We’re currently living through an era of profound social change, change that often goes hand in hand with crises. Though observations like this one are no longer exactly breaking news, what is indeed interesting—and also more challenging—is the question of how a successful approach to dealing with these changes might look. This idea was the starting point for the symposium “Embracing Ambiguity. Zur Rolle der Instrumental- und Gesangspädagogik in Musikpädagogik, Bildungspolitik und Gesellschaft” […On the Role of Instrumental and Vocal Pedagogy in Music Education, Education Policy, and Society], which was held at the mdw on 29 and 30 May 2026.

An International Musicological Conference on György Ligeti’s Centenary.

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.

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.

A Pandemic-Adapted Digital Symposium.

A Look Back at the 12th Annual Conference of the Association of Cultural Management at the mdw

Report on the Annual Conference of the Austrian Society for Musicology at the mdw, 22 – 25 November 2017.