Education policy shifts, socio-demographic developments, and recent studies point quite clearly to a continually growing need for qualified school music and music school teachers in the years to come. The mdw is responding to this situation with its promotional concept “Your Job: Music!”—an October-to-May series of comprehensive informational and preparatory offerings intended to help orient musically interested school students as they choose what to study and aim for as a career.

Elemental Music Education (EMp) head Veronika Kinsky and rhythmist Monika Mayr, a senior lecturer at the Department of Music and Movement Education/Rhythmics and Music Physiology, discuss the relevance of music and movement at every age and the impulses that the mdw can offer in this respect.

Exilarte – Center for Banned Music, which joined our institution as an mdw Research Center in 2016, has now spent two decades devoting itself to the musical estates of individuals who were persecuted, forced into exile, or murdered by the National Socialists—thereby preserving a significant chapter of European music history that might have been lost forever without its efforts.

In the arts, it is possible for multiple superlatives to exist side by side—for which reason this author hopes it won’t be taken amiss that he considers the concert series “Echo of the Unheard” to be the most important one in Viennese musical life. This series affords an experience of how an entire, fully valid era of music history exists of which Arnold Schönberg, Viktor Ullmann, Erwin Schulhoff, Egon Wellesz, Erich Zeisl, Ursula Mamlok, Vítězslava Kaprálová, Ruth Schönthal, and Marcel Rubin are just a few representatives among the approximately one hundred composers whose works it has included so far.

This year will see Exilarte, Center for Banned Music—founded as a private association and institutionalised as part of the mdw in 2016—celebrate 20 years of existence. In the following anniversary conversation, Exilarte head Gerold W. Gruber surveys what has been achieved and what still remains to be done.

In the following interview with mdw Magazine, Ursula Hemetek—former head of the Department of Folk Music Research and Ethnomusicology and founder of the Music and Minorities Research Centre (MMRC)—joins us together with the department’s current head Marko Kölbl to look back upon its eventful history, share insights on current developments, and discuss present-day political challenges.

The fact that cultural and above all musical diversity have (and indeed must have) an established place at our university is what this issue’s Special serves to highlight.