Prof. Dr. Matthias Lewy

Born in Magdeburg in 1973, Matthias Lewy studied comparative musicology and cultural and social anthropology at the Free University of Berlin. He also completed a degree in cultural and media management at the Hanns Eisler School of Music in Berlin. His professional career began in the 2000s, when he gained his first experience at Piranha Musik- und Verlags-AG and WOMEX (Worldwide Music Expo) in Berlin. He later worked as a freelance cultural manager and research assistant at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder).

From 2005 onwards, research visits took him to Venezuela and northern Brazil, where he investigated indigenous dance-song rituals. This field research formed the basis for his doctorate at the Free University of Berlin. After successfully completing his doctorate, he continued his academic career as a postdoc and took up a professorship in ethnomusicology at the University of Brasília in Brazil in 2015.

In 2019, he moved to Switzerland, where he initially worked as a research assistant at the Competence Centre Music Education Research (CC MER) at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts. In 2023, he was appointed Professor of Research and Teaching there. The following year, he successfully completed his habilitation at the University of Music FRANZ LISZT Weimar and was awarded the Venia Legendi in musicology. His research interests include ecomusicology, sound ontologies in Amazonia, popular music of Latin America and the Caribbean, music and politics as well as the global music industry, in particular the world music scene. He also deals with ethno-historical sources of music from ancient Mexico and archival issues in music research.

In addition to his academic work, he is involved in the field of applied artistic and academic music education. As a sound curator, he organises exhibitions in leading ethnographic museums, including the Grassi Museum Leipzig, the Humboldt Forum Berlin and the Musée d'ethnographie de Genève.