As the mdw celebrates 200 years of existence, this jubilee edition of mdw Magazine is here to provide you with a glimpse of our university’s remarkable diversity—diversity that is now unfolding as a kaleidoscope of variously formatted events having to do with performance, education, and research throughout this bicentennial year of 2017.
Offerings range from the large-scale participatory public space project Klangketten to a fulminant mdw tour-de-force at the Aufspiel event on all stages of the Vienna Konzerthaus and on to research projects that place the university’s past, present, and future at centre-stage.
30 years of Erasmus, the EU’s vital mobility support programme, give us an opportunity to review the foreign exchange experiences of our students, instructors, and administrative employees. Film Academy Vienna, which can look back on a colourful 65-year history, is currently unearthing memories of its early days in an archival project. And we also dig into the issue of how acting onstage is different than acting in front of the camera, as well as how acting students are prepared for both at the mdw’s Max Reinhardt Seminar.
The multi-year mdw event series Pianistic Traditions will be drawing to a close in 2017 with a focus on Austria’s tradition of piano-playing—as part of which we can look forward to interesting concerts, lectures, and master classes. And the question of how mdw teaching staff evaluate students’ musical performance(s) is addressed in qualitative terms by the study Quality of Arts by Rosa Reitsamer and Rainer Prokop.
The university’s exil.arte Centre, founded in 2016 under the leadership of Gerold Gruber, devotes itself to documenting, researching, publishing, and facilitating performances of works by exiled Austrian musicians and composers. The Centre’s first exhibition, slated to open on 22 May on the bel étage of the mdw’s Lothringerstrasse 18 location, will examine the fates of several such figures.
And finally, yet another way of remembering the past to mark 200 Years of the mdw is the scholarly effort Changing mdw, the fruits of which will be made publicly accessible in the form of interventions at various locations around the university starting on 15 May.
I wish you an enriching read!
