Lesar Yurtsever

When I’m not sitting at my laptop writing my PhD thesis, I’m usually at my piano, playing Mozart, Beethoven, or Bach — shifting from rational thinking to emotional feeling. But what if these two worlds weren’t so different after all? What do we see when we look at music in academics— and what can music tell us about politics, society, and how people see and feel each other?
I’m a historian, pianist, and musicologist, currently a scholarship holder at the Cluster of Excellence “Contestations of the Liberal Script (SCRIPTS)” at Freie Universität Berlin. Music and academia have always gone hand in hand in my life. With roots in Turkey and a fascination for U.S. culture, I became curious about how music shaped relations between these two countries. My PhD explores how Turkey used music, such as avant-garde music, to present itself to the United States as a modern, liberal nation.