Daniel K. L. Chua

Daniel K. L. Chua is the chair professor of music at the University of Hong Kong. Before joining the University as head the School of Humanities, he was a Fellow at St John’s College, Cambridge, and later Professor of Music Theory and Analysis at King’s College London. He is the recipient of the Royal Musical Association’s Dent Medal, a fellow of the American Musicological Society, and a corresponding fellow of the British Academy. As the president of the International Musicological Society (2017–22), he championed global musicology and continues to contribute to its development. He is the author of five books: The “Galitzin” Quartets of Beethoven (Princeton, 1994), Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning (Cambridge, 1999), Beethoven and Freedom (Oxford, 2017), Alien Listening: Voyager’s Golden Record and Music From Earth (Zone Books, 2021), and Music and Joy: Lessons on the Good Life (Yale, 2024).