In artistic endeavours, much like it is with other pursuits, urgent issues pertaining to climate change are more and more often coming to play a central role. Artists’ approaches to this theme are myriad.

It’s a mixture of curiosity, enthusiasm, and perhaps anxiety that can often arise when the talk turns to AI technologies’ deployment in our everyday private and professional lives. At home, it might be a robovac that’s supposed to save us work but—How could it be otherwise?—ends up repeatedly needing help. In academic and artistic contexts, on the other hand, it’s about things like questions of authorship, innovation, and inspiration.

What is KlangBildKlang? This large-scale mdw project, whose name translates as “SoundImageSound”, may indeed evoke the odd question. Is the focus on sound, here, or actually more on visual depiction? The answer is neither-nor. It’s much rather about interaction—between not just sounds and images, but also people, mdw departments, performing venues, and organisations.

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.

Exile can take on many forms. In rare cases it might be chosen and voluntary. However, most exiled individuals have been driven away, banished, politically persecuted, or stripped of their citizenship—with no choice but to leave the places they called home.

Music education is far more than “just” music class at school; it’s much rather a realm of complex interplay between art, pedagogy, and scientific and scholarly pursuits. This is borne out by the diverse opportunities for related study at the mdw, the numerous areas in which graduates and faculty are active, and a wide variety of educational and research projects.

Protest has many faces—and today, as in the past, we encounter it in the most varied ways, be it as traffic interventions intended to call attention to climate change or through those frequent news reports that tell of the courageous demonstrators in Iran and highlight the life-threatening consequences that their acts of protest entail.

Artists’ 100th birthdays are eagerly embraced as opportunities to take a renewed deep dive into their oeuvres. In 2023, both on these pages and elsewhere, the mdw is devoting special attention to the Hungarian-Austrian composer György Ligeti.

Viele von uns kennen das vielleicht: Wenn sich die ersten Rückenschmerzen im Alltag auftun, wird einem bewusst, dass man einfach nicht jünger wird und ein bisschen mehr Bewegung wahrscheinlich auch kein Fehler wäre.

When you think of film music, what melody comes to mind first? Ennio Morricone’s “Man with a Harmonica” from Once Upon a Time in the West, perhaps? Or the Star Wars theme, or even a film music classic by Erich Wolfgang Korngold?