Nanette Nielsen

Enacting Musical Aesthetics: The Embodied Experience of Live Music (Open Access)

Remy Martin & Nanette Nielsen (Shared first authors)

The vitality and affective potential of the live concert experience is a result of rich, cross-sensory interactions and varied participatory practices. The complexity of such entanglements has recently led philosophers to argue for an enactive, affordance-based approach that interrogates a variety of perceptual and sensory possibilities inherent in aesthetic experiences. Further, Shaun Gallagher's recent addition of the 4As (Affect, Agency, Affordance, Autonomy) to the 4Es (Embodied, Embedded, Enacted, Extended) for clarifying mind–world relations seem to have potent explanatory power for these kinds of encounters. Building on such current philosophical approaches while examining specific (and actual) live musical engagement, this article offers an interpretation of selected audience data from the MusicLab Copenhagen with the Danish String Quartet research concert to discuss particular responses from the audience physically present at the venue. Responding to neuroaesthetic approaches, we clarify the audience members’ individual and collective aesthetic experience through an enactive, affordance-based approach. We suggest that what is at play in the live concert environment is a mode of attentive dynamic listening. Rather than seeking to characterize the audience as passively responding to music, a 4Es/4As approach to aesthetic experience seeks to clarify embodied-enactive audience engagement for which anticipation is a dynamic factor that enables further musical action and resonance, also for the musicians on stage.

Mind surfing: attention in musical absorption (Open Access)

Simon Høffding, Nanette Nielsen, Bruno Laeng (shared first authors)

Literature in the psychology of music and in cognitive psychology claims – paradoxically – that musical absorption includes processes of both focused attention and mind wandering. We examine this paradox and aim to resolve it by integrating accounts from cognitive psychology on attention and mind wandering with qualitative phenomenological research on some of the world’s most skilled musicians. We claim that a mode of experience that involves intense attention and what superficially seems like mind wandering is possible. We propose to grasp this different mode of experience with a new concept: “mind surfing”. We suggest that a conjoined consideration of attention’s intensive and selective capacities can partially explain how one can be both focused and freely “surfing” on a “musical wave” at the same time. Finally, we couple this novel and foundational work on attention with a 4E cognition account to show how music acts as an affective and cognitive scaffold, thereby enabling the surfing.

The Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy

Edited by Tomás McAuley, Nanette Nielsen, Jerrold Levinson, and Associate Editor Ariana Phillips-Hutton

This Handbook offers an overview of the thriving interdisciplinary field of Western music and philosophy. It seeks to represent this area in all its fullness, including a diverse array of perspectives from music studies (notably historical musicology, music theory, and ethnomusicology), philosophy (incorporating both analytic and continental approaches), and a range of cognate disciplines (such as critical theory and intellectual history). The Handbook includes, but does not confine itself to, consideration of key questions in aesthetics and the philosophy of music. Each essay provides an introduction to its topic, an assessment of past scholarship, and a research-driven argument for the future of the research area in question. Taken together, these essays provide a current snapshot of this field and outline an abundance of ways in which it might develop in the future.

Paul Bekker's Musical Ethics

Nanette Nielsen

German music critic and opera producer Paul Bekker (1882–1937) is a rare example of a critic granted the opportunity to turn his ideas into practice. In this first full-length study of Bekker in English, Nanette Nielsen investigates Bekker's theory and practice in light of ethics and aesthetics, in order to uncover the ways in which these intersect in his work and contributed to the cultural and political landscape of the Weimar Republic. By linking Beethoven's music to issues of freedom and individuality, as he argues for its potential to unify the masses, Bekker had already in 1911 begun to construct the ethical framework for his musical sociology and opera aesthetics. Nielsen discusses some of the complex (and conflicting) layers of modernism and conservatism in Bekker that would have a continued presence in his work and its reception throughout his career. Bekker's demands for a 'practical ethics' led to his criticisms of metaphysically grounded approaches to aesthetics, and his ethical views are put into further relief in a sketch of the development of his music phenomenology in the 1920s. Nielsen unravels the complex intersections between Bekker's ethics and his opera aesthetics in connection with his practice as an Intendant at the Wiesbaden State Theatre (1927–1932), offering a critical reading of an opera staged during his tenure: Hugo Herrmann’s Vasantasena (1930). Further works are considered in light of the theoretical framework underpinning the book, inspired by several intersections between ethics and aesthetics encountered in Bekker's work.

Music and Ethics

Marcel Cobussen & Nanette Nielsen

It seems self-evident that music plays more than just an aesthetic role in contemporary society. In addition, music's social, political, emancipatory, and economical functions have been the subject of much recent research. Given this, it is surprising that the subject of ethics has often been neglected in discussions about music. The various forms of engagement between music and ethics are more relevant than ever, and require sustained attention. Music and Ethics examines different ways in which music can 'in itself' - in a uniquely musical way - contribute to theoretical discussions about ethics as well as concrete moral behaviour. We consider music as process, and music-making as interaction. Fundamental to our understanding is music's association with engagement, including contact with music through the act of listening, music as an immanent critical process that possesses profound cultural and historical significance, and as an art form that can be world-disclosive, formative of subjectivity, and contributive to intersubjective relations. Music and Ethics does not offer a general musico-ethical theory, but explores ethics as a practical concept, and demonstrates through concrete examples that the relation between music and ethics has never been absent.

• Nielsen, Nanette (2026). Enacting Musical Creativity: The Value of Human Agency in the Face of AI. Journal of Consciousness Studies. ISSN 1355-8250. 33(3), p. 123–144. doi: 10.53765/20512201.33.3.123. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  In his recent critique of well-established simplified comparisons between the human mind and AI, Alva Noë encourages us to 'rage against the machine' (Noë, 2024). In this article, I build on Noë's timely encouragement, and sketch perspectives from both music studies and enactivist philosophy in order to interrogate what musicking might add to the debate. As a case study, I explore the recent public discourse surrounding the AI-band The Velvet Sundown and consider the implications — mental health related and ethical — of engaging with AI-generated music. I draw on current scholarship on musical creativity and AI to discuss the possibilities and limitations of creative agency in AI, laying the foundation for why human creative agency should be regarded more valuable than the artificial creativity that AI offers. I also discuss some ethical implications of sharing agency with AI, suggesting that we should continue to foster attunement to our creative agency and capabilities, as empowered but also vulnerable musicking human agents. I argue that musicking offers an enactive entanglement through which we are granted an opportunity to embrace risk, resist rules, and learn new modes of orientation and reorientation that serve as empowering tools for navigating our way through the resistant path to being human.

• Høffding, Simon; Haswell-Martin, Remy & Nielsen, Nanette (2025). Absorbed Concert Listening: A Qualitative, Phenomenological Inquiry. Philosophies. 10(2). doi: 10.3390/philosophies10020038. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This paper pursues a phenomenological investigation of the nature of absorbed listening in Western, classical music concert audiences. This investigation is based on a data-set of 16 in-depth phenomenological interviews with audience members from three classical concerts with the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra and the Norwegian Radio Orchestra conducted in spring 2024. We identify seven major themes, namely “sharedness”, “attention”, “spontaneous thought/mental imagery”, “modes of listening” “absorption”, “distraction”, and “strong emotional experiences”, and interpret these in light of relevant ideas in phenomenology, cognitive psychology, and ecological aesthetics, more precisely “passive synthesis” from Husserl, the “sense of agency” from Gallagher, and “mind surfing” from Høffding, Nielsen, and Laeng. We show that, like absorbed musical performance, absorbed musical listening comes in many shapes and can be grasped as instantiating variations of passive synthesis, the sense of agency, and mind surfing. We conclude that absorbed listening circles around a kind of paradox of passivity, characterised by a sense of loss of egoic control arising from particular forms of invested, intensive perceptual, cognitive, and affective engagement.

• Haswell-Martin, Remy; Upham, Finn; Høffding, Simon & Nielsen, Nanette (2025). Embodied, Exploratory Listening in the Concert Hall. Behavioral Sciences. 15(5). doi: 10.3390/bs15050710. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Live music can afford novel, transformative aesthetic interactions for individual audience members. Nevertheless, concert research tends to focus on shared experience. In this paper we offer an account of exploratory listening that foregrounds embodied–enactive engagement and affective resonance through close analysis of the music, physiological measurements, and reflections from interviews. Our analysis centres on data collected from two musician audience members about one specific piece out of a larger interdisciplinary project involving concerts given by the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra and The Norwegian Radio Orchestra in March and June of 2024. Through the combination of in-depth phenomenological interviews with musically skilled audience members and measurements of breathing and body motion, we explore aesthetic enactment beyond common patterns of ‘synchronised’ response, focusing on audience members’ experiences of Harald Sæverud’s ‘Kjempeviseslåtten’ (The Ballad of Revolt) (1943). We find forms of absorbed, both imaginative and embodied involvement, of listeners enacting meaningful contact with, and pathways through, the music that in some ways corroborate crowd patterns but also reveal exploratory expertise and idiosyncratic affective orientations.

• Høffding, Simon; Bergstrøm, Rebecca Josefine Five; Bishop, Laura; Bravo, Pedro Pablo Lucas; Burnim, Kayla & Cancino-Chacón, Carlos Eduardo [Show all 28 contributors for this article] (2025). Introducing the MusicLab Copenhagen Dataset. Music & Science. 8. doi: 10.1177/20592043241303288. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  MusicLab Copenhagen was a unique research concert featuring the world-renowned Danish String Quartet in a naturalistic setting. The audience was split between one group physically located in the hall, another group listening to a radio broadcast, and a third group watching a live stream. Qualitative and quantitative data were captured from both musicians and audiences, resulting in a comprehensive dataset that can be used to address many research questions. This document introduces the dataset, explains its structure, and reflects on the related data collection, storing, publishing, and archiving processes.

• Martin, Remy Richard & Nielsen, Nanette (2024). Enacting Musical Aesthetics: The Embodied Experience of Live Music. Music & Science. 7. doi: 10.1177/20592043231225732. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  The vitality and affective potential of the live concert experience is a result of rich, cross-sensory interactions and varied participatory practices. The complexity of such entanglements has recently led philosophers to argue for an enactive, affordance-based approach that interrogates a variety of perceptual and sensory possibilities inherent in aesthetic experiences. Further, Shaun Gallagher's recent addition of the 4As (Affect, Agency, Affordance, Autonomy) to the 4Es (Embodied, Embedded, Enacted, Extended) for clarifying mind–world relations seem to have potent explanatory power for these kinds of encounters. Building on such current philosophical approaches while examining specific (and actual) live musical engagement, this article offers an interpretation of selected audience data from the MusicLab Copenhagen with the Danish String Quartet research concert to discuss particular responses from the audience physically present at the venue. Responding to neuroaesthetic approaches, we clarify the audience members’ individual and collective aesthetic experience through an enactive, affordance-based approach. We suggest that what is at play in the live concert environment is a mode of attentive dynamic listening. Rather than seeking to characterize the audience as passively responding to music, a 4Es/4As approach to aesthetic experience seeks to clarify embodied-enactive audience engagement for which anticipation is a dynamic factor that enables further musical action and resonance, also for the musicians on stage.

• Swarbrick, Dana; Martin, Remy Richard; Høffding, Simon; Nielsen, Nanette & Vuoskoski, Jonna Katariina (2024). Audience Musical Absorption: Exploring Attention and Affect in the Live Concert Setting. Music & Science. 7. doi: 10.1177/20592043241263461. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Musical absorption is a multi-dimensional phenomenon that has been understood in various ways, but is related to strong, immersive, and transformative musical encounters. For this exploratory article, we used a phenomenologically and psychologically informed questionnaire to measure audience members’ reports of musical absorption and affective experiences at the MusicLab Copenhagen research concert with the Danish String Quartet (DSQ). We aimed to examine the relation between musical absorption and (1) attention, mind-wandering, and senses of transformation; (2) affective phenomena of feeling moved or touched and awe; (3) social context, as determined by technological mediation of a livestream; (4) musical context (Beethoven, Schnittke, and folk music); and (5) motion. There were 91 participants in the live audience and 43 participants in the livestreaming audience, who completed questionnaires after each piece in the concert and who had their motion measured through an application that recorded accelerometer data from their smartphones. Drawing on methods from experimental psychology, we found that (1) being “absorbed in the music” was not related to mind-wandering, but it was related to a sense of positive transformation; (2) musical absorption was related to experiences of feeling moved, awe, connectedness, and enjoyment, and to being an “admirer” of the DSQ, as well as to being familiar with the music; (3) being at the live concert facilitated more musical absorption than watching the livestream; (4) the final concert section, containing a collection of folk tunes, promoted the most musical absorption; and (5) within the restrained movement dynamics of the live audience, motion trended as an indicator of an embodied experience of musical absorption. We use these results to engage in a phenomenologically informed and empirically enriched discussion of musical absorption and related affective and attentional dynamics.

• Nielsen, Nanette; Høffding, Simon & Laeng, Bruno (2023). Mind surfing: attention in musical absorption. Cognitive Systems Research. ISSN 2214-4366. doi: 10.1016/j.cogsys.2023.101180. Full text in Research Archive
• Nielsen, Nanette; McAuley, Tomas & Levinson, Jerrold (2020). Introduction. In Nielsen, Nanette; McAuley, Tomas; Levinson, Jerrold & Phillips-Hutton, Ariana (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy. Oxford University Press. ISSN 9780199367313. doi: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199367313.013.61. Full text in Research Archive
• Nielsen, Nanette (2020). Den musikalske etik. In Varkøy, Øivind & Holm, Henrik (Ed.), Musikkfilosofiske tekster. Tanker om musikk – og språk, tolkning, erfaring, tid, klang, stillhet m.m.. Cappelen Damm Akademisk. ISSN 9788202696818. p. 61–77. doi: 10.23865/noasp.115.ch4. Full text in Research Archive
• Nielsen, Nanette & Phillips-Hutton, Ariana (2020). Ethics. In Nielsen, Nanette; McAuley, Tomas; Levinson, Jerrold & Phillips-Hutton, Ariana (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy. Oxford University Press. ISSN 9780199367313. doi: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199367313.013.15. Full text in Research Archive
• Nielsen, Nanette (2019). 'Carl Nielsen, the Modern Musical Philosopher: Life as an Aesthetic Experience'. In Manos, Perrakis (Eds.), Life as an Aesthetic Idea of Music. Universal Edition. ISSN 9783702476212. p. 79–103. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Alle musikalische Praxis ist von Wertungen durchzogen. Das Publikum wertet Interpreten und Komponisten, auf oder ab; Interpreten lieben oder respektieren bestimmte Werke und ignorieren andere; Komponisten achten das Publikum oder missachten es. Wie aber solche Wertungen zustande kommen, weshalb sie sich durchsetzen oder nicht durchsetzen, und welche Maßstäbe ihnen zugrunde liegen, das verstehen wir viel zu wenig, und müssen es auch immer neu verstehen, denn etablierte Wertungen geraten außer Kurs und andere kommen in Geltung. Um Fragen dieser Art nachzugehen, begründete Harald Kaufmann 1968 die Studien zur Wertungsforschung. Wertungen, fand Kaufmann, sind kein undurchdringlich Letztes, Gefühle, über die sich nicht streiten ließe. Sie sind der Reflexion und Argumenten zugänglich wie auch bedürftig. Die verschiedenartigen Haltungen der Menschen stellen sie vor verschiedenartige Werte. Es mag keine höhere Warte – keinen ‚ästhetischen Standpunkt‘ –geben, von der aus die Gesamtheit der Werte in einem einzigen Wert – der ‚Schönheit‘ etwa – zu betrachten wäre. Doch Wertfreiheit wäre auch für das Nachdenken über Musik kein gangbarer Weg. Wer verlangte, sich im Umgang mit Musik der Wertung zu enthalten, verstümmelte die Verständnisfähigkeit

• Nielsen, Nanette & Hibberd, Sarah (2015). Immersion and Proximity: Music, Sound, and Subjectivity in The Memory Dealer. Journal of Sonic Studies. 9. Full text in Research Archive
• Nielsen, Nanette & Evans, Elizabeth (2015). Preludium: The Memory Dealer. Journal of Sonic Studies. 9. Full text in Research Archive
• Nielsen, Nanette (2013). ‘Ernst Krenek’s “problem of freedom” in Jonny spielt auf’. Twentieth-Century Music. ISSN 1478-5722. 10(1), p. 25–57. doi: 10.1017/s1478572212000400. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Ernst Krenek’s opera Jonny spielt auf (1927) was, according to the composer, concerned with ‘the problem of freedom’. But in what ways did it grapple with this problem? This article offers a new interpretation of Krenek’s opera in light of the composer’s views on freedom, developments in contemporary criticism, and the wider context of German Idealism. By focusing on constructions of subjectivity in Jonny, I argue that, much as Krenek lamented the fact that the opera’s fundamental message had not been taken seriously enough in the work’s reception, he himself had presented this theme of individual freedom ambiguously in musical terms. As a work that mediated between ethics and aesthetics, consistently adhering to an irreconcilable dialectic between the individual and the community, Jonny spielt auf contributed in important ways to the discourse that would stir so many Weimar intellectuals over the next few years to warn against the power of mass culture. © 2013 Cambridge University Press

• Nielsen, Nanette (2011). Opera for the people: melodrama in Hugo Herrmann's Vasantasena (1930). In Hibberd, Sarah (Eds.), Melodramatic Voices: Understanding Music Drama. Ashgate. ISSN 9781409400820. p. 159–159. Full text in Research Archive
• Nielsen, Nanette; Morgenstern, Martin & Steichen, James (2007). ‘To the Mirror Image’, by Paul Bekker. Opera Quarterly. ISSN 0736-0053. 23(2-3), p. 311–317. doi: 10.1093/oq/kbn043. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This is a piece originally written by Paul Bekker (1882-1937). It has been translated by Martin Morgenstern and Nanette Nielsen with James Steichen. This piece was originally published in German in Letters to Contemporary Musicians (Berlin: Max Hesses Verlag, 1932).

• Nielsen, Nanette (2007). ‘Sein oder Schein?: Paul Bekker's “mirror image” and the ethical voice of humane opera’. Opera Quarterly. ISSN 0736-0053. 23(2-3), p. 295–310. doi: 10.1093/oq/kbn042. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  One of the most important music critics of the early twentieth century, Paul Eugen Max Bekker was born in Berlin on September 11, 1882, to a tailor and a seamstress. After a career as a violinist and a short stint as a musical director, he began his journalistic profession in 1906. He initially worked for the Berliner Neueste Nachrichten and the Berliner Allgemeine Zeitung. In 1911, his book on Beethoven was published and was very well received. This earned him the position, beginning in that year, of music critic at the Frankfurter Zeitung: one of the first such positions in Germany. As a critic and theorist, Bekker produced more than thirty books, along with numerous other publications, including Das deutsche Musikleben (1916), Franz Schreker, Studie und Kritik der modernen Oper (1919), Gustav Mahlers Sinfonien (1921), and Wagner, das Leben im Werke (1924). As Intendant in Kassel (1925–27) and Wiesbaden (1927–32), he was responsible for many performances and produced several operas, including Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf, Schreker’s Der singende Teufel, and Weill’s Die Bu¨rgschaft. Bekker left Germany in 1933 and lived in New York, where he was a critic for the New Yorker Staatszeitung, from 1934 until his untimely death on March 7, 1937. Only a handful of his books have appeared in English translation, and many of his theories of music’s role in society have yet to be introduced to non-German readers. [...] © 2007 Oxford University Press

• Nielsen, Nanette & Hibberd, Sarah (2003). ‘Music in Melodrama: "the Burden of Ineffable Expression"?’. Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film. ISSN 2048-2906. 31(1), p. 30–40. Full text in Research Archive

View all works in NVA

• Nielsen, Nanette; McAuley, Tomas; Levinson, Jerrold & Phillips-Hutton, Ariana (2020). The Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199367313. 1100 p. Full text in Research Archive
• Nielsen, Nanette (2017). Paul Bekker's Musical Ethics. Routledge. ISBN 9781472486226. 242 p. Full text in Research Archive
• Nielsen, Nanette & Cobussen, Marcel (2012). Music and Ethics. Ashgate. ISBN 9781409434962. 190 p. Full text in Research Archive

View all works in NVA

• Nielsen, Nanette & Klungnes, Kristina Mariell Dulsrud (2026). Musikkens makt på TV-skjermen. Full text in Research Archive
• Nielsen, Nanette & Klungnes, Kristina Mariell Dulsrud (2026). Critical Transitions and Affective Temporalities in the Soundtrack of Stranger Things. Full text in Research Archive
• Nielsen, Nanette (2026). Enacting Musical Creativity: the value of human agency in the face of AI. Full text in Research Archive
• Nielsen, Nanette (2026). Anticipatory Aesthetics and the Listening Body. Full text in Research Archive
• Nielsen, Nanette (2026). Musicking and the value of human agency in the face of AI. Full text in Research Archive
• Hope, Mikael; Nielsen, Nanette & Laeng, Bruno (2026). Audiovisual Rhythms in Narrative Film: How Music Affects Attention, Memory and the Experience of Time. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Music is known to shape viewer experiences in film, yet how it affects the cognitive processes underlying viewer engagement remains unclear. This study investigated music's role in modulating temporal experience, memory, and attention in film viewing across two complete narratives. We conducted complementary online and laboratory experiments using animated films with different musical conditions: original music with tension-release patterns aligned to visual narrative, the same original music rearranged in a different temporal order, constant-intensity music, and no music. Laboratory results revealed that music with congruent narrative structure led to significantly shorter duration estimates, enhanced temporal order memory, better recognition of narrative details, and higher absorption ratings compared to reordered music. These effects were absent in the online experiment, suggesting that viewing context moderates music's impact. The findings demonstrate that music's narrative structure, and not just its presence or emotional content, modulates temporal experience, narrative memory, and attention during film viewing.

• Nielsen, Nanette (2024). Enacting musical aesthetics: the embodied experience of live music. Full text in Research Archive
• Nielsen, Nanette & Martin, Remy Richard (2024). Affective framing, care, and (en)action in musical encounters. Full text in Research Archive
• Nielsen, Nanette (2024). Improvisation as praxis: music as a form-of-life. Full text in Research Archive
• Nielsen, Nanette; Martin, Remy Richard & Bernhardt, Emil (2023). Entrainment, free will, and musicking: an enactivist perspective. Full text in Research Archive
• Edwards, Peter & Nielsen, Nanette (2023). Kunstmusikken lever! Også på Universitetet i Oslo. Full text in Research Archive
• Nielsen, Nanette (2022). 'On musical knowledge: a response to Carolyn Abbate'. Full text in Research Archive
• Nielsen, Nanette (2021). As We Wait for Music. Filologen. ISSN 0807-9250. 2, p. 14–19. Full text in Research Archive
• Nielsen, Nanette & Høffding, Simon (2019). Absorption in Schizophrenia, Music and Mystical Experience. Full text in Research Archive
• Nielsen, Nanette & Høffding, Simon (2019). A Musical Matter of Mind. Full text in Research Archive
• Nielsen, Nanette (2019). Alfred Hitchcock og Bernard Herrmann: mestere i spenning. Z filmtidsskrift. ISSN 0800-1464. Full text in Research Archive
• Nielsen, Nanette (2018). ‘Carl Nielsen, the modern musical philosopher: life as an aesthetic experience’. Full text in Research Archive
• Nielsen, Nanette (2018). ‘On attentive listening and moral understanding: music's challenge to philosophy’. Full text in Research Archive
• Nielsen, Nanette; Aksnes, Hallgjerd; Edwards, Peter & Kvalbein, Astrid (2018). Launch for Nanette Nielsen’s book _Paul Bekker’s Musical Ethics_. Introduction and moderation by Hallgjerd Aksnes, panel discussion including: Peter Edwards (University of Oslo), Peter Franklin (University of Oxford), Sarah Hibberd (University of Bristol), Astrid Kvalbein (NMH) and Aksel Tollåli (Oslo). Full text in Research Archive
• Nielsen, Nanette; Devine, Kyle; Hagen, Per Ole & Gadir, Tami (2017). How We Got into Academia, and How to Get (More) Out of It: Ideas Entrepreneurship in Action. Full text in Research Archive
• Nielsen, Nanette (2016). Radikal Operaregi? Full text in Research Archive
• Nielsen, Nanette (2016). Aesthetic Risks, Ethical Gains. Full text in Research Archive
• Nielsen, Nanette (2016). The Death and Future of Postmodernism. Full text in Research Archive
• Grindem, Karianne; Aksnes, Hallgjerd & Nielsen, Nanette (2016). Direkte knyttet til minner: Musikk. [Journal]. Dagbladet. Full text in Research Archive
• Nielsen, Nanette (2016). '15 Minutes with ... The Jerome Roche Prize Winner'. [Internet]. http://www.rma.ac.uk/students/?p=2731. Full text in Research Archive
• Nielsen, Nanette (2016). 'The work of musicology in the age of cultural reproduction', Jerome Roche keynote talk, University of Bangor, BFE/RMA Research Students’ Conference, 6-8 January, 2016. Full text in Research Archive
• Nielsen, Nanette (2015). 'Kan du endre musikken til Mozart?'. [Journal]. Dagsavisen http://www.dagsavisen.no/oslo/kan-du-endre-musikk. Full text in Research Archive
• Nielsen, Nanette (2015). 'Film music', interview, Norwegian National Radio (NRK), on the programmes 'Norgesglasset' and 'Brunsj', 12 May and 15 May, 2015. [Radio]. NRK. Full text in Research Archive
• Nielsen, Nanette (2015). 'Is changing the music in an opera allowed?', on The Magic Flute, in discussion with David Levin, Per Boye Hansen, Ståle Wikshåland, and audience members, The Norwegian National Opera, 24 October 2015. Full text in Research Archive
• Nielsen, Nanette (2015). 'Towards an ethics of listening: music, engagement, and subjectivity', keynote talk, Grieg Research School in Interdisciplinary Studies, Bergen, 26 November 2015. Full text in Research Archive
• Nielsen, Nanette (2015). 'Film Music and Spectator Engagement', Filmens Hus, Oslo, 'The Sound of Movies', 3-4 October 2015. Full text in Research Archive
• Nielsen, Nanette (2014). 'Danish music and modernism's legacies', talk for the Nielsen Study Day, IMR/Oxford Symposium, The Barbican, London, 11 October 2014. Full text in Research Archive
• Nielsen, Nanette (2014). 'Towards an ethics of musical experience', keynote talk for a conference on 'Shaped by Beauty' at Heythrop College, University of London, 26-27 June 2014. Full text in Research Archive
• Nielsen, Nanette (2013). 'Subjectivities merged, ethical responsibilities gained', RMA Annual Conference, IMR London, 19-21 September 2013, paper for panel on ‘Music in films: ethical-aesthetic discursive disruptions’. Full text in Research Archive
• Nielsen, Nanette (2013). ‘Paul Bekker’s musical ethics’, colloquium given at the University of Bangor, Wales, 23 April 2013 (Invited speaker). Full text in Research Archive
• Nielsen, Nanette (2013). 'Music and Modernism', King's College London, Study Day on Modernism held by the British Association of Modernist Studies (BAMS), 9 May 2013 (Invited speaker). Full text in Research Archive
• Nielsen, Nanette & McAuley, Tomas (2013). ‘Introduction’, Opera Quarterly special issue on ‘Opera and Philosophy’. Opera Quarterly. ISSN 0736-0053. 29(3-4), p. 183–185. doi: 10.1093/oq/kbu002. Full text in Research Archive
• Nielsen, Nanette (2012). ‘Voice and ethics in Berg’s Wozzeck’, paper given at the Royal Musical Association Annual Conference, Cardiff, 31 May-3 June 2012. Full text in Research Archive
• Nielsen, Nanette (2012). ‘Music and Philosophy’, invited co-convenor and speaker for a Research Training Day held at the Institute for Musical Research, London 5 March, 2012. Full text in Research Archive
• Nielsen, Nanette (2012). ‘Voice and the deconstruction of subjectivity in Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf’, paper for the Royal Musical Association Music and Philosophy Study Group session ‘Music, Philosophy and Identity’, International Musicological Society Congress, Rome, 1-7 July 2012. Full text in Research Archive
• Nielsen, Nanette (2012). ‘Ernst Krenek’s “Problem of Freedom” in Jonny spielt auf’, colloquium given at the Oxford University Faculty of Music, 14 February 2012 (Invited speaker). Full text in Research Archive
• Nielsen, Nanette (2012). 'On the musically ethical', keynote talk with Marcel Cobussen for the conference 'Arts and Ethics', Trinity Western University, Langley, B.C., Canada, 18-19 October 2012. Full text in Research Archive
• Nielsen, Nanette (2011). Invited respondent to the AMS/RMA Music and Philosophy Study Group session, ‘The ethics of musical labor’, American Musicological Society Annual Meeting, San Francisco, 10 November 2011. Full text in Research Archive
• Nielsen, Nanette (2011). Invited respondent to the paper ‘Jan W. Morthenson: The Reluctant Avant-Gardist?’, by Per Broman, Annual Meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics, 29 October 2011. Full text in Research Archive
• Nielsen, Nanette (2011). ‘Paul Bekker’s ambivalent modernism’, lecture given at the Institute for Musical Research (IMR), Stewart House, London, 24 November 2011 (Invited speaker). Full text in Research Archive
• Nielsen, Nanette (2010). ‘Towards an ethical criticism of music’, given at the RMA Study Day, ‘Music and Philosophy’, King’s College, London, 20 February 2010. Full text in Research Archive
• Nielsen, Nanette (2010). ‘Modernism and the masses: music and social change in the Weimar Republic’, University of Surrey, 16 November 2010 (Invited speaker). Full text in Research Archive
• Nielsen, Nanette (2010). ‘Music and morality in Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel’, Glyndebourne Opera Festival, pre-performance talks, 25 July and 1 August 2010 (Invited speaker). Full text in Research Archive
• Nielsen, Nanette (2009). ‘Between Politics and Ethics: Paul Bekker’s reception of Kurt Weill’s Die Bürgschaft (1932)’, given at the study day ‘Politics of Opera’, Taylorian Institute, Oxford, 9 October 2009. Full text in Research Archive
• Nielsen, Nanette (2009). ‘The danger of music criticism and the case for control’, given at the SMA/IMR study day ‘Performance Criticism’, Stewart House, London, 16 December 2009 (Invited speaker). Full text in Research Archive
• Nielsen, Nanette (2009). ‘Music, Beauty, and Ethics’, colloquium paper given at the Music Department, University of Nottingham, 3 November 2009 (Invited speaker). Full text in Research Archive
• Nielsen, Nanette (2008). ‘Opera for the people: melodrama in Hugo Herrmann’s Vasantasena (1930)’, at the conference ‘Music and the Melodramatic Aesthetic’, University of Nottingham, 5-7 September 2008. (Invited speaker). Full text in Research Archive
• Nielsen, Nanette (2008). ‘The ethics of voice in Weimar opera’, for the Royal Northern College of Music Research Seminar Series (Manchester, 15 February 2008). (Invited speaker). Full text in Research Archive
• Nielsen, Nanette (2006). 'On the ethical in music', for the Royal Institute of Philosophy's Public Lecture series 'Apollo and Dionysus. Philosophy's troubled relations with the Creative Arts', University of East Anglia, 23 November 2006. (Invited speaker). Full text in Research Archive
• Nielsen, Nanette (2006). 'Ethical Encounters: Voice and Freedom in Bekker and Krenek', Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society and Society for Music Theory, Los Angeles, 2-5 November 2006. Full text in Research Archive
• Nielsen, Nanette (2006). ‘“Should politics be sung?”’: voice and ethics in Bekker and Weill’, Royal Musical Association, 42nd Annual Conference, Nottingham, 11-14 July 2006. Full text in Research Archive
• Nielsen, Nanette (2005). Review of Claire Taylor-Jay, The Artist-Operas of Pfitzner, Krenek and Hindemith: Politics and the Ideology of the Artist (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). Music & Letters. ISSN 0027-4224. 86(4), p. 664–668. doi: 10.1093/ml/gci124. Full text in Research Archive
• Nielsen, Nanette (2005). 'An Intersection of Ethics and Aesthetics: Paul Bekker as Intendant', for the Faculty of Music Colloquia Series, University of Cambridge, 8 June 2005. (Invited speaker). Full text in Research Archive
• Nielsen, Nanette (2003). ‘The Musicological Turn to Ethics’, at the Third Biennial International Conference on Twentieth-Century Music, University of Nottingham, 26-29 June 2003. Full text in Research Archive
• Nielsen, Nanette (2002). ‘Musical Discourse and Moral Understanding’, at the conference ‘Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art’, University of Warwick, May 2002. Full text in Research Archive

View all works in NVA