The International Summer Academy of the mdw
Global networking, international cooperation, and appreciation of cultural, ethnic, and regional diversity are coming under increasing pressure. Wars, new imperialist aspirations to power, a resurgence of nationalist ideologies, and withdrawals from international agreements are threatening to diminish the importance accorded to diversity, sustainability, and collective action. It’s hence all the more vital that we enable creative potential to be experienced and rendered usable—potential that, after all, lives between the poles of globally dominant mainstreams and standards and regional self-determination.
For musicians, music mediators, and researchers, isa opens up a space where artistic stances can be contemplated, advanced in nuanced ways, and enabled to have a direct impact on society.
From 22 July to 2 August 2026, the 26th edition of isa – the International Summer Academy of the mdw will be devoting itself to this theme with “global – local” as its overarching idea. These eleven days will see the mdw Campus and Vienna itself become the site of concentrated artistic work and well-considered engagement with music in a world that is both globally networked and locally defined.
isa’s master classes and workshops are set to bring together diverse backgrounds, origins, and artistic practices. Workshops will expand upon the master classes’ artistic endeavours with practically focussed formats covering contemporary playing techniques, chamber music, bodywork, and stage presence. Contrasting aesthetic approaches will converge, with international educational journeys meeting individual biographies. Central to all of this will be the creative power of places, migration, and globalisation as a formative factor behind musical developments as well as the relationship between global and local music traditions. Music will be conceived of here not as an aesthetic product but as a cultural practice that creates identity and reflects societal processes.
A special accent at isa26 will be an emphasis on banned music courtesy of the mdw’s Exilarte Center. The associated artistic work will focus on pieces by composers whom displacement and exile expunged from cultural memory. The renewed presence of such material will go beyond the mere reconstruction of music history to also embody a contribution to critical engagement with the past and the present. Engaging with banned music serves to highlight historical ruptures while also making clear just how tightly musical developments are intertwined with political and social upheavals.
Alongside this focus, the existing concept of isa as a “music city lab” will be taken further. On the mdw Campus and in collaboration with the city’s institutions and communities, a wide range of musical and discursive encounters are to take place. Concerts, lecture-performances, and discussion formats will open up the International Summer Academy to the urban realm and extend an invitation to experience and think collectively about artistic processes in public. In this way, Vienna will itself become a resonance chamber in which global perspectives and local experiences enter into productive interplay.
The International Summer Academy of the mdw defines itself as a place of the highest artistic excellence and as a lab for exchange and reflection. Its international tutors work intensively with selected participants, foster individual artistic profiles, and create an overall context in which sustainable networking can take place.
isa26 extends an invitation to partake in impactful artistic experiences, to join the conversation on music in a globally networked but localised world, and to both make and listen to music together. From 22 July to 2 August 2026, Vienna will become the meeting place of an international community that conceives of music as a lively, societally relevant process—with openness, a critical eye, and its sights set firmly on the future.
