Alex Rehding is Fanny Peabody Professor of Music at Harvard University. Trained as a music theorist, he has long sought to broaden out the domain of this field. This has led him to research fields as remote as Ancient Egypt, Neuroaesthetics, and Outer Space. He has also been a founder of the field now known as “Ecomusicology,” the eco-critical study of music.
His monographs include Hugo Riemann and the Birth of Modern Musical Thought (2003), Music and Monumentality (2011), Beethoven’s Symphony no. 9 (2017), and Alien Listening (2021). He was editor for Acta musicologica (2006–2011), editor-in-chief of the Oxford Handbooks Online series in Music (2011–2019), and is series editor of the six-volume Bloomsbury Cultural History of Western Music (2023). His contributions have been recognized with such awards as a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Dent Medal and, most recently, the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin.
During his time in Berlin, he was especially active in seeking productive ways of using music and art, in our era of climate change, to raise awareness and bring about behavioral change.