A symposium and a lecture series that took place in 2018 at the mdw have now given rise to the open-access multi-author volume Knowing in Performing, which includes contributions in English and German.

After a flat, circular artifact reminiscent of a compact disc had been found in Vienna’s Auer-Welsbach Park back in June of 2019, it took quite some analytical work to determine that it was indeed a digital data medium containing a lengthy message of unclear origin.

The theme of this multiauthor volume, which presents lectures from the 29th Annual Conference of the German Society for Popular Music Studies, hits a socio-political nerve for more reasons than just the increasingly nation-centred coronavirus mitigation strategies.

In music acoustics, the process by which player actions affect the acoustics of an instrument is known as “player-instrument interaction”, which is a research topic that has been investigated in connection with a broad variety of instruments. In single-reed woodwind instruments such as the clarinet and saxophone, sound is produced by the vibration of a single reed attached to a mouthpiece.

So here we are: in its ninth year of existence, isaScience is going “hybrid”! With the mdw’s international and interdisciplinary summer conference having been postponed in early 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the isaScience team is now preparing for its first-ever hybrid edition, in which it will pick up right where it left off.

On 11 November 2020, the Music and Minorities Research Center (MMRC) launched its first annual lecture, delivered in online form. Despite the special circumstances, this event managed to engage an interdisciplinary audience from all around the world and fulfil its main goal, which was to bring scholars from different disciplines together in constructive and lively discussions.

On September 8, 2020, Europe’s largest refugee camp—Moria, situated on the Greek island of Lesbos and known as a “living hell”—was set afire. The continuous three-day blaze ultimately left the camp completely destroyed and 13,000 people in utter destitution.