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.

“Who no know go know”: this title of a song by the legendary Nigerian musician Fela Kuti serves as the motto of a project first realised in South Africa by the mdw faculty members Rupert Fankhauser and Philipp Sageder.

At the mdw, a special priority has always been to offer students the best possible support and accompaniment on their personal pre-career paths. With this in mind, the Leonard Bernstein Department (LBI) and the Fritz Kreisler Department developed competitions.

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.

Stephan Pauly, Director of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Wien, on the common roots shared by his institution and the mdw, the Webern Symphonie Orchester, and jointly developed new concert formats.

As part of the course on Music Mediation/Community Music, itself part of the subject area “Music in Dialogue” at the mdw’s Department of Music Education Research, Music Didactics and Elementary Music Education, this past winter semester saw the project Tschick – ein Held? conducted with inmates at JVA Gerasdorf, a juvenile detention centre in Lower Austria.