Maurice Windleburn earned his PhD in Musicology from the University of Melbourne and is a fellow of the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Hong Kong.
His current research examines the sonic ontologies theorised by philosophers, occultists, scientists and critics in modernist France (1880-1940), and their effects on music and other arts in this period. In exploring past worldviews that metaphysically privilege sound (or adjacent concepts like music, rhythm, resonance, and vibration), Windleburn aims to provide a richer historical context for the sonic ontologies currently circulating in sound studies and continental philosophy.
In addition to his present focus, Windleburn retains a research interest in contemporary avant-garde music, having published his first book, John Zorn’s File Card Works: Hypertextual Intermediality in Composition and Analysis, with Routledge. He has published in several musicological and interdisciplinary journals.
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2024John Zorn’s File Card Works: Hypertextual Intermediality in Composition and Analysis. Routledge.
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2023“The Drastic Hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Vladimir Jankélévitch”, in Gadamer, Music, & Philosophical Hermeneutics, ed. Sam McAuliffe (Springer).
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2023“French Symbolist Aesthetics and Hazrat Inayat Khan’s Musical Ontology”, Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics 46 (1): 124-132.
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2021“Musical Hyperrealism: Exploring Noah Creshevsky’s Compositions through Jean Baudrillard’s Ideas”, Organised Sound 26 (3): 403-412.
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2021“The Musical Depiction of a Distorted Place, Space and Time: An Interpretation of John Zorn’s Interzone”, Tempo 75 (296): 34-45.
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2020“Interpreting John Zorn’s Spillane (1986) as a Sonic Detective Novel or Film Noir”, Musurgia 27 (3): 53-72.
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2024Review of The Music of James Tenney, by Robert Wannamaker. Notes 81 (1): 152-154.
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2020Review of Logic of Experimentation: Rethinking Music Performance Through Artistic Research, by Paulo de Assis. Current Musicology 107: 197-209.