Peter Krakauer
The Viennese musicologist Dr. Peter Krakauer is Professor and Deputy Head of Musicology at Universität Mozarteum Salzburg, and Professor of Music Theory and History at the Anton Bruckner Private University in Linz. He started his academic career in 1982 at the Department of Music Pedagogy at the Mozarteum as a University Assistant to Professor Wolfgang Roscher, before getting his tenure in 1993. His early research focused on polyaesthetics and the integrative possibilities of music education in bridging cultural differences. With an illustrious teaching career spanning more than 35 years, he has taught classes on European music history from antiquity to the 21st century, jazz and popular music, musical theatre, history of opera, film music, as well as ethnomusicology and music anthropology. He has undertaken field trips to do research on musical traditions and practices on the old Amish order in Iowa and Illinois, and hopes to do future fieldwork surveying the various ethnic minority groups and their respective musical traditions in Northern Vietnam.
The crux of his interdisciplinary approach to teaching lies in getting his students to reflect on music as a social and cultural phenomenon, and its ideological usages, while challenging them to think about evolving notions of high art, the popular, and the hegemony of Western classical music. A trained conductor who studied at the Vienna Conservatory, Dr. Krakauer is also a certified piano instructor who taught piano in public music schools for 12 years in the province of Lower Austria during his time as a musicology student at the University of Vienna. In addition, Dr Krakauer is a gifted and versatile improviser who can compose in virtually all styles and genres, a testimony to his vast and intimate knowledge of all musical idioms. Most recently, he composed music in response to The Gleaming Man, a triptych of prose, poetry and artwork by Singapore-based artists and writers. He hopes to collaborate with fellow arts practitioners, other organisations and academics, and to share his expertise and diverse experiences on music with students, friends, different communities, and audiences in Singapore.
