The Vienna-born violinist and composer Fritz Kreisler (1875–1962) was one of the 20th century’s most influential recording artists, and this year marks the 150th anniversary of his birth.

Earlier this year, after more than a decade of practical work in the field of gender equality and youth participation in cultural life in Serbia, I defended my doctoral dissertation at the University of Arts in Belgrade’s Faculty of Dramatic Arts.

Franz Kafka’s close confidant Max Brod is said to have coined the oft-quoted saying according to which Prague was one hundred percent Czech, one hundred percent Jewish, and one hundred percent German. This paradoxical ascription points to the complex cultural makeup of Bohemia’s capital city, where ethnic, linguistic, and religious affiliations existed not distinctly side-by-side but as a dense web of relationships. The Prague of that era stood alongside Vienna as an important cultural centre of the Habsburg Monarchy in which imperial, national, and transnational influences overlapped.

When one thinks of the popular music of Yugoslavia, it’s frequently that country’s well-researched rock and punk music that come to mind—genres that are ascribed a political and subversive character. Disco, in contrast, has been viewed as apolitical and commercial and hence received commensurately less attention. It is with the comparatively little-researched area of Yugoslav disco that this special issue of the open-access journal TheMA therefore deals.

When a musician takes a bow to a string instrument, they rely on technique and intuition to produce a desired tone. But what exactly defines the limits of playability and the quality of the sound? What factors influence string vibration, and which of these depend on the player’s technique versus the string itself?

In late 1924, just over a century ago, the then-Academy of Music and Performing Arts was joined by a Fachhochschule of Music and Performing Arts—a further predecessor of today’s mdw that was intended to operate in parallel with the Academy. Just a few years later, however, the Fachhochschule was dissolved—plunging its sister institution into a deep crisis.

The promise of transformative, touching experiences is what drives the art business. Sociologist Hartmut Rosa, framing it in a broader perspective, identifies this quest as a historical paradigm that propels the acceleration of late modern society in the interest of increasing the individual’s “shares of the world”. He refers to it as the promise of resonance. Resonance, as a modality of correlation with the world, is something to which we are naturally drawn.

“Trans-Bodied Knowledge” is an artistic research project led by Efilena Baseta and supported by the Austrian Science Fund’s PEEK programme for arts-based research in which a technologically oriented university—TU Wien—is collaborating with an artistically oriented university—the mdw—in an attempt to generate unique insights by blurring the boundaries between science and art.