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.

On 8 June 2022, the Herta and Kurt Blaukopf Award for outstanding mdw dissertations was conferred for the second time. This award, worth € 2,000 per awardee, went to four excellent early-stage researchers. The dissertations thus recognised demonstrate the broad spectrum of research currently being pursued at the mdw and once again bear witness to the quality of the findings being produced by our University’s doctoral candidates.

This publication, prepared by editors Sarah Chaker (IMS) and Axel Petri-Preis (IMP) on the basis of an mdw lecture series, offers a conglomerate of theory and practice pertaining to the innovative potential of those community and audience engagement-related artistic and educational practices that are known collectively as Musikvermittlung.