Birgit Berger

Birgit Berger has spent many years exploring rhythmic structures in music and art, with a particular focus on the musical thought of Jaki Liebezeit.

Her work brings together musicology, movement research and the philosophy of time within an interdisciplinary approach to structure, examining shared principles of organization across music, art and architecture. This perspective opens up new ways of understanding how musical time emerges.

Her exploration of the relationship between music and the visual arts began in the late 1980s through an encounter with the American free-jazz musician Reverend Frank Wright (1935–1990). In the early 1990s, the German sculptor Prof. Detlef Birgfeld (1937–2026) and the American Fluxus artist Al Hansen (1927–1995) contributed further impulses to the development of this line of inquiry.

Birgit Berger was personally close to Jaki Liebezeit, and her long-standing familiarity with his musical thought and practice forms an essential background to her work. At its core is the question of how time emerges, is perceived and is organized in musical contexts.

With Jaki Liebezeit – Time as Structure: On the Organization of Rhythmic Time, she published the first German-language structural-theoretical study of Liebezeit’s rhythmic legacy. Rather than understanding rhythm as a sequence of notes or mathematical patterns, the book approaches it as the result of precisely organized movement.

In Jaki Liebezeit – Collective Rhythm: On the Organization of Collective Time, Berger develops this inquiry further, focusing on how shared time emerges through movement, perception and mutual orientation. Its point of departure is Jaki Liebezeit’s musical practice.

The English edition of "Jaki Liebezeit - Collective Rhythm: On the Organization of Collective Time", edited by John Payne, is expected to be published in late December 2026 or early January 2017.