Since October of last year, a new leading team has been at the helm of the Leonard Bernstein Department of Wind and Percussion Instruments. Michael Pircher, Michaela Reingruber, and Martin Mühlfellner speak about ongoing projects, the style of teamwork they’ve developed, and the goals they’ve set themselves for the coming four years.

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.

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.

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.

The mdw’s music education offerings encompass numerous different degree programmes. In the following, teaching faculty members and students from the mdw’s Music Education (ME) and Music Education for Voice and Instruments (IGP) programmes discuss how music educators for regular schools and music schools are trained as well as the importance of artistic training in this context.

As a trained instrumental teacher, mdw alumna and music school director Johanna Ensbacher is an expert on the cultivation of young talents. In her conversation with mdw Magazine, she revealed the important role played in this by youth orchestras and the challenges faced by Austria’s music schools.

The versatile hip hop artist and mdw alumna Ursi Wögerer, a.k.a. Miss BunPun, seeks to use her music to raise awareness of themes like queerness, empowerment, and body positivity/neutrality. As is the case with her current single “Take Me as I Am”, where she once again unites serious themes with positive vibes.

Brutpflegerinnen members Eva Puchner and Susanne Preissl, mdw graduates Golnar Shahyar and Simon Scharinger, and Department of Folk Music Research and Ethnomusicology head Marko Kölbl discuss whether art has to be political and the contexts in which it can support protest movements.

Every three years, the Collection of Historical String Instruments of the Oesterreichische Nationalbank (OeNB), the Republic of Austria’s central bank, lends out four high-quality historical string instruments to students enrolled at Austrian universities of music—and since November 2022, two of these instruments have been played on by mdw students Teresa Wakolbinger and David Kessler.

Last November witnessed the release of Interploitation, this busy artist’s third solo album. Situated entirely within the cosmos of electronic sound, it bears witness to a radical step by an exceptional cellist.