From 23 to 25 June, the mdw hosted the conference Facing_Drag with renowned international guests from various fields of cultural studies and from the performing arts, continuing where last year’s online conference left off.

In everyday life, notions of supposed “parallel worlds” and “parallel societies”, of imagined social niches and bubbles that are (supposedly) moving apart and frequently considered irreconcilable, are widespread. In the realm of popular music practice (in general) and in popular music studies (in particular), such constructions can also be observed on the most varied levels

This rich collection of essays, many of them incubated in the forum of the annual isaScience conference of the mdw, is essential (and open-access) reading.

To mark the hundredth birthday of the Greek-French composer Iannis Xenakis, the mdw’s Department of Musicology and Performance Studies (IMI) and Special University Programme in Electroacoustic and Experimental Music (ELAK) have teamed up with the festival Wiener Festwochen to organise a symposium on Xenakis’s electroacoustic oeuvre that is scheduled to take place from 19 to 21 May 2022.

The MMRC lecture is an annual event of the Music and Minorities Research Center (MMRC). Due to the hybrid format in which this year’s event was held, the audience was able to participate both in the mdw’s Joseph Haydn-Saal and online via Zoom.

For those who’ve thus far heard music by Orlando di Lasso performed mainly as a cappella “vocal music”, Bernhard Rainer’s book presents an opportunity to discover some new aspects—such as how Lasso effectively staged music via its arrangement, instrumentation, and richly varied performance.

It’s widely acknowledged that the Global North’s existing set of rules in terms of performance clothing and onstage behaviour can be traced back to the bourgeois culture that was in the process of becoming established during the 19th century. This was a period that also gave rise to public concert life, concert halls, and concert culture.

“Our past is also our future” (Unsere Vergangenheit ist auch unsere Zukunft) is the motto that heads the homepage of the Fritz Kreisler Department—a wonderful match in light of not only the Viennese string sound, but also the Department’s most recent project: the online presentation of the Karl Scheit Archive.