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.

Eine Vielzahl von Künstler_innen, Musiker_innen und Komponist_innen haben den Plattenspieler in den letzten Jahrzehnten intensiv genutzt, bearbeitet und erweitert. Durch virtuos angewandte Techniken, wie u. a. Scratching und Beat-Matching, wurde der Plattenspieler zum Instrument und der bzw. die DJ zum/zur Musiker_in.

It all began a few years ago with a clarinet concerto by the American composer Aaron Copland (1900–1990). My eye was caught by the words at the very top of the page: “For Benny Goodman”. Was Copland friends with the swing icon? Did they work together? Or did the composer simply admire Goodman (1909–1986) as a musician?

Since 2023, the mdw has been honouring outstanding papers of these types that pertain to music and the performing arts at large with the “mdw young research award (myra)”. Alongside providing some public recognition for these frequently ambitious papers, the point is to strengthen the connections between our university and schools as well as to lend visibility to disciplines and questions concerning music and other performing arts that interest young people and are also focuses of work at the mdw.

The fact that Helmut Lachenmann now occupies an outstanding position in the contemporary music scene is owed not just to his compositions but also to the efficacy of his writings, which have stimulated the production of a considerable number of texts referring thereto.

How do art and sound enter into dialogue with each other in the public realm? As part of KlangBildKlang, the three-day spring school “Sonic Dialogues: Intersections of Art and Sound in Public Spaces” offered a forum for early-stage researchers to explore precisely this question.

The new artistic research project “Spirits in Complexity” is a cooperative effort together with the Johannes Kepler University (JKU) in Linz, the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, the University of the Arts in Reykjavik, and several artistic and scientific experts.