This project explores neoclassic, a musical genre that has positioned itself since the early 2000s between classical music, ambient, minimal music, and post-rock. Characterised by compositional simplicity, a sustained tone, and an emphasis on silence, neoclassic has opened up contemporary (art) music to an audience broader and more diverse than ever before. Neoclassic often engages with pressing contemporary issues – from the refugee crisis and climate change to the challenges of new technologies – by drawing on visual media, post-production effects, innovative concert formats, and new modes of reception through streaming services. In doing so, it distances itself from the sharp ruptures, both political and aesthetic, that defined the postwar musical avant-garde. Rather than shock or the loss of self, it favours a dialogical interplay between the musical event and the listener’s perceptual categories, guided by an ethics of care. The project approaches neoclassic through the lens of a poetics of experience and repair: focusing on selected works by two leading figures of the genre – Max Richter and Jóhann Jóhannsson – it explores how neoclassic music articulates the concept of repair beneath its apparent compositional simplicity. It traces how this music expresses repair in all its theoretical complexity and the ambivalence of attempts to perform social repair, while also shaping repair in ways specific to the music itself.
DR. HABIL. MAURO FOSCO BERTOLA
CURRICULUM VITAE
Mauro Fosco Bertola is a Privatdozent in musicology at the University of Tübingen. He first studied philosophy in Italy (laurea), completing a thesis on the moral philosophy of Nicolas Malebranche, later earning a doctorate in musicology from Heidelberg University in 2012 with a dissertation exploring how collective identities were constructed through musicological research and radio broadcasting in Italy and Germany between 1890 and 1945. He has worked as a research associate at the Department of Musicology in Heidelberg, held a postdoctoral fellowship at the DFG Research Training Group “European Dream Cultures” at Saarland University, and served as an editor for contemporary music at Breitkopf & Härtel. Between 2022 and 2025, he directed a DFG-funded project on the theme of dreams in contemporary music theatre. In 2025, he completed his Habilitation with a study on the portrayal of dreams in the work of Kaija Saariaho and Salvatore Sciarrino. His research centres on contemporary music theatre, the relationship between music and philosophy, and the interplay between music and film.
