Special birthdays make it possible to regard artists’ works in a new light, reinterpret them, and perhaps also spot things that had previously gone undiscovered, with new approaches to familiar things facilitating the understanding of new aspects. In this spirit, the current special invites you to find out just how multifaceted the outstanding composers Anton Bruckner and Arnold Schönberg were.
The mdw was recently honoured with an Erasmus+ Award, conferred by the Austrian Agency for Education and Internationalisation (OeAD) as part of a festive ceremony on 12 December 2023.
It’s 6:30 p.m. on a Tuesday. Students from various programmes are welcomed to the mdw’s Clara Schumann-Saal by Miriam Steinkühler-Fuchsberger, a member of the ipop – Department of Popular Music faculty. Her mission today, like on many Tuesdays past: to unleash students’ passion for singing together despite any tiredness after their day’s work at the University. mdw Magazine sat in on one of their rehearsals.
This summer semester, the first students are commencing their studies under the new Master of Arts in Music Therapy curriculum. This master’s degree programme joins the Bachelor of Arts in Music Therapy (launched in 2020) to complete the step-by-step replacement of the old music therapy diploma programme with a new BA/MA structure.
Be it remote learning, hybrid instruction, live streaming, the recording of in connection with artistic diploma exams, or live sound at concerts: over the past ten years, the mdw’s Audio-Video Center (or AV Center for short) has become an essential part of our institution’s everyday life.
Art and science are two areas that have fascinated Haruki Noda ever since his childhood years, which included a huge dose of the natural sciences and an early musical start in the form of guitar lessons. It’s precisely this duality that one can so keenly sense in his present-day work as a composer, multimedia and performance artist, and musicologist.
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.
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.
For the current academic year of 2023/24, director Sarantos-Georgios Zervoulakos is teaching as a visiting professor of drama directing at the Max Reinhardt Seminar—which is not the first time he’s returned to the institution where he originally studied. Then as now, what he values most of all about the Seminar is Max Reinhardt’s concept of an ensemble that allows actors and directors to “grow up” in an atmosphere of close interaction and mutual inspiration.
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.
Barbara Albert, Jessica Hausner and Karina Ressler are the protagonists oft the first three volumes of the book series Aus der Werkstatt [From the Workshop], based on an ongoing oral history project of the Media and Film Studies chair at Film Academy Vienna. In wide-ranging workshop conversations, the filmmakers discuss their artistic work and provide insights into their cinematic thinking and the methods by which they proceed.
Police officer Nancy is torn between her responsibility and her compassion for the family, who’ve been living in Austria for a long time and are blindsided when the police show up. For this stirring short film, Film Academy Vienna alumnus Mark Gerstorfer and his Film Academy team won a Student Academy Award in gold in the Narrative category.
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.
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.
“Amenca ketane” is a maxim of the Roma movement in Austria and means “collectively, together”. The MMRC Lecture on 16 November 2023 at the mdw’s Joseph Haydn-Saal took these Romanes words as a motto under which to address the history of this people’s traumas and their use of music to overcome them: amenca ketane. Histories of Trauma, Music and Romani Empowerment.
Following up on Music – Media – History (transcript, Bielefeld 2021), Elias Berner and Matej Santi have now published the second book of the project “Telling Sounds”. While their first publication—based largely on contributions to an international conference held at the mdw in 2019—was released at the project’s outset, the present volume serves as something of a concluding summation.
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.
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