Education
Born in Wuppertal, Dümling studied musicology in Essen, Vienna and Berlin and earned a Doctor of Philosophy with an interdisciplinary study on Arnold Schönberg and Stefan George, with Carl Dahlhaus as his mentor.
Born in Wuppertal, Dümling studied musicology in Essen, Vienna and Berlin and earned a Doctor of Philosophy with an interdisciplinary study on Arnold Schönberg and Stefan George, with Carl Dahlhaus as his mentor.
In 1985 he published his comprehensive work on Bertolt Brecht’s collaboration with composers. Following twenty years as music critic for the Berlin newspaper Der Tagesspiegel (1978–1998), Dümling contributed to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, "Neue Musik-Zeitung" and several radio programs. As a scholar at the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities Dümling created an American version of the exhibition „Entartete Musik (degenerate music) in 1989/90, which travelled to more than 50 locations worldwide, including the Royal Festival Hall in London, and the Vienna State Opera.
In 2007 he developed a Spanish version of the exhibition for the University of Sevilla, and a revised German version for the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra.
1992-1999 he served as Project Consultant for the DECCA Civil Defense-series "Entartete Musik". Following a lecture tour through Europe he was the organiser of the conference “Musical Exile in Australia” in Dresden 1996.
From 2000 to 2003 Dümling continued this research project at the Technische Universität Berlin (Zentrum für Antisemitismusforschung), sponsored by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. 2004 he received the Harold White Fellowship from the National Library of Australia.
In 1992 Dümling wrote the official biography of German composer Leon Jessel (1871–1942).
He revised and republished the biography in 2012.
He is also a "Honorary Research Associate" at the Royal Holloway, University of London, a "Research Fellow" at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne and a member of the Advisory Board to the "International Centre for Suppressed Music"" in London.