Creativity is a trait that can be learned and doesn’t care about age, as numerous workshops of the festival KlangBildKlang aimed at children, adolescents, and entire families will prove. The creative and innovative approaches in play here will overcome barriers and open up paths of approach that enable music to be experienced in a lively and inspiring way.

KlangBildKlang, the mdw's transdisciplinary festival, celebrated its start on 20 April at the Künstlerhaus in Vienna with a reception and the concert Beyond Keys: Synesthetic Soundscapes.  Johannes Meissl, Vice Rector for International Affairs and Art, presented the festival program and provided an overview of the more than 50 artistic projects accompanied by music and art mediation activities.

It is thus that the festival KlangBildKlang, which will bundle over 50 projects at a wide array of Viennese venues this May and June, can call upon a rich art- and musico-historical tradition. The question as to whether it is possible to render sounds visible and—conversely—render images, colours, and motion audible is to be pursued in a multitude of locations.

Special birthdays make it possible to regard artists’ works in a new light, reinterpret them, and perhaps also spot things that had previously gone undiscovered, with new approaches to familiar things facilitating the understanding of new aspects. In this spirit, the current special invites you to find out just how multifaceted the outstanding composers Anton Bruckner and Arnold Schönberg were.

The fact that Schönberg enjoyed near-“guru”-like veneration not only due to his exceptional artistic and pedagogical abilities but at least as much by virtue of his personal charisma is attested to not least by the multitude of prominent Schönberg pupils.

From March to December 2024, the academic and artistic events of the Anton Bruckner Department will invite all those who possess the according interest and openness to spend ten months exploring and engaging with, approaching and critically encountering this great anachronist while most certainly also experiencing his warmth, his conviviality, and the joy of wayfaring.

The music mediation award LEARN TO HEAR was recently conferred for the first time in anticipation of Arnold Schönberg’s 150th birthday in September 2024. Initiated by the Arnold Schönberg Center and conceived in cooperation with the mdw’s Department of Music Education Research and Practice, this award—which will be conferred annually for a period of five years—commemorates Arnold Schönberg as a pedagogue.

The interplay between his output and teaching of music and the constant exchange with his institutionally and privately taught pupils characterised Bruckner’s artistic biography and had a lasting influence upon his oeuvre.

Inspired by Arnold Schönberg’s 150th birthday, which is currently being celebrated worldwide, the new exhibition at the mdw’s Exilarte Center sheds light on the social and cultural milieu inhabited by the Second Viennese School’s founder. Particular attention is paid to both Alexander Zemlinsky and Schönberg’s pupil and eventual assistant Richard Hoffmann.

Arnold Schönberg’s 150th birthday is in 2024—a jubilee year of numerous events in tribute to this universal artist and a pioneer of musical modernism. And Ulrike Anton, director of Vienna’s Arnold Schönberg Center, can now look back on her first full year.