When people hear the term “music education”, their first association is frequently with a concrete practice: that of music teaching and musical learning in classrooms, at music schools, in workshops, or in work with people of various backgrounds and ages ranging all the way from kids and teens to seniors. Initially less present in their minds is the research accompanying this practice—research that analyses it, critically scrutinises it, and advances its development.

The Vienna-born violinist and composer Fritz Kreisler (1875–1962) was one of the 20th century’s most influential recording artists, and this year marks the 150th anniversary of his birth.

With its international symposium “Between Research and Activism: Futures of Music and Minority Studies”, scheduled to take place from 12 to 14 February 2026, the Music and Minorities Research Center (MMRC) will be ushering in a new phase of its existence. As part of this, the MMRC—founded in 2019 to pursue research on music and minorities—plans to celebrate its initial seven years.

The mdw’s Department of Folk Music Research and Ethnomusicology, which is Austria’s largest place of research and teaching in its field, has existed at the mdw for 60 years. It’s hence no wonder that the department’s history is commonly viewed as having begun in 1965. However, folk music as well as research on folk music had been present here long before.

The Music and Minorities Research Center of the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna is currently hosting the research project “Sounds of Trauma: Naga Song Responses to Political Conflict” led by Christian Poske and funded by an ESPRIT research grant of the Austrian Science Fund. It began in August 2024 and is slated to run through July 2027.

Earlier this year, after more than a decade of practical work in the field of gender equality and youth participation in cultural life in Serbia, I defended my doctoral dissertation at the University of Arts in Belgrade’s Faculty of Dramatic Arts.

When a musician takes a bow to a string instrument, they rely on technique and intuition to produce a desired tone. But what exactly defines the limits of playability and the quality of the sound? What factors influence string vibration, and which of these depend on the player’s technique versus the string itself?

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.

“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.