The Beethoven’s Werkstatt is a project which seeks to investigate the compositional processes in Beethoven’s oeuvre. The project started in 2014 as a small group of musicologists who were fascinated by Beethoven’s unique compositional approach to writing his many symphonies and sonatas. They combined the preservation of Beethoven’s works and paired it with music encoding technology to better analyze and understand the marvelous works of this prominent music figure. To achieve this, they discover and document the order of manuscripts and individual pen strokes. This information allows them to better understand the decisions that went into Beethoven’s composition style. The project continues to grow and gain the interest of many music scholars and historians from all across Europe and North America.
Project Team Members
| Dr. Susanne Cox Research Associate Located in Munich, Germany Since 2014, Dr. Susanne Cox has done active research to the project and continues to contribute her skills as a doctorate-level graduate, focusing on “The ‘Engelmann’ Sketchbook – Investigations into Beethoven’s Sketches from the Spring of 1823.” |
| Jan-Peter Voigt Research Associate Located in Hagen, Germany A profound musicologist who studied computer science and advertisement and has done illustration work for music scores and notations. He received his doctorate at the University of Hagen with his thesis statement in “Learning, Predicting, and Generating Note Sequences.” |
| Prof. Dr. Bernhard R. Appel Project Manager Located in Saarbrücken, Germany Co-Founder of the project, Dr. Bernhard R. Appel has extensive experience and education in the field of music composition and musicology. During his research years, he was a member of the Robert Schumann Research Center and studied Schumann’s pieces, a research project that would precede the founding of the Beethoven’s Werkstatt project in 2014. |