Historian, philosopher, and journalist Philipp Blom will be present as a keynote speaker at the String Quartet Biennale Amsterdam. In his books, Blom addresses major cultural and societal issues, with several of his publications translated into Dutch. In 2018, he delivered the opening speech at the Salzburg Festival, later published as ‘The Great World Stage’, discussing the power of imagination in times of crisis. An avid chamber musician himself, he chronicled the quest for the maker of his violin in ‘Italian Journey’, a story of craftsmanship and labor migration, of wood types and the definition of sound, and of Venice as the capital of eighteenth-century music. Philipp Blom lives and works in Vienna, the city of great classical composers Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert. As a speaker in Amsterdam during the String Quartet Biennale, he will examine the intimacy of chamber music and what it truly means to listen well.