WELCOME!
Current news from the Department of Folk Music Research and Ethnomusicology
at the mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna
WE ARE 60!
The Department of Folk Music Research and Ethnomusicology at the mdw celebrates its 60th anniversary in 2025, marking six decades of research, artistic practice, teaching, and socio-political engagement. We look back on a unique development: from its founding by Walter Deutsch with the establishment of Austrian folk music research to Gerlinde Haid, who significantly advanced the field, Rudi Pietsch, who played a decisive role in defining artistic teaching, Ursula Hemetek, who anchored international ethnomusicology at the department with her research with minorities, to today, where we are striding into the future full of ambition and with a vision.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, IVE!
» Anniversary Symposium Program
» Celebratory evening 60 years of the department with a keynote by Ana Hofman, musical contributions from students,
and greetings from friends of the department_Streaming
» Celebratory evening Program
» Radio broadcast “Dimensions. The World of Science,” Ö1 on the 60th anniversary of the department
NEWS
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Isabel Frey receives the
Award of Excellence 2025
Isabel Frey, currently a senior artist and postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Folk Music Research and Ethnomusicology, was awarded the Award of Excellence 2025 by the Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research (BMBWF) for her dissertation "Vocal Yiddishkeit: Postvernacular Transmission and Performance of Yiddish Folksong." Frey wrote her outstanding dissertation in the field of Ethnomusicology as part of the structured doctoral program "Music Matters. Materialities, Knowings and Practices in Performing Arts" at the mdw. This state prize, which comes with a cash award of EUR 3,000, has been presented since 2008 to the 40 best dissertations of the previous academic year.
Congratulations!
© Martin Lusser
New Publication
European Voices VI
Ardian Ahmedaja (ed.) Singing, Song, and Sound as Human Acts of Personal and Cultural Agency. European Voices VI. Music Traditions/Musik Traditionen Vol. 5. Wien: Böhlau. 2025. 308 pp., map, photographs, sheet music, tables, list of audiovisual examples, notes on contributors, index.
ISBN 978-3-205-22374-0 (Print)
ISBN 978-3-205-22375-7 (OpenAccess)
Johann Gottfried Herder characterised singing and song as human acts of personal and cultural agency (Herder and Bohlman 2017). These agencies are enacted musically, centralising the idea of “performance”. In this context, “singing” refers to the act of performance, which, due to its interactive nature in real time, is the most important moment of music-making, particularly in multipart music traditions, while “song” and its emergence remain the object and subject of the act of creation. “Sound” is an indispensable part of all these processes. The perception and interpretation of these aspects by different people affect both the practice and discourse of music, shaping meaningful experiences in terms of the attitudes and cognitive processes involved in its creation (Blacking 1973).
