Latest news
Latest news
Workshop "How do we talk about racism?"
25.06.2025
Around 30 students from the University of Oldenburg, mainly from the Institute of Music, met in the Chamber Music Hall on 25 June 2025. We discussed the topic in a World Café format. The workshop was initiated by the lecturers Susanne Binas-Preisendörfer, Mario Dunkel, Sidney König and Shanti Suki Osman.
Workshop: Music and politics in the sustainability discourse
16.01.2025 from 16-18 h
In January 2025, two experts from the field of music and sustainability will visit the University of Oldenburg to report on their experiences in implementing sustainability goals in art and culture.
Anyone interested in this topic is invited to attend and discuss this area of music. The workshop will be led by Prof Dr Susanne Binas-Preisendörfer and Dr Shanti Osman from the Institute of Music.
Two guests will come to the workshop to report from their fields of work:
- Dr Ralf Weiß (cultural consultant, Chair of the Network for Sustainability in Art and Culture 2N2K Deutschland e.V.).
- Richard Hötter (composer, musical director at the Oldenburg State Theatre)
When? 16 January 2025 4-6 p.m.
Where? A08 1-110 at the University of Oldenburg
Producing workshop with Cato
24.06.2024 6-8 pm A11 1-113 Please note registration!!!
On 24 June 2024 6-8pm, Hamburg-based music producer Cato is hosting an exclusive workshop at Uni Studio A11-1-113. Cato, known for his groundbreaking productions in the field of contemporary rap and urban pop, opens the doors to his creative process and invites you to take a look behind the scenes of music production.
Cato is a producer, multi-instrumentalist and songwriter. Musically influenced from an early age and growing up in Hamburg's hip-hop scene, he is the second half of rapper Ansu and has been instrumental in the development of the music since the end of project. Together with Levin Liam, he produced Levin's first album "vergiss mich nicht zu schnell" in 2022, defining a new sound for Germany between indie, rap and pop. In 2023 and 2024, he also produced poppier songs such as "Hallo", "Küss Mich" and "Mensch" by Ivo Martin, which now have over 22 million streams and will act as executive producer of Ivo's debut album, which will be released this autumn. Cato's production influences range from hip-hop, jazz and soul to pop and indie. Artists Cato has worked with so far include: Ansu, Levin Liam, $OHO BANI, Monk, Ivo Martin, Tom Hengst, Nate57, Lugatti & 9ine, Lotte, DXVE, Disastar, Paula Engels, Babyjoy.
Registration by email to
International Workshop
"Sounds Different" - Postcolonial Perspectives on Aurality and the Politics of Listening
(english version below)
From 4 to 6 May 2023, twenty academics met at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg in Delmenhorst to share their experiences and research findings on the topic of sound and listening in lectures and discussions, bringing together perspectives from music, cultural and media studies, sound studies, archival practice and the cultural sector. In this context, the complicated relationship between the global North and the global South was particularly focussed on.
How does identity sound? Who owns sounds? Whose voice is heard? Who or what do we ignore? Do colonialism and racism have a specific sound? To what extent is listening a political sense entangled in power structures? In eight panels and an open space, the participants discussed the extent to which what we hear and how we hear are shaped in a variety of social, cultural and technological ways.(Link to the programme)
The conference was organised by Susanne Binas-Preisendörfer (University of Oldenburg) and Florian Carl (Cape Coast/Ghana; University of Cologne, Germany). The participants came from Europe, Africa and Latin America. The conference was organised as a co-operation between the HWK and the University of Oldenburg and was funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the University of Oldenburg and the HWK.
The idea for the conference emerged from a project on the sonic dimension of the history of the North German Mission in West Africa, which Florian Carl has been carrying out as a scholarship holder of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the Institute of Music at the University of Oldenburg over the past year and a half.
The participants want to stay in contact and continue working on the topics of the conference. Finally, the results of the conference and further discussions are to be published in a volume by an English-language publisher.
International Workshop
"Sounds Different" - Postcolonial Perspectives on Aurality and the Politics of Listening.
From May 04-06, 2023, twenty scholars met at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg in Delmenhorst to exchange their experiences and research results on the topic of sound and listening in lectures and discussions, bringing together perspectives from music, cultural and media studies, sound studies, archival practice, and the cultural sector. In this context, particular attention was paid to the complicated relationship between the global North and the global South.
How does identity sound? Who owns sounds? Whose voice is heard? Who or what do we overhear? Do colonialism and racism have a specific sound? To what extent is hearing a political sense entangled in power structures? In eight panels and an open space, participants discussed the extent to which what we hear and how we hear are shaped in multiple ways by society, culture, and technology.(Link to the programme)
The conference was hosted by Susanne Binas-Preisendörfer (University of Oldenburg) and Florian Carl (Cape Coast/Ghana; University of Cologne, D). The participants came from Europe, Africa and Latin America. The conference was organised in cooperation between the HWK and the University of Oldenburg and funded by the Alexander-von-Humboldt-Foundation, the Fritz-Thyssen-Foundation, the University of Oldenburg and the HWK.
The idea for the conference arose from a project on the sound dimension of the history of the North German Mission in West Africa, which Florian Carl conducted as a fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the Institute of Music of the University of Oldenburg over the past year and a half.
The participants want to stay in contact and continue working on the topics of the conference. Finally, the results of the conference and the continuing discussions are to be published in a volume by an English-language publisher.
When pop music culture writes (its) history (summer semester 2021)
The starting point for the teaching project was observations that show that popular forms of music and their protagonists have been playing a remarkable role as a cultural practice and media dispositive in society's spaces of remembrance for some years now. This applies to radio formats such as "the greatest hits of the 70s", "the 100 best songs from the GDR", biographies of stars, countless documentaries and fictional films (biopics of deceased and living "legends" or scenes of popular music) or musicals that bring the lives of individual musicians and their songs to the stage. Semi-fictional novels or autobiographical memoirs are published and museums show permanent or travelling exhibitions on the history of pop music. The events and formats listed can be understood as visualisations of (contemporary) history and as historiographies of pop cultural knowledge.
Further information on the teaching project and the results of the individual projects can be found at the following link: wp.uni-oldenburg.de/lehrkonzepte/wenn-popkultur-ihre-geschichte-schreibt/
Publication of the anthology "Beyond... Popular music and transgression(s)
Brief information
Beyond ... Popular Music and Transgression(s)
Proceedings: 2nd IASPM D-A-CH Conference/Graz 2016
Aspects of transgression seem to exist independently of specific cultural and historical contexts as a characteristic feature of popular music, its practices, media and theories as well as methods of research. The second conference of the German-speaking branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM - D-A-CH) was dedicated to this topic and took place in autumn 2016 at the Karl-Franzens University in Graz, Austria. With this volume, we are publishing almost all of the lectures held and discussed at the conference in written and thus revised form and hope not only to present an appropriate documentation of them, but above all to provide important food for thought for further deepening this multi-layered topic between "internal" attribution and "external" reading. The volume follows the systematics of the conference, focussing on social/political transgressions & popular music, transgressions in and between the (artistic) media and popular music, and transgressions in the study of popular music.