It was quite soon following its completion last summer that the Future Art Lab was filled with life. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, however, meant that the grand opening of this new mdw Campus building would have to wait.

So here we are: in its ninth year of existence, isaScience is going “hybrid”! With the mdw’s international and interdisciplinary summer conference having been postponed in early 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the isaScience team is now preparing for its first-ever hybrid edition, in which it will pick up right where it left off.

Podcasts (including pocasts about science and research) are in everyone’s ears: they enable us to dig into specific themes, gain insights into the most varied research questions and academic disciplines, and get to know personalities from academia.

Maria Gstättner-Heckel and Martin Mühlfellner, both of whom teach at the Leonard Bernstein Department of Wind and Percussion Instruments, relate their experiences with COVID-19.

From 7 to 9 April 2021, the mdw will be hosting the 12th International Conference on Artistic Research of the Society for Artistic Research (SAR) in cooperation with the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and the University of Applied Arts Vienna.

2020’s Beethoven jubilee inspired a great number of cultural events and musicological research projects in many places—especially in Vienna. And to conclude this year here, 18 students from the University of Vienna’s Department of Musicology (as part of the course “Beethovens Violinsonaten – Entstehung, Analyse, Interpretation”) join forces for an inter-university project with 15 performers from the mdw.

It is immensely gratifying that Austria’s Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research has once again awarded a Diversitas Prize to the mdw! It was in 2016 that the mdw received its first Diversitas Prize for “All Stars Inclusive”, an inclusive band that has continued its activities at the mdw ever since.

The mdw now has a publishing house of its very own: as of March 2021, the growing number of university presses in Austria and Europe is being joined by the open access academic publisher mdwPress.