In May 2026, the interdisciplinary festival “TODAS. Latin American Women* Musicians in Vienna. Concerts, Lecture, Dialogues” took place at the mdw. This event was an outcome of the research project “Reverse Ethnomusicology: Migrant Musicians as Researchers”. Co-curator Gabriela Dossow Ponce describes how the festival evolved and why it was so important.

It was with these tongue-in-cheek lines that Hans Gál (1890–1987) gently but firmly reminded the members of his madrigal choir of their first rehearsal in 1938. This musical good-luck pig was served up as a three-part canon formatted as a postcard and garnished with tastefully placed madrigalisms. And indeed, madrigals were a huge love of this versatile musician—a fact that even earned him the nickname “Madri-Gál”.

When exactly does a pandemic begin, and when does it end? Is there a clear “before”, “during”, and “after”, or does our understanding of such things have more to do with our perception of temporality? And by what exactly are the knowledge and memories we have of past pandemics shaped? Simply by images, monuments, and statistics? Or perhaps also by sounds and music?

Arno Böhler and Susanne Valerie Granzer’s collection entitled The Flavor of Thinking is a 21st-century engagement with one of Western philosophy’s oldest problems: the (perceived) tension between “thinking” and “feeling”.

“These days, when I look back, I sometimes ask myself where I got the self-confidence to go out into the big wide world,” says Anke Schad-Spindler with a laugh. Now general manager and scholarly head of EDUCULT as well as a freelance businesswoman, this mdw alumna studied in Germany, Italy, England, and Austria—and her dissertation on cultural governance was awarded a state prize by what was then Austria’s Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research.

At the mdw, EMp can look back upon over 40 years of history as an artistic and pedagogical discipline. Particularly in recent years, the relevant practice and research have expanded thanks to dialogue with various groups. The associated range of activities extends from courses for seniors and band offerings for adolescents to child-parent courses, instrumental courses focused on violin, guitar, piano, and wind instruments, and the inclusive band project “Young All Stars” as well as cooperative efforts between EMp teachers and schools and music-making courses for professionals—to mention just a few of the practical teaching formats offered by the mdw’s “Viennese EMp” team.

The International Day of Provenance Research has been taking place annually on the second Wednesday in April since 2019. It’s an occasion for various activities ranging from lectures to guided tours of museums, collections, and libraries and on to the publication of scholarly essays in the blog Retour. 8 April of this year saw the mdw participate in this day’s observance for the first time, doing so with a dedicated event and the opening of the permanent exhibition Stolen Melodies – Provenance Research at the ub.mdw in the open stacks of the mdw’ University Library (ub.mdw).

That a seminar for acting and directing should be named for a founder who was seldom present at his own institution is a truly remarkable circumstance. Just why this is not a contradiction and just how Max Reinhardt managed to make precisely this acting school into one of the German-speaking region’s most illustrious can now be learned—along with numerous other intriguing details—from a new book by Peter Roessler.