A new home for the oldest repertoire: with the establishment of the mdw’s 25th department, instrumentalists and singers now have the opportunity to immerse themselves in the world of historically informed performance more fully than ever before.

50 years ago, on 21 January 1970, Austria’s parliament passed the Universities of the Arts Organisation Act (KHOG), which accorded university-level status to the Academies of Music and Performing Arts in Graz, Salzburg, and Vienna as well as to the Academy of Applied Arts Vienna as Hochschulen.

The thinking of French philosopher and musicologist Vladimir Jankélévitch has been known to German-speaking readers since 2016 thanks to a formidable translation of his 1961 tract La Musique et l’Ineffable (Music and the Ineffable).

It was early in life that this passionate musician felt drawn to her parents’ piano—and today, she’s a frequently requested soloist, an enthusiastic continuo player, and a professor of harpsichord at the Institute of Early Music and Historical Performance Practice at the Anton Bruckner Private University of Upper Austria.

A Pandemic-Adapted Digital Symposium.

The academic year of 2020/21 marks the birth of the mdw’s Department of Early Music—and in the following conversation, department head Stefan Gottfried and deputy head Eugène Michelangeli speak about their approaches to historically informed performance and the initial projects of this new department.

Going to a new country to study is exciting, inspiring, and wonderful but also entails lots of questions, challenges, and uncertainties.

A central performance practice-related concern is the employment of period instruments or appropriately made replicas thereof, the investigation and mastery of which brings us closer to the music created by those who originally played on them.