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.

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.

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.

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.

How do art and research mediation relate to pro-democratic awareness-raising? What contribution can research and democracy ambassadors active in schools make to the cultivation of critical thinking as a skill central to democratic action? And how might this be done in actual practice? These questions were the focus of an exchange event at the mdw’s Banquet Hall on 11 December 2025.

The mdw’s first-ever Pop-Up Advent Calendar this past December saw musical performances play out at various spots all over Vienna—getting the public in the Christmas spirit in a special way and making for unforgettable concert moments.

It was a historic moment for the mdw great talent award powered by Christian Zeller: for the first time since the inception of this competition, all three finalists were awarded 1st prizes—a powerful testament to these young talents’ outstanding quality and the competition’s continual development.

A Monday in December at the Vienna Gasometers. I’m moving between shops, escalators, and long glassed-in corridors. The four gasometer towers here can be viewed as something like a city-within-the-city, being home to around 1,500 people. Their approximately 220,000 m2 of floor space play host to residential flats, offices, retailers, and cultural offerings. It’s a place of everyday life—and it was precisely here that the fourth edition of the community music series “Grätzl Töne”, which I experienced as an enrolee in the music mediation course “Vermittlung von Musik”, played out

Germany’s Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and his wife Elke Büdenbender were guests of Austrian Federal President Alexander Van der Bellen from 21 to 23 October of last year. It had been 28 years since a German federal president had last made a state visit to Austria.