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.

The international gathering Critiques of Power in the Arts (25–27 April 2024), initiated by the Department of Cultural Management and Gender Studies and co-curated in collaboration with a network of critical friends from the realms of research and practice, stood out for unusual academic formats such as performances, workshops, and jam sessions that were held in various mdw spaces.

On the evening of 24 May, the main campus of the mdw was given over to the 2024 Long Night of Research, offering an interested audience of all ages insights into the research taking place at our institution.

What do musique mixte, gender roles in Austrian film, and music mediation have in common? The answer is that all three are topics of mdw dissertations recognised with the 2024 Herta & Kurt Blaukopf Award.

What’s the present-day significance of music-related commemorative work? And just how might one familiarise people with “ostracised music” in the absence of contemporary witnesses? On these topics, Priska Seidl spoke with Volker Ahmels and Gerold Gruber at the Festival Verfemte Musik [Festival of Ostracised Music] in Schwerin.

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.

An International Musicological Conference on György Ligeti’s Centenary.

Three podcasts created as part of the project Klingende Zeitgeschichte [Audible Contemporary History] take on the topic of institutional discontinuities at the mdw and its institutional predecessors. To create them, individuals all across the University worked to acoustically stage “peripheral stories” from the 20th century, efforts that have since made it possible to hear the archival documents themselves on multiple musical and linguistic levels.

A violin suspended in mid-air next to an indoor swimming pool, another producing delicate sounds as if by itself: it was with such unusual impressions that HannaH Walter’s lecture-performance “becoming vyborg. becoming with technology” ushered in the second day of isaScience 2022, aptly fusing essential aspects of this interdisciplinary, hybrid humanities conference with the theme of “Un/Learning: Norms and Routines in Cultural Practices” in Reichenau an der Rax.