One of the foremost professional goals of many Leonard Bernstein Department students is obtaining a full-time post in a renowned orchestra. In the interest of improving their chances of auditioning successfully, the Bernstein Department and the Rectorate agreed back in March 2019 to establish orchestral master classes. The idea was to afford ambitious students an additional opportunity to engage in personal exchange with colleagues from the respective orchestras before actually auditioning.

It was a student job with concert organiser Jeunesse that laid the cornerstone of her passion for music mediation work with children and adolescents—and today, this mdw alumna is responsible for education as part of the Concert Planning & Administration staff at the Wiener Konzerthaus. At the moment, she’s busy organising the final event of KlangBildKlang together with her alma mater.

It’s 6:30 p.m. on a Tuesday. Students from various programmes are welcomed to the mdw’s Clara Schumann-Saal by Miriam Steinkühler-Fuchsberger, a member of the ipop – Department of Popular Music faculty. Her mission today, like on many Tuesdays past: to unleash students’ passion for singing together despite any tiredness after their day’s work at the University. mdw Magazine sat in on one of their rehearsals.

Art and science are two areas that have fascinated Haruki Noda ever since his childhood years, which included a huge dose of the natural sciences and an early musical start in the form of guitar lessons. It’s precisely this duality that one can so keenly sense in his present-day work as a composer, multimedia and performance artist, and musicologist.

With the Department of Popular Music (ipop) celebrating 20 years of existence, we take brief look into its past and future with teachers, graduates, and students.

Autumn 2020 saw ECMA – the European Chamber Music Academy initiate a broad-based process of development and professionalisation with the EU-funded project ECMA Pro – International Career Development and Socially Engaged Outreach.

It was in 2020 that mdw alumna Josipa Bainac-Hausknecht first worked at the Exilarte Center for Banned Music. The topic of music in exile, still as current as ever, occupies an important place in this Croatia native’s academic and artistic doings.

This past summer semester, students of the Joseph Haydn Department of Chamber Music and Contemporary Music and the Max Reinhardt Seminar devoted an entire evening to the life and works of this exceptional English woman composer with The Life and Times of Ethel Smyth.

Since 2017, mdw alum Bernhard Jaretz has been working as a music teacher at the Ella Lingens Gymnasium, a Viennese academic secondary school, where he founded a music specialisation. He also heads the Choir School at St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna, founded the Vienna Lakeside Music Academy in the newly developed Viennese neighbourhood Seestadt Aspern in 2014, serves as choir director of the contemporary opera ensemble Neue Oper Wien, and authors school textbooks and instructional videos.

“Who no know go know”: this title of a song by the legendary Nigerian musician Fela Kuti serves as the motto of a project first realised in South Africa by the mdw faculty members Rupert Fankhauser and Philipp Sageder.