On 13 July 2026, Prof. Dr. Georg Mohr (University of Bremen) will deliver his Fellow Lecture on the topic “Access to Music in Digital Change”. The lecture will take place from 4.15 pm to 6.30 pm in the Philosophikum (Domplatz 23, 48143 Münster), room 201.

Music is more accessible than ever. This has become a commonplace in interviews with musicians asked about the impact of digitalisation on music. Digital technology has changed the production of music, its transmission, diffusion and reproduction – as well as music listening habits. How can this change in the access to music as a cultural good be described? Several aspects have to be considered.

In music production, digitality opens and changes the music maker’s access to her material: instruments and sounds. Since digital streaming has become the dominant technique of playing music, any person at any time at any place has a nearly unlimited choice between a huge quantity of music for personal use, nearly for free. What does this situation imply? The lecture will deal with some of its most striking aspects – aesthetic, hermeneutic, political, economic – and question the very notion of accessibility in relation to music.

Prof. Dr. Georg Mohr is a retired professor of philosophy specializing in practical philosophy at the University of Bremen. His research focuses, among other things, historically on Kant’s philosophy and, thematically, on the awareness of time and subjectivity; free will/attribution/person; philosophical implications of democratic legal culture, particularly criminal law, international law, and human rights; and in the philosophy of music, particularly the ontology of the musical work of art, musical expression, music perception/music comprehension, composition and improvisation.