About
Department of Musicology, Faculteit Letteren, KU Leuven
Head, Research Center for Music Philosophy and Humanities Fundamenta musicae, Sofia
My name is Christian Vassilev. I am an FWO Junior Postdoctoral Fellow at KU Leuven and Head of the Research Center for Music Philosophy and Humanities Fundamenta musicae in Sofia. My work moves between musicology, philosophy of music, and the wider humanities, with a particular interest in musical subjectivity, identification, agency, and the pre-reflective dimensions of musical experience.
I received my PhD in Musicology from the National Academy of Music “Prof. Pancho Vladigerov” in Sofia in 2023, after completing the academy’s integrated musicology programme in 2019. During those years I was also an Erasmus scholar at the University of Augsburg, an experience that widened my intellectual horizon and sharpened my sense of the European conversations in which my work belongs.
Writings
My books and articles include Methodological Foundations of Eero Tarasti’s Musical Semiotics (Acta Semiotica Fennica, 2023), “The Phenomenon of Musical Identification: A View from Heidegger’s Early Phenomenology” (Horizon. Studies in Phenomenology, 2022), and “The Whole City Must Never Cease Singing”: Plato and the Community of the Musical Nomos (Philosophy of Music Education Review, 2024). Other recent and forthcoming work addresses experience and justification in music education, Heinrich Schenker’s idea of organic wholeness, and phenomenological approaches to musical understanding.
Teaching and service
I have taught philosophy and music, philosophical aspects of musical interpretation, psychology of music, ethics, pedagogy, and theory and philosophy of education at the Bulgarian National Academy of Music. I serve as a peer reviewer for the British Journal of Aesthetics and for Springer’s Numanities - Arts and Humanities in Progress series, and I am editor of the “Music Philosophy” series at Riva Publishing House.
Public work and languages
Recent invited talks and conference papers have taken me to Helsinki, Brighton, Athens, Giessen, and Ermoupolis. I work primarily in English and Bulgarian, with German, French, Italian, and Russian as research languages.