Associate Researcher
Katharina Preller is a postdoctoral researcher in musicology at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Over the last ten years, she has studied various aspects of historical piano making, from one of the earliest surviving grand pianos from Germany (Franz Jacob Spath, Regensburg ca. 1770), to the Viennese pianos with downstriking action by the Streicher firm, and C. F. Theodore Steinway's patent inventions in New York. Between 2016 and 2022, she worked as a doctoral student and research assistant at the Deutsches Museum, the world's largest museum of science and technology. In her doctoral thesis, she investigated how Steinway & Sons drew on Hermann von Helmholtz's acoustic research for their development of the modern concert grand piano.
At the Orpheus Instituut she's part of Tom Beghin’s research cluster “Declassifying the Classics” as an organologist in the new project on Beethoven's last pianos.
At LMU, Katharina Preller teaches music history and is working on her second book (habilitation). Besides organology, her main interest currently lies in seventeenth century music in southern Germany and the European “periphery”, especially Eastern Europe.
