Exile can take on many forms. In rare cases it might be chosen and voluntary. However, most exiled individuals have been driven away, banished, politically persecuted, or stripped of their citizenship—with no choice but to leave the places they called home.
Since last autumn, higher education didactics expert Caroline Ebel has been responsible for working with the studies commissions on the development of teaching at our institution as well as for the advising, coaching, and professional development of faculty. In the following conversation with mdw Magazine, Ebel provides an initial impression of how her work has been progressing.
In January 2024, the mdw is co-launching the first European University Alliance in the area of music and performing arts. In July 2023, the EU Commission granted the mdw and seven European partner universities approval for IN.TUNE.
With the Department of Popular Music (ipop) celebrating 20 years of existence, we take brief look into its past and future with teachers, graduates, and students.
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. She has since been part of numerous prominent projects as a director, producer, and screenwriter.
Autumn 2020 saw ECMA – the European Chamber Music Academy initiate a broad-based process of development and professionalisation with the EU-funded project ECMA Pro – International Career Development and Socially Engaged Outreach.
It was in 2020 that mdw alumna Josipa Bainac-Hausknecht first worked at the Exilarte Center for Banned Music. The topic of music in exile, still as current as ever, occupies an important place in this Croatia native’s academic and artistic doings.
This past summer semester, students of the Joseph Haydn Department of Chamber Music and Contemporary Music and the Max Reinhardt Seminar devoted an entire evening to the life and works of this exceptional English woman composer with The Life and Times of Ethel Smyth.
Since 2017, mdw alum Bernhard Jaretz has been working as a music teacher at the Ella Lingens Gymnasium, a Viennese academic secondary school, where he founded a music specialisation. He also heads the Choir School at St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna, founded the Vienna Lakeside Music Academy in the newly developed Viennese neighbourhood Seestadt Aspern in 2014, serves as choir director of the contemporary opera ensemble Neue Oper Wien, and authors school textbooks and instructional videos.
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.
The plot of Olivia Scheucher’s diploma production at the Max Reinhardt Seminar plays out amidst the world of the Austrian Armed Forces—which isn’t an alien environment for this graduate of the drama directing programme.
Stage director and Max Reinhardt seminar professor Anna Maria Krassnigg has loads of experience directing Shakespeare’s plays. But even for this experienced director, putting on Macbeth at the Hanoi Academy of Theatre and Cinema is an adventure.
The film industry is a rough place. Brutal competition along with the pressure to perform and deliver, tight schedules, and financial insecurity can combine to produce considerable mental strain. Against this backdrop, film director Leni Lauritsch has launched a new course with the intent of better preparing the young film professionals of Film Academy Vienna to deal with it all.
The #MeToo movement and especially last year’s debates in Austria regarding abuses of power on film sets have shifted a new, previously little-known job description into focus: that of “intimacy coordinator” (IC), for which EU-recognised training now exists.
The twelfth edition of the Seoul International Extreme-Short Image & Film Festival (SESIFF) has sent out its invitations, and among their recipients is a six-person film delegation from Vienna. The reason is 130 years of diplomatic relations between the two countries and the festival’s “Austria Focus” in 2022. Several short films from Film Academy Vienna (including Bato Nebo, Echthaar, and Fische) are to be screened as their own block, a master class with director Magdalena Chmielewska (Lullaby) is scheduled, and The Best Orchestra in the World will be shown as part of the opening event.
Since 2015, EFP – European Film Promotion has been introducing ten outstanding young directors along with their current films in the Future Frames section of each year’s Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. Several Film Academy Vienna students having been represented there over the past few years, and this year once again saw a film make it into the official selection: Magdalena Chmielewska presented her Max Ophüls Prize-winning film Lullaby at the festival, and she spoke with mdw Magazin about the significance of such a film festival invitation and why she’s always thinking about her next project.
2023 marks the first time that this award, the result of a cooperative effort between the Department of Music Education Research, Music Didactics and Elementary Music Education (IMP) and the Office of Research Support, has been offered. A total of 63 theses were submitted by final-year school students who engaged in research on a diversity of themes having to do with music and the performing arts at large.
Judith Kopecky’s investigation of Viennese musical life in 1928 for her dissertation project is an accomplishment of meticulous rigor. Her research focused on that era’s genre of the “concert song” (Konzertlied), under which she subsumed not only works for voice and piano but also Lied-type works accompanied by an instrumental ensemble or orchestra.
In the multi-author volume YouTube and Music. Online Culture and Everyday Life, edited by Holly Rogers, Joana Freitas, and João Francisco Porfírio, various contributors shed light on how record companies, musicians, and users take advantage of YouTube’s potential.
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