Joep Janssens - Musicologist
Joep Janssens has been working as a university assistant in the Section of Musicology at the Department of Art and Musicology since July 2024. After completing his bachelor's degree in forestry in the Netherlands, he studied musicology at the universities of Graz and Vienna.
He also works as an author of program introductions for concerts and has been a member of the editorial board of the first German-language student musicology magazine StiMMe which he was involved in founding.
In his dissertation project, he is researching the role of the politicized discourse of the 'German forest' in 19th century choral music as part of the interdisciplinary focus area Perception: Episteme, Aesthetics, Politics, bringing together music, perception of nature, identity and politics in the humanities.
Joep Janssen's research interests lie in the interdisciplinary approach to music history, with a particular focus on the analysis of musical topoi and the connection between nature, politics and identity in the 19th century. In his bachelor's thesis, he examined the historical development of the topos of ecstasy in Alexander Scriabin's piano sonatas. In his master's thesis on the musical topoi of the forest in 19th century piano music, presented at the Austrian Society for Music , he combined musical score analysis with literary, social and environmental historical processes. As part of the international conference"Music and Climate Change" at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen, he delved further into the connection between music history and nature. Here, he presented the thesis that art played a significant role in the context of changing attitudes towards the environment in the 19th century based on the "Appearance of two types of landscape in the piano character piece".