Immanuel de Gilde and Lorenz Blaumer   Music Mediation at Stegreif Without a conductor, without sheet music or chairs: Stegreif demonstrates new ways of what a modern orchestra can look like. In radical recompositions, the group combines symphonic music with improvisation and influences from other genres, and integrates the audience in a unique auditory and spatial exploration. Using these innovative …

On Participatory Devising Processes in Opera and the Courage to Fill Gaps Krysztina Winkel   Intro: Get Up and Go Receiving, discussing, and co-creating music theatre and dance, combined with the curiosity to initiate individual, societal, and organisational transformation processes (even if only on a microcosmic level), forms the core of the outreach work at the Vienna State Opera. Since …

A Conversation with Djanay Tulenova, Avri Levitan, and Johannes Meissl Axel Petri-Preis   In her book Journeys of Lifelong Learning in Music, Rineke Smilde describes how musicians who play in various, sometimes new and unfamiliar, social contexts reflect on their artistic identity and how experiences from these musical practices also influence performances in conventional concert settings (Smilde 2021, 200). According …

Systems Learning through Counter-Stories of Finnish Socially Engaged Musicians Heidi Westerlund and Sari Karttunen   Introduction Despite increasingly critical voices (e.g. Westerlund 2006; Hallam and Gaunt 2012; Holmgren 2020; Manternach 2024), the master-apprentice model continues to be the main pedagogical model in higher music education. While securing the sustainability of such tradition, it also provides a model par excellence of …

A Conversation with Lydia Grün, Ulrike Sych, and Sean Gregory Sarah Chaker and Axel Petri-Preis   The music labour market has undergone extensive changes in recent decades – this is especially true for the classical music sector (Bork 2010; Engelmann, Grünewald, and Heinrich 2012; Scharff 2018; Bull 2019; Whitney, Rowley, and Bennett 2021; Prokop and Reitsamer 2023). A growing number …

Students’ Perspectives on the Master’s Programme Contemporary Arts Practice (CAP) Axel Petri-Preis   Introduction Conservatories emerged in the late 18th and early 19th centuries (Bennett 2016, 59) as places where young individuals are educated for a career in classical music under the auspices of the highest artistic excellence. Traditionally, the main focus has been on developing mastery on the instrument …

1 Shanti Suki Osman   Introduction The symposium Diskriminierungskritische Perspektiven in die Curricula an der Schnittstelle von Bildung und Kunst! [Discrimination Critical Perspectives on the Curricula at the Interface of Education and Art!] was hosted and initiated by Carmen Mörsch at the Schauspielhaus Dortmund in June 2023 and attended by music and art educators and mediators, as well as students, …

Sabine Reiter   Constanze Wimmer initiated Austria’s first university music mediation programme, Musikvermittlung – Musik im Kontext [Music Mediation – Music in Context], at the Anton Bruckner Private University in 2009: At the time, university programmes and the Netzwerk Junge Ohren [Network Young Ears] had already existed in Germany for ten years. Around the same time, a sort of cultural …

How to Get the Evaluation of Music Mediation Activities out of its Procrustean Bed? Irina Kirchberg   In Quebec and France, the implementation of music mediation activities depends on subsidies offered by arts councils, ministries of culture or social innovation, or donations from patrons. Evaluative practices have been appearing in the cultural sector since the 80s and 90s, with the …