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Scholars' Abstracts, Biographies, & Websites
Beethoven Conference
27-30 March 2026, London
Emil Gryesten
Associate Professor | Royal Danish Academy of Music
ABSTRACT: Reincarnations: Experimental reinterpretations of Beethoven's Late Piano Sonatas
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This lecture-recital forms part of an artistic research trajectory that seeks to generate new aesthetico-epistemic knowledge through experimental re-engagements with Beethoven’s late piano sonatas. Concert pianist and researcher Emil Gryesten carries out this project as part of his PhD research at the Orpheus Institute (docARTES), titled Metaphor and the Erotics of Interpretation.
Originating in the Beethoven Reconstructed project (2023), grounded in Schenkerian analysis, the research gradually extends these foundations toward an assemblage-based understanding of musical works as open, generative multiplicities. Metaphor functions as a transductive link between conceptual
and corporeal dimensions of performance, leading to an exploration of Roland Barthes’s notion of somatémes - points where musical sense is produced through embodied, affective gestures rather than representational signs.
Drawing on Paulo de Assis’s work, the project develops a methodology combining archaeological and genealogical engagement with musical materials and their critical re-actualisation through experimental performance. In this perspective, interpretation becomes not a reproduction of a pre-existing work but a site of transformation where historical, analytical, and performative forces converge in the emergence of new musical thought.
The lecture includes live performance excerpts from Beethoven’s Opp. 106, 110, and 111, alongside documentation of electro-acoustic reinterpretations and transdisciplinary
BIOGRAPHY
Emil Gryesten is a Danish concert pianist and lecturer of piano and chamber music at the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen. He is currently pursuing an artistic research PhD at the Orpheus Institute (docARTES) with the project Metaphor and the Erotics of Interpretation, which combines performance practice with theoretical studies derived from semiotics, phenomenology, and related fields to explore metaphor, embodiment, and experimental performance in 19th-century piano music.
A prizewinner at the Hamburg Steinway Competition and the Nordic Piano Competition, Gryesten made his Carnegie Hall debut in Weill Recital Hall and has performed widely across Europe, USA and Eastern Asia as both soloist and chamber musician. His recent recordings include Beethoven: The Late Piano Sonatas (2023) and a Chopin album featuring the 24 Preludes and Sonata No. 2, recorded on an 1837 Érard piano (2025).
Gryesten holds degrees from the Royal Danish Academy of Music and the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, and pursued advanced studies at the International Piano Academy in Como, Italy.
