… 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. 2021. Spezialästhetik, Grenzziehung, Methodologie: August Wilhelm Ambros und Eduard Hanslick im österreichischen Ästhetikdiskurs um 1850. In August Wilhelm Ambros: Wege seiner Musikkritik, -ästhetik und -historiographie, ed. M. Štědronská, 37-60. Wiener Veröffentlichungen Zur Musikwissenschaft 53. Wien: Hollitzer.
- Wilfing, Alexander. 2020. Hanslick's Kantianism? Johann Heinrich Dambeck, Christian Friedrich Michaelis, and Hans Georg Nägeli. In Hanslick im Kontext: Perspektiven auf die Ästhetik, Musikkritik und das historische Umfeld von Eduard Hanslick / Hanslick in Context: Perspectives on the Aesthetics, Musical Criticism, and Historical Setting of Eduard Hanslick, eds. A. Wilfing, Landerer, C., and Wilfing-Albrecht, M., 61–86. Wien: Hollitzer.
- Wilfing, Alexander, Christoph Landerer, and Meike Wilfing-Albrecht, eds. 2020. Hanslick im Kontext: Perspektiven auf die Ästhetik, Musikkritik und das historische Umfeld von Eduard Hanslick / Hanslick in Context: Perspectives on the Aesthetics, Musical Criticism, and Historical Setting of Eduard Hanslick. Wien: Hollitzer.
- Wilfing, Alexander. 2020. Matthias Schmidt, Eingebildete Musik: Richard Wagner, das jüdische Wien und die Ästhetik der Moderne. München: edition text + kritik, 2019. wagnerspectrum 16/1: 266–270.
- Wilfing, Alexander. 2019. "Absolute" Aesthetics in Context: The Sociopolitical Fundamentals of Eduard Hanslick's Scholarly Activities; Towards a Cultural Turn in Hanslick Scholarship. International Review for the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 50/1–2: 179–190.
- Wilfing, Alexander, and Christoph Landerer. 2019. Eduard Hanslick. James Fieser and Bradley Dowden,. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.