Alexander Rehding

Alexander Rehding is the Fanny Peabody Professor of Music at Harvard University’s Department of Music within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. He holds a Ph.D. from Cambridge University (1998) and has been at Harvard since 2003. His research focuses on German and European cultural history (18th–21st centuries), with specializations in music and identity, cultural transfer, historiography, ecocriticism, sound studies, and digital humanities. He founded Harvard’s Sound Lab in 2012 to integrate technology into music research and teaching.

Rehding has served as editor for Acta musicologica (2006–11) and editor-in-chief of the Oxford Handbooks Online in Music (2011–19). His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Dent Medal from the International Musicological Society. He is series editor of the six-volume Cultural History of Western Music (Bloomsbury). His current projects include monographs on musical instruments’ role in thought formation, music and the Anthropocene, and the Voyager Golden Record’s cultural significance.

His publications span Beethoven analysis, monumentality in 19th-century music, and Riemann’s impact on music theory. His work bridges musicology with interdisciplinary fields like media studies and environmental humanities.