sound, nature: the landscape garden in the 18th century".

Academic interests
Music of the 16th-19th century, historiography of music(ology), social history/discourse history of bourgeois musical life, sound, landscape and aesthetics



  • winter term 2020/21
    The nimbus of the late works. Beethoven's late string quartets and piano sonatas
  • winter term 2019/20
    Education and outreach, music dramaturgy and journalism around a concert of the Göttinger Sinfonieorchester
  • summer term 2019
    Harmony
  • winter term 2018/19
    Counterpoint
  • winter term 2017/18
    Urban Space and Identity: Street, music and sound in the city
    Music and language in the 18th century: musical thinking about meaning and expression
  • summer term 2017
    History of the concert in 19th century Germany: the listeners between norm and practice
  • winter term 2016/17
    Sensibility: Aesthetics, anthopology and music in the 2nd half of the 18th century (team teaching with Prof. Andreas Waczkat)
  • summer term 2016
    Sounding cultural history in gardens and nature
  • winter term 2015/16
    The Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung: the musical public in the early 19th century




  • Library supervisor
  • ERASMUS departmental coordinator
  • Public relations and homepage




Articles

  • Christine Hoppe and Sarah Avischag Müller, "Musicological Pathways to Approaching the Body in Music", in: Music in the Body – The Body in Music. Körper an der Schnittstelle von musikalischer Praxis und Diskurs, ed. by id., 2021. Hildesheim: Olms 2021 (=Göttingen Studies in Musicology 11), p. 9–26


Edited volumes

  • Music in the Body – The Body in Music. Körper an der Schnittstelle von musikalischer Praxis und Diskurs, ed. by Christine Hoppe and Sarah Avischag Müller, 2021. Hildesheim: Olms 2021 (=Göttingen Studies in Musicology 11)
  • Utopie und Idylle. Der Mecklenburg-Schweriner Hof in Ludwigslust 1764–1837, hrsg. von Sarah Avischag Müller und Andreas Waczkat (in Vorbereitung) (=Göttingen Studies in Musicology 1)


Papers at conferences

  • Die Natur zum Klingen bringen. Hör- und Musikpraxis in den Landschaftsgärten Weimars im späten 18. Jahrhundert. Kolloquium Kunst- und Kulturgeschichte, Universität Augsburg, 12.4.2018
  • „Sounding out the garden spaces in the 18th century: concepts of nature and art in sonic practice“. Konferenz: Sounding out the Space: A Conference on the Spatiality of Sound, 4.11.2017, Dublin
  • „Hören im Landschaftsgarten“. Konferenz: Jahrestagung der Gesellschaft für Musikforschung, 28.9.2017, Kassel
  • „Einfachheit und Natürlichkeit: Hören im Landschaftsgarten des 18. Jahrhunderts“. Konferenz: Einfach, leicht, minimal? Simplizität in der Musik. Symposium des Dachverbands der Studierenden der Musikwissenschaften, 14.9.2017, Münster


Conference reports


Editorial commissions
Member of the board of the musicological blog "musiconn.kontrovers"