Alexander Jakobidze-Gitman

Research Area Phenomenology of Music

Alexander Jakobidze-Gitman researches music and musical discourses in Western Europe in the early modern period and in Eastern Europe during the Cold War. He works at the interface of phenomenology, discourse analysis, the history of ideas and cultural history, flanking historical investigations with findings and insights from more recent empirical research.

In addition to academic essays, he is also active as a music mediator, organising discussion concerts on popular science topics such as "Scenes of nature in tone painting", "Music in late Stalinism", "Why did Dmitri Shostakovich want to rewrite 'The Well-Tempered Clavier'?" or "Why was Vladimir Lenin prepared to listen to Beethoven's Appassionata op. 57 every day?". He combines piano playing with cultural and historical commentary.

Alexander Jakobidze-Gitman studied piano at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow and completed his postgraduate studies at the Royal Academy of Music in London. He then went on to study cultural and artistic studies, receiving his M.A. from the Russian State University for the Humanities in 2008. In 2009, he completed his doctorate at the Russian State Film Institute, where he subsequently worked as a research assistant. His work as a film researcher culminated in the monograph Stalin's Era in Post-Soviet Film (2015). His work as a concert pianist has taken him to Georgia, Great Britain, Germany, Latvia, Poland, Russia, Spain, Cyprus, Switzerland, the USA and the Netherlands.

In 2012, he came to Witten/Herdecke University as a scholarship recipient of the German Academic Exchange Service; here he worked as a research assistant at the Chair of Phenomenology of Music from 2013 to 2021, and since 2022 as Programme Manager Resource Arts at the WittenLab. Zukunftslabor Studium fundamentale. In the summer semester of 2017, Jakobidze-Gitman was a Visting Fellow at the University of Sheffield.

Alexander Jakobidze-Gitman is a member of the Society for Interdisciplinary Musicology and the Gesellschaft für Musikforschung (GfM).