With the present year drawing to a close, our current Special celebrates 60 years of folk music research and ethnomusicology at the mdw. What began as an academic interest in European folk music has developed over the decades to now embody a wide-ranging, internationally networked research field. A developmental milestone in this regard was the establishment of the German-speaking region’s first master’s degree programme in ethnomusicology in 2019 along with the subsequent founding of the mdw’s Music and Minorities Research Center (MMRC) by Wittgenstein Award-winner Ursula Hemetek. In all this, the mdw took a determined stand in support of cultural diversity as lived practice in a university setting.
The 2026 edition of the Vienna Days of Contemporary Piano Music will be placing a focus on the French composer Tristan Murail. Women composers are becoming more visible in piano teaching thanks to the ongoing project “gehört gespielt” of the Ludwig van Beethoven Department of Piano in Music Education, which is aiming to establish a more diverse repertoire in instrumental instruction. Students of the Max Reinhardt Seminar enthralled audiences this past summer with a musical promenade theatre production based on Shakespeare’s sonnets. And the Department of Music Education Research and Practice has set out to show quite impressively just how important academic research concerning music education is: in upcoming issues, we’ll be providing closer looks at selected research projects in this area.
I wish you an interesting read!
