Sebastian Spieker studied musicology and German philology at the Universities of Bern and Basel and completed his Master's degree in 2025 with a thesis on Claude Debussy, Henri Bergson and . He worked as a student assistant at the Department of Musicology and conducted archival research at the Paul Sacher Stiftung. Since 2026, he has been writing his doctoral thesis as part of the Imagining Landscape project, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

Imagining Landscape. Landscape as a musical aesthetic paradigm in Germanspeaking early 19th century.

In the decades around 1800, listening to music was compared to viewing landscapes in numerous art and music-related texts. This comparison articulates a specific understanding of music, according to which the audience wanders through symphonies like landscapes, imbuing them with individual images and memories. This thesis examines the development and significance of this concept regarding instrumental music. Starting from its formulation in treatises on the philosophy of art (e.g. Schiller, Fernow, or A.W. von Schlegel), its application in music-specific contexts (concert reviews or composer's diaries) is traced. Building on this, analyses of orchestral concert overtures programmatically referencing to landscapes will demonstrate the influence of landscapes on the formal structure of compositions.