… studied musicology and philosophy at the University of Vienna and attained his doctorate in 2016. His research interests include aesthetics, musical criticism, the relations between musicology and art history, and the history of science and musicology in particular.
At the ACDH-CH, Alexander Wilfing is part of the research unit Musicology. From 2014 to 2021, he has been part of several research projects on the historical contexts of Hanslick’s aesthetics. From 2021 to 2023 he oversaw a project on the institutional establishing of musicology as an academic discipline in 19th-century Vienna, located in Frankfurt, Brno, and Vienna. He is currently leading a FWF-funded project on Hanslick’s criticism and its complex relation to his aesthetics and scholarly writings (2022–2025), conducted in Vienna, Salzburg, and at Stanford University. From 2018 to 2024, he was editor-in-chief of Musicologica Austriaca: Journal for Austrian Music Studies.
Publications
- Wilfing, Alexander, Meike Wilfing-Albrecht, and Daniel Elsner. 2023. Eduard Hanslick, Vom Musikalisch-Schönen: Ein Beitrag zur Revision der Ästhetik der Tonkunst [digital edition of all ten versions, including TEI markup].
- Celestini, Federico, Vasiliki Papadopoulou, and Alexander Wilfing, eds. 2023. "Austrian Music Studies: Topics, Perspectives, Concepts", special issue von "Musicologica Austriaca: Journal for Austrian Music Studies".
- Wilfing, Alexander. 2023. Musikalische Autonomie und das Gesamtkunstwerk: Eduard Hanslick und Richard Wagner im Dialog mit der Idealistischen Musikästhetik. Open Library of Humanities 9. doi:10.16995/olh.8114.
- Wilfing, Alexander. 2023. Musik, Maß, Genie: Grillparzers Bezugnahme auf Kants (Musik-)Ästhetik. In Verwandlungen: Dichter als Leser Kants, eds. V. Waibel, Geml, G., Jakobsohn, S. C., and Schaller, P., 233-264. Göttingen: V&R unipress / Vienna University Press.
- Landerer, Christoph, and Alexander Wilfing. 2023. Eduard Hanslick, Vom Musikalisch-Schönen. Ein Beitrag zur Revision der Ästhetik der Tonkunst. Felix Wörner and Wald-Fuhrmann, Melanie. Hartmut Wald-Fuhrmann Grimm Melanie Wörner. Musikästhetik in Europa und Nordamerika. Lexikon Schriften Über Musik. Kassel/Berlin: Bärenreiter/Metzler: 316-319.
- Wilfing, Alexander. 2023. Karl August Timotheus Kahlert, System der Aesthetik. Felix Wörner and Wald-Fuhrmann, Melanie. Hartmut Wald-Fuhrmann Grimm Melanie Wörner. Musikästhetik in Europa und Nordamerika. Lexikon Schriften Über Musik. Kassel/Berlin: Bärenreiter/Metzler: 426-428.