Juilliard-trained, Aysegul Durakoglu is a performer with versatile interests and a repertoire that encompasses both the earliest and contemporary styles. Since her highly acclaimed New York Debut Recital at Merkin Concert Hall in New York, where Bernard Holland of the New York Times described her musicality “impeccable like nothing false or artificial but naturally come by.” Aysegul has concertized widely as a soloist and chamber musician both nationally and internationally. She has appeared with major orchestras, and has been featured in various festivals, as well as radio and television programs in her native country, Turkey. After receiving her Master of Music degree from the Juilliard School, Aysegul earned a Ph.D. with notable distinction at New York University where she also served on the piano faculty. She is currently serving as a Full Professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology. As a researcher and educator, she presented lecture-recitals at the World Piano Conferences in Serbia, CMS Conferences in Berlin, Argentina, Toronto, and Vancouver in Canada. In 2000, she established a Chamber Music Society, Musica Mundana to bring together a fusion of sounds and cultures, including the Sephardic, Latin American, Turkish and Mediterranean traditions. 

 She has released solo albums, Dances through the Keyboard, Debussy’s Piano Etudes, Alla Turca, and was featured in a documentary film about the Turkish-American composer, Ilhan Mimaroglu-Robinson of Manhattan at the New York Film Festival in November 2021. In addition, she published an anthology, in July 2022, with her colleagues Yunus Tuncel and Michael Steinmann, on the philosophy and music of Friedrich Nietzsche and has been presenting lecture-recitals throughout the United States, Canada, and recently at King’s College-London, NYU, and Goethe Insitute in Boston.               

For more information, please visit: www.ayseguldurakoglu.com

Michael Steinmann is Professor of Philosophy at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey. He received his Ph.D. at the University of Tübingen and his Habilitation at the University of Freiburg. Steinmann specializes in ethics, with a focus on applied ethics, and German continental philosophy of the 19th and 20th century. His books include The Ethics of Friedrich Nietzsche (De Gruyter, 2000), The Openness of Meaning. Logic and Language in Martin Heidegger (Mohr Siebeck, 2008), and Reframing Ethics Through Dialectics. A New Understanding of the Moral Good (Bloomsbury, 2023).  

Yunus Tuncel teaches at the New School’s Schools of Public Engagement and is a co-founder of the Nietzsche Circle and is the Editor-in-Chief of its electronic journal, The Agonist, which is published twice a year. He received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the New School for Social Research. He is the author of Towards a Genealogy of Spectacle (Eye Corner Press, 2011), Agon in Nietzsche (Marquette University Press, 2013), Emotion in Sports (Routledge, 2019), Nietzsche on Human Emotions (Schwabe, 2021), and Flames of Passion (Beadle Press, 2022) and the editor of Nietzsche and Transhumanism (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017) and a co-editor of Nietzsche and Music (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2022). He has been working on music and philosophy interaction with thinkers and musicians for the last ten years, with an emphasis on Nietzsche and music. His areas of research include art, competition, culture, myth, music, power, spectacle, sports, performance, and theater. He is interested in the fusion of art (all forms of art) and philosophy in various cultural formations and undertakes a peripatetic project called Philomobile.

Tilman Williams is a doctoral candidate in Musicology at the Berlin University of the Arts, conducting comparative research on Nietzsche’s moral critique and Schoenberg’s transition to atonality. Currently, he is a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University in New York. Before undertaking his doctoral project, he studied Philosophy, Latin, and Sports in Cologne, Rome, and Buenos Aires.