Special

Special: The Societal Relevance of Music Education

28. April 2026

Music education helps people access far more than just musical notation and instrumental or vocal techniques: it also opens up realms of cultural participation, strengthens social skills, and nourishes individuals’ expressive capacity. In this Special, we shed light on the societal significance of music and helping people access music, take a look into a school classroom, and show how up-to-date music teaching looks in today’s world.

Research

The International Day of Provenance Research at the mdw

The International Day of Provenance Research has been taking place annually on the second Wednesday in April since 2019. It’s an occasion for various activities ranging from lectures to guided tours of museums, collections, and libraries and on to the publication of scholarly essays in the blog Retour. 8 April of this year saw the mdw participate in this day’s observance for the first time, doing so with a dedicated event and the opening of the permanent exhibition Stolen Melodies – Provenance Research at the ub.mdw in the open stacks of the mdw’ University Library (ub.mdw).

Report

Strengthening Our Engagement with Society

Since early 2024, the mdw has been part of the European Universities Alliance IN.TUNE – Innovative Universities in Music and Arts in Europe. The halfway point of IN.TUNE’s initial phase has now been reached, which makes it worthwhile indeed to take a look back upon the great effort that’s gone into Work Package 6.

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The Archival Turn in Music Sociology: An International Conference

To mark the 60th anniversary of the Department of Music Sociology (IMS), the international conference “The Archival Turn in Music Sociology” took place from 5 to 7 February 2026 in the mdw’s Fanny Hensel Hall (and online). Organised by Rosa Reitsamer, Rainer Prokop, and Tianyu Jiang, this conference aimed to highlight the significance of archives, gendered music historiographies, and (the politics of) the reconstruction of music histories.

Report

International Research Center – Gender and Performativity: Second Opening Teresa Kranawetter, Karo Spöring

December of last year witnessed the second opening event of the International Research Center – Gender and Performativity (ICGP). With some distance, we can now look back upon a successful symposium. Focusing on the relationship between gendering and racialisation from a global perspective, topics such as fascistisation, populism, and institutional complicity were critically analysed.

Report

global – local: isa 26

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.

Music

“A Rehearsal Space for Democracy”

In this mdw Magazine interview, the intriguing genesis of the community music project weites Nahen [Proximate Distance] and the preparations for its performance on the mdw Campus on 3 June 2026 are discussed by Axel Petri-Preis (co-artistic director, Participation and Community), Peter Jakober (co-artistic director, Composition), Bettina Büttner-Krammer (Head of Music Education, Wiener Symphoniker), Lukas Kobermann (conductor of the wind ensemble Blasmusik Kagran), Mariia Pysmenna (secondary school teacher, MS Johann-Hoffmann-Platz), and Emir Handzo (secondary school teacher, MS Brüßlgasse).

Music

Alumnus in Focus: Georg Traxlmayr

“One of my earliest specific memories is from my musical training as a small child. We were standing around an open grand piano and were supposed to see how long we could actually hear a note,” remembers the passionate musician. Thanks to music-loving parents who wanted to give him the opportunity to acquire a musical education, the Lower Austria native began with piano lessons in the first form of primary school and then took guitar and saxophone lessons later on.

Music

St. Ursula’s Celebrates 350 Years

The mdw’s Church of St. Ursula can look back upon 350 years as an important location for (sacred) music in Vienna. Empress Dowager Eleonora Gonzaga, the widow of Emperor Ferdinand III, brought the Order of Saint Ursula to Vienna in 1660. A central concern of this order, one that they shared with the Jesuits, was to promote education. The small group of invited sisters, who arrived from Liège, first took up residence on Dorotheergasse before moving to Johannesgasse in 1663.

Music

Alumnae in Focus: Liuba & Nadia Kalmykova

It was through the Exilarte Center that the passionate chamber musicians of the Ineo Quartet first came into contact with banned music. And today, string quartets by composers such as Julius Bürger and Hans Gál have become fixtures of their repertoire.

Drama

Music in the Limelight

He brings music to theatre. Imre Lichtenberger Bozoki is a true allrounder of the Austrian theatre scene—and since last autumn, he’s been teaching Music and Dramatic Expression at the Max Reinhardt Seminar. He talked with us about how he went from trumpeter to stage director, why he thinks the Viennese scene is one-of-a-kind, and why his subject is probably the most relaxed one of all at the Max Reinhardt Seminar.

Drama

When Images Themselves Become the Stage

Just two-and-a-half months into teaching at the Max Reinhardt Seminar, and one’s already asked to take stock: it can only be mdw Magazine that’s asking! In response, Magdalena Gut—who began teaching courses on stage design and scenography in October 2025—both gladly and adeptly provided us with answers and insights on a field of foremost significance to theatre that’s all too often relegated more than just literally to the background in the performances to which actors and directors give rise.

Drama

Shakespeare in Contrasting Locations

The work Sonettfabrik [Sonnet Factory], specially conceived for the defunct lignite briquette factory LOUISE in Domsdorf, Brandenburg and produced as part of the Max Reinhardt Seminar’s cooperative relationship with the Lausitz Festival, served as that festival’s opening performance. And shortly thereafter, at the palace Schloss Leopoldskron in Salzburg, a version tailored specifically to this location entitled Reinhardt probt Shakespeare-Sonette [Reinhardt Rehearses Shakespeare Sonnets] was performed.

Drama

A Realm of Free Thought

The Iceland-born opera and stage director Thorleifur Örn Arnarsson recently teamed up with third-year acting students at the Max Reinhardt Seminar to tackle one of the greatest theatrical tragedies of all time: Shakespeare’s Macbeth. In this interview with mdw Magazine, he speaks about the joys of working with a new generation of actors, aspirations for his role as a visiting instructor at the Max Reinhardt Seminar, and just why Shakespeare’s analyses of power and people manage to outlast every era.

Film

The Film Academy Vienna at Berlinale 2026

Every February, Berlin becomes the centre of the cinematic world. The Berlinale, whose competition awards the famed Golden and Silver Bears, is one of the world’s biggest film festivals. It boasts a varied array of programme sections, among them the short film competition Berlinale Shorts—which, in 2026, included a first-ever film from Film Academy Vienna: Ein Unfall [An Accident] by Film Academy student Angelika Spangel.

Film

Award-Winning Examples of International Cinematic Cooperation

Lena Zechner and Melvyn Zeyns study production at Film Academy Vienna. November 2025 saw both of them win German Short Film Awards, Germany’s most important and lucrative form of recognition for short films. These awards are conferred annually in six categories at a ceremony in Hamburg.

Film

In a Military Jacket to Millions in Funding

“Every beginning is precarious” is a statement that holds true for a great many projects in creative and artistic fields. But with their film project SOLDAT, Film Academy students Vivian Bausch and Fabian Rausch experienced the exact opposite. Just how they ended up landing a generous filmmaking subsidy, how it feels to write a screenplay as a duo, and how the two assess the current situation for film professionals in Austria are all things they discussed with mdw Magazine.

Film

The Gender/Queer/Diversity Call of Film Academy Vienna

Featuring portrayals of femininity and masculinity that diverge from existing norms and conventional notions, queer life realities, and questions of social class as well as the thematisation of physical and physical disabilities, the film projects submitted to and supported through the Gender/Queer/Diversity Call make clear the sheer breadth of this thematic field.

Research

Review: Das Max Reinhardt Seminar. Im Weltgarten des Spiels. 1928–1965

That a seminar for acting and directing should be named for a founder who was seldom present at his own institution is a truly remarkable circumstance. Just why this is not a contradiction and just how Max Reinhardt managed to make precisely this acting school into one of the German-speaking region’s most illustrious can now be learned—along with numerous other intriguing details—from a new book by Peter Roessler.

Research

mdwHistory: “Moviegoing ended. Her employment at the Academy of Music was terminated.”

Born in Lemberg (today’s Lviv, Ukraine) in 1896 to an assimilated Jewish family, Kremer grew up in Sarajevo until her father—an officer and civil servant employed by the Ministry of War—was transferred to Vienna in 1905. While religion played zero role in her family, education was highly valued: the children were permitted to pursue any avenue of training they desired. Kremer, like her sisters, received her first piano lessons from her mother. At age ten, she continued her pianistic training in a preparatory programme at what is now the mdw.

Research

One Shimmy at a Time

What if questions of social justice could take tangible shape in our own bodies such that we could discuss complex political issues without relying primarily on words? In an era in which disembodied content consumption continues to polarise much of the Western world, my PhD project explores a different mode of collective sense-making: a performative and educational musical theatre practice for adults not necessarily trained in either dance or music.

Music

Drama

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Research

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