In the following interview with mdw Magazine, Ursula Hemetek—former head of the Department of Folk Music Research and Ethnomusicology and founder of the Music and Minorities Research Centre (MMRC)—joins us together with the department’s current head Marko Kölbl to look back upon its eventful history, share insights on current developments, and discuss present-day political challenges.

It was to this fragment, hitherto viewed as being of secondary importance in research on Adorno, that the initiators of the international D-A-CH project “Writing Music. Iconic, performative, operative and material aspects in musical notation(s)” devoted the 2019 conference “Music, Writing, Difference – An Interdisciplinary Conference on Adorno’s Theory of Musical Reproduction”, which was held at the Arnold Schönberg Center in Vienna.

The international and interdisciplinary summer conference isaScience 2022 will take place from 31 August to 4 September 2022 both at Hotel Marienhof in Reichenau an der Rax and online. In keeping with this year’s motto of isa – the International Summer Academy of the mdw, “ALWAYS ANEW”, this year features a number of changes.

This rich collection of essays, many of them incubated in the forum of the annual isaScience conference of the mdw, is essential (and open-access) reading.

In music acoustics, the process by which player actions affect the acoustics of an instrument is known as “player-instrument interaction”, which is a research topic that has been investigated in connection with a broad variety of instruments. In single-reed woodwind instruments such as the clarinet and saxophone, sound is produced by the vibration of a single reed attached to a mouthpiece.

Writing about writing is a paradoxical act—seeing as it involves articulating oneself using the very tool that one is attempting to describe.