Wilfried Gruhn

Wilfried Gruhn (born 15 October 1939) is a German music educator, musicologist, violinist, and professor emeritus at universities in Germany and abroad. His focus is the music education of small children. He founded and directed the Gordon Institute of early childhood music learning in Freiburg in 2003. He is engaged in several international organisations such as International Society for Music Education (ISME) and the Internationale Leo Kestenberg Gesellschaft which published Leo Kestenberg's complete writings in six volumes.

Life Born in Königsberg, Gruhn grew up in Arnsberg after his family was expelled from East Prussia in 1945. He studied school music and violin as well as musicology with Arnold Schmitz, German studies with Paul Requadt and psychology with at the University of Mainz. with a thesis about the instrumentation in the orchestral works of Richard Strauss. He studied as a postgraduate in the Ludwig Bus master class in Saarbrücken. After the first state examination, he first played as a violinist in the Kammerorchester des Saarländischen Rundfunks

He is the author and editor of numerous specialist publications and essays as well as co-editor of music education journals Zeitschrift für Musikpädagogik (Journal for music pedagogy), Musik und Unterricht (Music and lessons) and European Music Journal. Intensive contacts with American music pedagogy since 1980 led him to study the music learning theory of Edwin Gordon. The research approaches of the cognitive sciences resulted in new empirical approaches to learning research (perception and cognition of music), which also took up the expanded possibilities of the emerging neuroscience and led to research into the neural foundations of musical learning in collaboration with medical scientists, psychologists and neurologists. he founded in 2009 the Internationale Leo Kestenberg Gesellschaft, which published the complete writings of Leo Kestenberg, a music education in Prussia, in six volumes, from 2009 to 2013.

Publications Author Musiksprache Sprachmusik Textvertonung. Aspekte des Verhältnisses von Musik, Sprache und Text. Diesterweg Frankfurt 1978. with : Wege des Lehrens im Fach Musik. Ein Arbeitsbuch zum Erwerb eines Methodenrepertoires. Schwann, Düsseldorf 1983. Kinder brauchen Musik. Beltz, Weinheim 2003. Der Musikverstand. Olms Hildesheim 1998, 3rd revised edition 2008, 4th edition 2014. Geschichte der Musikerziehung. Eine Kultur- und Sozialgeschichte schulischer Musikerziehung vom Gesangunterricht der Aufklärungspädagogik zu ästhetisch kultureller Bildung. Wolke, Hofheim 1993, 4th edition 2014. Wahrnehmen und Verstehen. Untersuchungen zum Verstehensbegriff in der Musik. Florian Noetzel, Wilhelmshaven 1987, ; 2nd edition 2004 (TB zur Musikwissenschaft, vol. 107). Anfänge des Musiklernens. Eine lerntheoretische und entwicklungspsychologische Einführung. Olms, Hildesheim 2010. Musikalische Gestik. Vom musikalischen Ausdruck zur Bewegungsforschung. Olms, Hildesheim 2014. Wir müssen lernen, in Fesseln zu tanzen. Leo Kestenbergs Leben zwischen Kunst und Kulturpolitik. Wolke, Hofheim 2015. "Hören als Handeln. Eine neurophysiologische Theorie der musikalischen Wahrnehmung." Olms, Hildesheim 2022

Editor with Heinz W. Höhnen, B. Binkowski, H. Hopf, R. Jakoby: Entwicklung neuer Ausbildungsgänge für Lehrer der Sekundarstufen I und II im Fach Musik. Modellversuch der Staatlichen Hochschule für Musik Ruhr, Folkwang Hochschule Essen, Mainz und Regensburg 1978. Reflexionen über Musik heute. Schott, Mainz 1981. with Francis H. Rauscher: Neurosciences in Music Pedagogy. Nova Science Publishers Inc., New York 2007. with U. Mahlert, D. Schenk and J. Cohen: Leo Kestenberg: Gesammelte Schriften. complete writings in 6 volumes. Freiburg: Rombach, 2009–2013. with Annemarie Seither-Preisler: Der musikalische Mensch. Evolution, Biologie und Pädagogik musikalischer Begabung. Olms, Hildesheim 2014. with Peter Röbke: Musiklernen. Bedingungen, Handlungsfelder, Positionen. Helbling, Innsbruck/Esslingen 2018.