Siglind Bruhn
siglind@umich.edu
Siglind Bruhn, born 11 October 1951 in
Hamburg, Germany, is a music analyst/musicologist, concert pianist, and
interdisciplinary scholar presently working at the University of
Michigan’s Institute for the Humanities as a full-time researcher in
the fields of “Music and Literature” and “Music in Interdisciplinary
Dialogue.” She is also a Distinguished Senior Research Fellow at the
University of Copenhagen’s Center for Christianity and the Arts and,
for the period 2004-2009, a chercheur invité at the
Sorbonne’s Institut d’esthétique des arts contemporains. In 2001
she was elected an ordinary member of the European Academy of Arts and
Sciences. In 2007/2008, she was awarded an honorary doctorate (doctor philosophiae honoris causa)
from Växjö University, Sweden.
Before coming to the United States, she
taught at the University of Hong Kong, where she was the Director of
Studies for the Program in Piano Performance Pedagogy (1987-1993), and
at the Pianisten-Akademie in Ansbach, whose founding director she was
(1984-1987). Globally, she is or has been active on the Executive Board
of the Danish National Research Foundation’s International Postdoctoral
Center, on the Executive Board of the International Society for the
Interdisciplinary Study of Symmetry, as Vice-President of the
International Association for Word and Music Studies, and as Commission
Chair in the International Society for Music Education. She was a
Visiting Professor at the Central Conservatory in Beijing and a
visiting artist/visiting lecturer in most West European countries as
well as in China, Taiwan, Australia, South Africa, Namibia, Ecuador,
and on various American campuses.
Siglind holds three post-graduate degrees: a
Master-of-Music equivalent in piano performance, piano pedagogy, and
music theory from the Musikhochschule Stuttgart [Staatsexamen
künstlerisches Hauptfach Klavier]; a Master of Arts in Romance
literatures and philosophy from the University of Munich, and a Ph.D.
[Dr.phil., summa cum laude] in music analysis, musicology, and
psychology from the University of Vienna, which she earned with a
dissertation in the field of musical hermeneutics.
As a concert pianist, she has given solo and
chamber music recitals in twenty-two countries on all five continents.
She has recorded extensively with classical radio stations in several
countries and can be heard on two LPs and four CDs. As a researcher,
she has contributed numerous articles to scholarly journals and
chapters to anthologies in both Europe and the United States, and has
authored fifteen books. She has also edited/co-authored five volumes of
scholarly essays and three issues of a scholarly journal, as well as
translating one music-theoretical book from English into German. She is
co-editor of the book series INTERPLAY: Music
in Interdisciplinary Dialogue, published by Pendragon Press. One of
her books, Musical Ekphrasis: Composers Responding
to Poetry and Painting, was nominated for the publication awards of
the American Musicological Association and the Society for Music Theory.
Since 1994, Siglind has suspended her
university teaching to devote herself fully to research and writing. In
1997, she was honored by being named the youngest and first female Life
Research Associate at the University of Michigan’s Institute for the
Humanities. Internationally, she is an active member on research teams
such as the Équipe scientifique d’herméneutique musicale
(based at the Université des Sciences Humaines in Strasbourg,
France), the Nordic Society for Interarts Studies (based at the
University of Lund, Sweden), and the Musical Signification Project
(based at the University of Helsinki, Finland).
In her most recently completed research
project, she has investigated how the ancient concept of “world
harmony” –– consonance and perfect proportion found in all aspects of
the macro- and microcosmos –– plays itself out in Paul Hindemith’s
opera The Harmony of the World and Hermann Hesse’s novel The
Glass Bead Game. Currently, she is engaged in writing a trilogy of
studies on the music of Olivier Messiaen: “Messiaen’s Contemplations on
Covenant and Incarnation,” a hermeneutic analysis of the composer’s two
theological piano cycles, Visions de l’Amen and Vingt
Regard sur l’Enfant-Jésus, has come out in November 2007;
“Messiaen’s Explorations of Love and Death,” a study of the
Tristan trilogy and three related song cycles,” is awaiting publication
in mid-2008; and
“Messiaen’s Interpretations of Holiness and Trinity,” which
traces the echoes of medieval theology in his oratorio, organ
meditations, and opera, will complete the trilogy later in this year of
the composer’s centennial.
