In the Special of this May/June issue of mdw Magazine, we introduce you to a current interdepartmental project of our university: KlangBildKlang. This comprehensive music mediation effort opens up new spaces and seeks to enable art to be experienced and heard by anyone and everyone. Our articles here review the creation of this project, take a closer look at special performing venues, and highlight aspects like how music mediation can benefit even our society’s youngest members. What’s more, we provide an initial preview of KlangBildKlang’s big concluding concert at the Wiener Konzerthaus on 22 June in which Andrés Orozco-Estrada will lead the mdw’s Webern Symphonie Orchester in a presentation of Wassily Kandinsky’s synaesthetic retranslation of Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.
We also take a look back at the conferral of honorary mdw membership on the star conductor Marin Alsop, an act by which our University recognised Alsop’s internationally outstanding achievements as an artist as well as her work to promote women conductors and support children’s and adolescents’ musical education. We go on to introduce the new mdw master’s degree programme Music in Society, which will be launched in the winter semester of 2024/25. Furthermore, the Department of Vocal Studies and Music Theatre faculty members responsible for their department’s performances of the opera Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor share some insights into the elaborate rehearsal work as well as a glimpse behind the scenes of this major spring production. And finally, we report on how green film productions can be realised even by students and survey what readers can expect in the near future from mdwPress, the mdw’s own open-access academic publisher.
Wishing you an interesting read!
