About

Dr. Gina Emerson is a researcher, cultural manager and curator in the fields of contemporary and classical music, based in Berlin. Her work explores and connects the topics of audience experience, sustainability, cultural participation and the use of new technologies across art music contexts.

She is the author of Audience Experience and Contemporary Classical Music, published by Routledge in March 2023. The book takes a multidimensional view of the audience experience of newly composed music and looks at how musical expertise and the frames of social context and concert format shape aesthetic responses to this art form (analysed as a ‘high art subculture’). It draws on audience surveys conducted at twelve contemporary classical music concerts from a range of institutions across Europe, in collaboration with the Ulysses Network, producing the first large-scale study on this topic.

She is currently a Research Associate on the collaborative research project ‘Ein nachhaltiger Kulturauftrag für Musik – ein neuer Aspekt orchestraler Exzellenz’, a joint initiative by the RIFS Potsdam and the Kammerakademie Potsdam. She is supporting the orchestra in developing and implementing a socio-ecological sustainability strategy, whilst also exploring how classical music can build sustainable relationships with a range of communities and how it can be curated to connect with societal topics. She is a member of the Art-Science Cooperations for Sustainability research group at the RIFS.

Prior to this, she was a Research Associate with the 3DMIN (Design, Development and Dissemination of New Musical Instruments) project at the Technical University of Berlin. She holds an MA in Musicology from the Humboldt University of Berlin and BA in Music from the University of Oxford.

From 2020 to 2021, she was a project manager and dramaturg with Ensemble Quillo, producing a range of contemporary music and education formats in rural Brandenburg. She has been active as a board member, organiser and curator within the Berliner Gesellschaft für Neue Musik collective since 2020. She also collaborates with the INM Berlin, consulting on formats and audience engagement in contemporary music.