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.

The MMRC lecture is an annual event of the Music and Minorities Research Center (MMRC). Due to the hybrid format in which this year’s event was held, the audience was able to participate both in the mdw’s Joseph Haydn-Saal and online via Zoom.

For those who’ve thus far heard music by Orlando di Lasso performed mainly as a cappella “vocal music”, Bernhard Rainer’s book presents an opportunity to discover some new aspects—such as how Lasso effectively staged music via its arrangement, instrumentation, and richly varied performance.

It’s widely acknowledged that the Global North’s existing set of rules in terms of performance clothing and onstage behaviour can be traced back to the bourgeois culture that was in the process of becoming established during the 19th century. This was a period that also gave rise to public concert life, concert halls, and concert culture.

The FWF-funded research project “Achieving Togetherness in Music Ensemble Performance”, based at the Department of Music Acoustics – Wiener Klangstil, aims to shed light on the experiences of togetherness that arise during music performance.

Following a long wait due to the coronavirus pandemic, the 8th isaScience Conference went forward in its first hybrid edition—both on location in Reichenau an der Rax and online—from 11 to 15 August.