The #MeToo movement and especially last year’s debates in Austria regarding abuses of power on film sets have shifted a new, previously little-known job description into focus: that of “intimacy coordinator” (IC), for which EU-recognised training now exists.

The plot of Olivia Scheucher’s diploma production at the Max Reinhardt Seminar plays out amidst the world of the Austrian Armed Forces—which isn’t an alien environment for this graduate of the drama directing programme.

Stephan Pauly, Director of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Wien, on the common roots shared by his institution and the mdw, the Webern Symphonie Orchester, and jointly developed new concert formats.

In the music of Austrian composer Hanns Eisler (1898–1962), steadfast rejection of war plays a conspicuous and consistently present role.

Brutpflegerinnen members Eva Puchner and Susanne Preissl, mdw graduates Golnar Shahyar and Simon Scharinger, and Department of Folk Music Research and Ethnomusicology head Marko Kölbl discuss whether art has to be political and the contexts in which it can support protest movements.

With its early days behind it and with increasing self-confidence, music mediation is now forging a different path than the one originally intended for it by the classical concert business—this in light of our current societal circumstances, under the impression of a way of thinking that is decolonial and critical of power and discrimination, and in keeping with a “social turn” in the arts.

As part of the course on Music Mediation/Community Music, itself part of the subject area “Music in Dialogue” at the mdw’s Department of Music Education Research, Music Didactics and Elementary Music Education, this past winter semester saw the project Tschick – ein Held? conducted with inmates at JVA Gerasdorf, a juvenile detention centre in Lower Austria.