The second edition of isaCommunity, held on the mdw Campus and in the Music in Dialogue Hall (MiD-Saal) at Vienna’s Gasometer complex in July 2026, saw young musicians once again converge on Vienna. Sixteen participants from Europe, North and South America, and the Middle East spent an entire week here working at the interface between artistic practice and social engagement.

A Monday in December at the Vienna Gasometers. I’m moving between shops, escalators, and long glassed-in corridors. The four gasometer towers here can be viewed as something like a city-within-the-city, being home to around 1,500 people. Their approximately 220,000 m2 of floor space play host to residential flats, offices, retailers, and cultural offerings. It’s a place of everyday life—and it was precisely here that the fourth edition of the community music series “Grätzl Töne”, which I experienced as an enrolee in the music mediation course “Vermittlung von Musik”, played out

As part of the course on Music Mediation/Community Music, itself part of the subject area “Music in Dialogue” at the mdw’s Department of Music Education Research, Music Didactics and Elementary Music Education, this past winter semester saw the project Tschick – ein Held? conducted with inmates at JVA Gerasdorf, a juvenile detention centre in Lower Austria.