What is KlangBildKlang? This large-scale mdw project, whose name translates as “SoundImageSound”, may indeed evoke the odd question. Is the focus on sound, here, or actually more on visual depiction? The answer is neither-nor. It’s much rather about interaction—between not just sounds and images, but also people, mdw departments, performing venues, and organisations.
Our university’s cooperation with the Munich-based classical recording label Solo Musica represents the latest step toward rendering the outstanding achievements of mdw students even more visible and audible. The first such project to have been realised is a recording with the Chaos String Quartet.
Alexandra Althoff, dramaturge and former artistic director of the Burgtheater, assumed leadership of the mdw’s Max Reinhardt Seminar on 1 March 2024. She and Steffen Jäger, who serves as her deputy head, speak about these new responsibilities, the challenges and planned emphases during their term in office.
In late January of this year, conductor Marin Alsop was made an honorary member of our institution. With this act, the mdw recognised Alsop’s internationally outstanding achievements as an artist as well as her work to promote women conductors and support the musical education of children and adolescents.
“Psst, psst, psst, psst” echoes enticingly throughout the gilded hall of the Schönbrunner Schlosstheater. White shrouds hanging above the stage allude to the moon, which lights what has just been rehearsed. Such were the scenes that one could observe in February’s rehearsals for the mdw opera production Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor, which premières this March.
One of the foremost professional goals of many Leonard Bernstein Department students is obtaining a full-time post in a renowned orchestra. In the interest of improving their chances of auditioning successfully, the Bernstein Department and the Rectorate agreed back in March 2019 to establish orchestral master classes. The idea was to afford ambitious students an additional opportunity to engage in personal exchange with colleagues from the respective orchestras before actually auditioning.
It was a student job with concert organiser Jeunesse that laid the cornerstone of her passion for music mediation work with children and adolescents—and today, this mdw alumna is responsible for education as part of the Concert Planning & Administration staff at the Wiener Konzerthaus. At the moment, she’s busy organising the final event of KlangBildKlang together with her alma mater.
It’s 6:30 p.m. on a Tuesday. Students from various programmes are welcomed to the mdw’s Clara Schumann-Saal by Miriam Steinkühler-Fuchsberger, a member of the ipop – Department of Popular Music faculty. Her mission today, like on many Tuesdays past: to unleash students’ passion for singing together despite any tiredness after their day’s work at the University. mdw Magazine sat in on one of their rehearsals.
Art and science are two areas that have fascinated Haruki Noda ever since his childhood years, which included a huge dose of the natural sciences and an early musical start in the form of guitar lessons. It’s precisely this duality that one can so keenly sense in his present-day work as a composer, multimedia and performance artist, and musicologist.
Director Christina Tscharyiski, born in Vienna in 1988, has been looking forward quite a bit to her involvement with the Max Reinhardt Seminar as a visiting director this summer semester. She’s now hard at work with the third-year acting class on a staged production of Elfriede Jelinek’s text Sonne, los jetzt!
For the current academic year of 2023/24, director Sarantos-Georgios Zervoulakos is teaching as a visiting professor of drama directing at the Max Reinhardt Seminar—which is not the first time he’s returned to the institution where he originally studied. Then as now, what he values most of all about the Seminar is Max Reinhardt’s concept of an ensemble that allows actors and directors to “grow up” in an atmosphere of close interaction and mutual inspiration.
Just what is it that underpins the actor’s craft? Anja Thiemann, a professor at the Max Reinhardt Seminar since March 2023, provides mdw Magazine with some insights into her work with first-year acting students, her multifaceted career, and her efforts to put suppressed women authors back in the spotlight.
After serving as the Burgtheater’s deputy artistic director, Alexandra Althoff found it important to get back in direct contact with young people working toward theatrical careers and return to the Max Reinhardt Seminar, where she’d already taught from 2013 to 2018.
“Green filming” refers to measures taken as part of film production that aim to reduce CO2 output and conserve resources. The film industry’s environmental footprint is a large one: film teams travel to all kinds of locations, equipment needs to be transported, and set elements as well as costumes need to be made—all of which results in large amounts of waste as well as high energy consumption. Recent years, however, have seen a shift in attitudes.
Barbara Albert, Jessica Hausner and Karina Ressler are the protagonists oft the first three volumes of the book series Aus der Werkstatt [From the Workshop], based on an ongoing oral history project of the Media and Film Studies chair at Film Academy Vienna. In wide-ranging workshop conversations, the filmmakers discuss their artistic work and provide insights into their cinematic thinking and the methods by which they proceed.
Police officer Nancy is torn between her responsibility and her compassion for the family, who’ve been living in Austria for a long time and are blindsided when the police show up. For this stirring short film, Film Academy Vienna alumnus Mark Gerstorfer and his Film Academy team won a Student Academy Award in gold in the Narrative category.
Barbara Albert studied directing as well as screenplay writing and dramaturgy at Film Academy Vienna during the 1990s. Her graduation film Nordrand (1999), simultaneously her debut feature film, celebrated its world première at the Venice Film Festival and went on to achieve international renown.
Ever since its establishment in 2021, mdwPress—our university’s own open-access academic publisher—has been working to make research at the mdw both more visible and openly accessible. An advisory board comprised of outstanding researchers and scholars from within and outside the mdw both guarantees academic independence and assures publication quality.
The infrastructure research project Applied/Experimental Sound Research Laboratory (ÆSR Lab) (2023–2026) is a collaborative effort of the University of Applied Arts, the mdw (Artistic Research Center and Department of Composition Studies and Music Production), and the Phonogrammarchiv of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. This project embodies an initiative to develop a mobile and modular sound research lab.
The November 2023 release Handbuch Musikvermittlung [Music Mediation Handbook] has not only met but also far exceeded all expectations. Editors along with their 57 co-authors from the music mediation community and adjacent fields, succeed here in sketching out the contours of music mediation in all of its dimensions, colours, and nuances across this handbook’s easily digestible chapters.
“Amenca ketane” is a maxim of the Roma movement in Austria and means “collectively, together”. The MMRC Lecture on 16 November 2023 at the mdw’s Joseph Haydn-Saal took these Romanes words as a motto under which to address the history of this people’s traumas and their use of music to overcome them: amenca ketane. Histories of Trauma, Music and Romani Empowerment.
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