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.

From 23 to 25 June, the mdw hosted the conference Facing_Drag with renowned international guests from various fields of cultural studies and from the performing arts, continuing where last year’s online conference left off.

In everyday life, notions of supposed “parallel worlds” and “parallel societies”, of imagined social niches and bubbles that are (supposedly) moving apart and frequently considered irreconcilable, are widespread. In the realm of popular music practice (in general) and in popular music studies (in particular), such constructions can also be observed on the most varied levels

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.

To mark the hundredth birthday of the Greek-French composer Iannis Xenakis, the mdw’s Department of Musicology and Performance Studies (IMI) and Special University Programme in Electroacoustic and Experimental Music (ELAK) have teamed up with the festival Wiener Festwochen to organise a symposium on Xenakis’s electroacoustic oeuvre that is scheduled to take place from 19 to 21 May 2022.