Peter Petersen (born 17 July 1940) is a German musicologist and professor emeritus of the University of Hamburg.
[3] One focus of Petersen's research is in the field of 20th century music (among others Bartók, Berg, Hölszky, Lutosławski).
Petersen is editor of the series "Music in the 'Third Reich' and "in Exile" and co-editor of the Online-Lexikon verfolgter Musiker und Musikerinnen der NS-Zeit.
Based on meticulous score analyses, which are then contextualized, his investigations often open up the content-related connections of such compositions in a completely new way – for example, the structure of meaning in Alban Berg's Wozzeck[6] and in Richard Strauss' Friedenstag.
[7] In the field of music theory, Petersen developed a fundamentally new rhythm theory ("Komponententheorie [de]"),[2] which detaches the concept of duration from the individual tone and recognises all sound phenomena ("components") as having rhythm-generating potential (sound, pitch, diastematic, articulation, dynamics, timbre, harmony, texture, phrase, speech).