How does the truly “artistic” manifest itself in a music lesson—and how can that be put into words? These questions were central to the interdepartmental workshop “Instrumental-/Vokaldidaktik künstlerisch befragt” [Instrumental and Vocal Didactics, Artistically Queried], organised by the Music Education for Voice and Instruments (IGP) team and held on 16 May 2025. Around 60 students—mainly from the IGP programme—turned out to participate. This group was joined by faculty members from the mdw’s music education departments as well as guests from outside the University.
Following an introductory session for the entire group, the participants formed smaller groups to discuss their own experiences with artistic moments in teaching contexts. Here, the newly published collected volume Instrumentaldidaktik künstlerisch gedacht [Instrumental Teaching, Artistically Conceived], edited by Hannah Lindmaier and Peter Röbke, served as a common point of reference and source of impulses. This publication brings together current strands of discussion in the realm of general instrumental didactics and expands them by various perspectives. One aspect shared by all of this volume’s contributions is a focus on moments where things get “serious”—where a certain critical density or degree of concentration is reached that facilitates intense musical and aesthetic experiences. But just what is it that characterises such moments? And how can they be didactically catalysed without forcing things?
These questions served as springboards for conversations where personal experiences and didactic considerations as well as artistic and research-based perspectives all came together. The participants focused on aspects such as entering into resonance with one’s opposite or with the music itself, consciously opening out personal boundaries in order to immerse oneself more deeply in the music, sudden experiences of musical flow thanks to the relinquishment of control, willingness to fully embrace risk-taking, and the back-and-forth between active playful engagement and reflexive learning. Such moments, moments where musicians experience themselves as both present and creatively efficacious, were described by many as being central to artistically understood instrumental teaching.
The individual discussion groups were moderated by Cecilia Björk and Ivanka Muncan, Michael Göllner, Hannah Lindmaier, Judith McGregor, Benedikt Plößnig, and Peter Röbke.
Thereafter, by way of continuing the discourse in dialogue with instrument- and voice-specific didactics, a panel discussion took place featuring teachers from various professions and fields of work related to instrumental and vocal teaching. In addition to the aforementioned publication’s two editors, the participants here included Elisabeth Aigner-Monarth (Beethoven Department), Anna Guggenberger (Schubert Department), Michael Göllner (IMP), and Isabel Schneider (Alma Rosé Department).
This discussion made it clear how artistic moments—whether in university teaching, at music schools, or in social music-making projects such as “Superar”—are by no means something extra but rather both the nucleus and the objective of musical education. And the workshop as a whole offered valuable impulses for a type of music pedagogy that understands the artistic and the instructional as being fundamentally interdependent.
It also became evident just how much potential resides in exchange between differing perspectives in terms of music-making didactics, with a shared interest in initiating artistic processes, aesthetic perceptions, and intense music-making experiences forming a solid common denominator in service of well-reflected and lively teaching practice. This event involved students, teachers of specialised and general didactics, and practitioners from the teaching professions in a multilayered exchange—after which the students, when asked for their feedback, accorded particular praise to the diversity of perspectives made possible by the combination of participants.
