Prof. Dr. Martin Tröndle

Bio

Since 2015 Martin Tröndle is appointed to the WÜRTH Chair of Cultural Production at the Department of Culture and Media Science at the Zeppelin University in Germany. The work at the Chair deals with a large variety of topics, all centred around the production, distribution and reception of arts.

Tröndle was principal investigator (2008-14) of eMotion – mapping museum experience, supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation. eMotion analysed the experience of the museum-goer experimentally. The core of the interest was the museum architecture, the art objects, curatorial installation and how they effect and affect the behaviour of the visitors.  (www.mapping-museum-experience.com)

Tröndle is now principal investigator (since 2018) of ECR – Experimental Concert Research supported by the Volkswagen Foundation and others. ECR is experimentally analysing the concert experience.

Since 2014 Tröndle is Editor in Chief of the peer reviewed journal Zeitschrift für Kulturmanagement: Kunst, Politik, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft / Journal of Cultural Management: Arts, Policy, Economics, and Society.

He is the Editor of the two volumes Das Konzert: Neue Aufführungskonzepte für eine klassische Form (2011, 2nd edition) und Das Konzert II: Beiträge zum Forschungsfeld der Concert Studies (2018) as well as several other books.

His work gained attention by the media (e.g. print: The New York Times, DIE ZEIT, Der Spiegel, El Pais), German, Swiss, Austrian TV and Radio Stations and many others. In 2014 he was awarded the Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten Award in New York for “outstanding contributions in the field of experimental aesthetics”.

Research Statement

My interest and motivation in the project ECR – Experimental Concert Research is a direct result of my research work over the past 15 years.

The research project eMotion- mapping museum experience focused on the interdependence and impact of individual works of art, their display and presentation, the architecture, and the impression of each visitor based on his or her previous knowledge and the respective reception situation. The two volumes Das Konzert: Neue Aufführungskonzepte für eine klassische Form [The Concert: New Performance Concepts for a Classical Form] and Das Konzert II: Beiträge zum Forschungsfeld der Concert Studies [The Concert II: Contributions to the Field of Concert Studies] focus on the historical development and impact of presentation forms, dramaturgies, and rituals. Whether and how this cultural and musicological analysis of the performing arts and the concert experience could also be analyzed empirically has been of interest to me ever since the evaluation of the diverse data available in eMotion.

For the first time, Experimental Concert Research opens up the possibility of methodically triangulating the concert experience in practice under real conditions. By amassing a comprehensive and diverse set of data, I hope to be able to examine and, if necessary, question existing assumptions about musical life. The international research team taking up this challenge provides expertise in various fields. Musicologists, music and art psychologists, cultural sociologists, programmers, musicians, dramaturges, and technicians are all working together to establish a multi-perspective and ambitious approach to the question of what constitutes a concert experience.

I hope that the experimental, multi-methodical approach will solve what I would describe as ‘good’ research. It is a methodical set-up that, due to the breadth and depth of the data available, will allow us to call our assumptions into question. The results of this applied basic research could at best, analogous to eMotion, find resonance in the fields of cultural sociology, empirical aesthetics, concert, and music pedagogy, as well as among programmers, cultural politicians, and the media.