Sebastian Wedler is Assistant Professor of Musicology at Utrecht University. His research concerns the analysis and criticism of music from the nineteenth century to the present day, issues in the philosophy of musical thought (with a focus on critical theory and ecocriticism), and the epistemology of music theory.

In his first monograph, Anton Webern at the Dawn of Modernism (to appear in October 2025 in Cambridge University Press’s Music in Context series), he offers the first extended account of Webern’s tonal music (1899–1908). A study of both the generative elements of Webern’s aesthetic imagination, and the philosophical signatures of musical modernity, this book explores the complex and variegated ways in which the young composer engaged with, and sought to contribute to, the cultural discourses of fin-de-siècle modernism, well before he self-consciously embarked upon his famous ‘path’ to the New Music. Key topics covered include the musical representation of nature, temporality, and absence, as well as a critical reappraisal of the category of earliness. His other works include articles and chapters in venues such as Music Analysis, Twentieth-Century Music, The Cambridge Companion to Music and Romanticism, The Cambridge Companion to Serialism, and Beethoven in Context (forthcoming). He has presented his research widely at conferences in the USA, UK and continental Europe, including at the annual meetings of the American Musicological Society and the Society for Music Theory.