50 years ago, on 21 January 1970, Austria’s parliament passed the Universities of the Arts Organisation Act (KHOG), which accorded university-level status to the Academies of Music and Performing Arts in Graz, Salzburg, and Vienna as well as to the Academy of Applied Arts Vienna as Hochschulen.

Writing about writing is a paradoxical act—seeing as it involves articulating oneself using the very tool that one is attempting to describe.

In the run-up to the 30th International Summer Academy of the mdw, the present year will also see the Semmering region host the eighth edition of isaScience. This conference invites researchers, arts professionals, and activists of all academic levels and from various academic disciplines relevant to music and the performing arts in general to join in the discourse on “Heroes?!”, this year’s thematic emphasis at isa.

Austrian musicologist Gerold W. Gruber is the founder and head of the mdw’s exil.arte Centre. exil.arte functions as a point of contact and interface for research on as well as the reception, preservation, and presentation of works by Austrian composers, musicians, and music researchers who were deemed “degenerate” by the Third Reich.

On 29 November 2019, the Music and Minorities Research Center (MMRC) was formally and festively opened following a several-month conceptual phase.

Or: How do we THINK ABOUT BEETHOVEN when figuring out how to MEMORIALISE BEETHOVEN during this jubilee year?

If conscious and unconscious orientations are fundamental to human experience, then sounds can “simultaneously drive and be the object of orientive and disorientive processes”.

On 16 December 2019, mdw Rector Ulrike Sych honoured the winners of the first-ever Herta and Kurt Blaukopf Award for Outstanding Dissertations at the mdw.