The fact that Helmut Lachenmann now occupies an outstanding position in the contemporary music scene is owed not just to his compositions but also to the efficacy of his writings, which have stimulated the production of a considerable number of texts referring thereto.

The November 2023 release Handbuch Musikvermittlung [Music Mediation Handbook] has not only met but also far exceeded all expectations. Editors along with their 57 co-authors from the music mediation community and adjacent fields, succeed here in sketching out the contours of music mediation in all of its dimensions, colours, and nuances across this handbook’s easily digestible chapters.

Following up on Music – Media – History (transcript, Bielefeld 2021), Elias Berner and Matej Santi have now published the second book of the project “Telling Sounds”. While their first publication—based largely on contributions to an international conference held at the mdw in 2019—was released at the project’s outset, the present volume serves as something of a concluding summation.

Judith Kopecky’s investigation of Viennese musical life in 1928 for her dissertation project is an accomplishment of meticulous rigor. Her research focused on that era’s genre of the “concert song” (Konzertlied), under which she subsumed not only works for voice and piano but also Lied-type works accompanied by an instrumental ensemble or orchestra.

In the multi-author volume YouTube and Music. Online Culture and Everyday Life, edited by Holly Rogers, Joana Freitas, and João Francisco Porfírio, various contributors shed light on how record companies, musicians, and users take advantage of YouTube’s potential.

Die Eroberung des Museums by Ina Roß investigates how the Tribal Museum (founded in 2013) of the City of Bhopal, which lies in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, has been appropriated and also co-determined by its visitors since it opened.

It was to this fragment, hitherto viewed as being of secondary importance in research on Adorno, that the initiators of the international D-A-CH project “Writing Music. Iconic, performative, operative and material aspects in musical notation(s)” devoted the 2019 conference “Music, Writing, Difference – An Interdisciplinary Conference on Adorno’s Theory of Musical Reproduction”, which was held at the Arnold Schönberg Center in Vienna.

The newly released fourth volume of the Viennese music education-related publication series wiener reihe musikpädagogik revolves around inclusive music-making in all its breadth, covering its practical, pedagogical, and aesthetic dimensions including actual music-making practice.

This publication, prepared by editors Sarah Chaker (IMS) and Axel Petri-Preis (IMP) on the basis of an mdw lecture series, offers a conglomerate of theory and practice pertaining to the innovative potential of those community and audience engagement-related artistic and educational practices that are known collectively as Musikvermittlung.

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.