Music education helps people access far more than just musical notation and instrumental or vocal techniques: it also opens up realms of cultural participation, strengthens social skills, and nourishes individuals’ expressive capacity. In this Special, we shed light on the societal significance of music and helping people access music, take a look into a school classroom, and show how up-to-date music teaching looks in today’s world.[:)

Magdalena Severin’s final lesson of the day has just ended, and her students are still leaving the classroom as she sits down to talk with mdw Magazine. Here at the Döblinger Gymnasium (BG19), an academic secondary school, she’s now spending Monday through Thursday teaching students of various ages. Originally hired to teach music here, she recently added German—her second teaching subject.

Education policy shifts, socio-demographic developments, and recent studies point quite clearly to a continually growing need for qualified school music and music school teachers in the years to come. The mdw is responding to this situation with its promotional concept “Your Job: Music!”—an October-to-May series of comprehensive informational and preparatory offerings intended to help orient musically interested school students as they choose what to study and aim for as a career.

Elemental Music Education (EMp) head Veronika Kinsky and rhythmist Monika Mayr, a senior lecturer at the Department of Music and Movement Education/Rhythmics and Music Physiology, discuss the relevance of music and movement at every age and the impulses that the mdw can offer in this respect.

Exilarte – Center for Banned Music, which joined our institution as an mdw Research Center in 2016, has now spent two decades devoting itself to the musical estates of individuals who were persecuted, forced into exile, or murdered by the National Socialists—thereby preserving a significant chapter of European music history that might have been lost forever without its efforts.