Esteban Buch is a professor of music history at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. A specialist of the relationships between music and politics, he is the author of Trauermarsch. L’Orchestre de Paris dans l’Argentine de la dictature (Seuil, 2016), Le cas Schönberg. Naissance de l’avant-garde musicale (Gallimard, 2006), and Beethoven’s Ninth. A Political History (The University of Chicago Press, 2003), among other books. He is also the coeditor of Composing for the State : Music in Twentieth Century Dictatorships (Routledge, 2016) and Finding Democracy in Music (Routledge, 2020).

Research focus

• Politics of Music
• Music in the Context of Political Violence
• Music History
• Relationships between Learnt Music and Popular Music

Current Research Projects at SCRIPTS
After working extensively on music and dictatorship (Buch 2011 & 2016, Buch e.a. 2015), music and diplomacy (Buch 2016, Buch & Fléchet 2018), music and liberalism (panel at the American Musicological Society’s 2017 annual meeting) and music and democracy (Adlington and Buch, forthcoming), Esteban Buch intends to write a comprehensive and interdisciplinary essay on music and power. This will provide a theoretical articulation of the historiographic method, prevalent in these publications, with insights gained from Sound Studies and the ongoing "sonic turn" in the social sciences. It will also elaborate on recent musicological literature, especially narratological and phenomenological approaches in music analysis, with a special focus on temporal forms and the perception of historical temporalities. Examples are to be taken from European and Latin-American cultural productions in the twentieth century, this last being his principal field of expertise.