From 4 to 7 February of this year, the 6th Mauricio Kagel Composition Competition took place in the Fanny Hensel-Saal and was also streamed live on the Internet. Its jury publicly discussed the 14 compositions nominated for the final round, which saw them performed by students of the Ludwig van Beethoven Department of Piano in Music Education.

isa, the International Summer Academy of the mdw, will take place this year on the mdw’s main campus at Anton-von-Webern-Platz, a new spatial setting that’s well positioned to offer students more opportunities—especially for creative exchange.

Jan Jiracek von Arnim, who was appointed as the mdw’s youngest-ever professor of piano in 2001 and assumed artistic directorship of the International Beethoven Piano Competition Vienna in 2011, talks about proper breathing, dancing lessons’ beneficial impact on music-making, and his ambivalent stance toward competitiveness in the arts.

In the recent practicum “Jazz in Austria” an introduction to important holdings at Viennese libraries was paired with a focus on artistic legacies and collections at the archives and libraries of the mdw.

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.

For all of them, it began with everything standing still: the present year’s crop of graduating stage directors at the Max Reinhardt Seminar—Manuel Horak, Lukas Schöppl, and Florian Thiel—commenced their studies at the height of the pandemic. That period’s outward stasis had given rise to an inner urge to move forward—and all three, with their starkly differing life histories up to then, took and passed the entrance examination for the Max Reinhardt Seminar’s stage directing programme.

“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.

I am Verena Grundner. I study recorder in the Historical Performance Practice master’s degree programme.