In April of this year, the week-long festival “Balladen für einen Bulldozer” [Ballads for a Bulldozer], the first of its kind at the Department of Composition Studies and Music Production, offered an impressive platform on which to present and reflect upon contemporary music.

The new artistic research project “Spirits in Complexity” is a cooperative effort together with the Johannes Kepler University (JKU) in Linz, the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, the University of the Arts in Reykjavik, and several artistic and scientific experts.

The international gathering Critiques of Power in the Arts (25–27 April 2024), initiated by the Department of Cultural Management and Gender Studies and co-curated in collaboration with a network of critical friends from the realms of research and practice, stood out for unusual academic formats such as performances, workshops, and jam sessions that were held in various mdw spaces.

In the context of this year’s International Women’s Day we spoke about power and gender relations in theatre at the mdw. Moderator Alexandra Althoff presided over a conversation between Bettina Hering, Petra Paterno, and Julia Wissert.

On the evening of 24 May, the main campus of the mdw was given over to the 2024 Long Night of Research, offering an interested audience of all ages insights into the research taking place at our institution.

What do musique mixte, gender roles in Austrian film, and music mediation have in common? The answer is that all three are topics of mdw dissertations recognised with the 2024 Herta & Kurt Blaukopf Award.

Since January 2024, the mdw has been working together with seven European partner universities on IN.TUNE – Innovative Universities in Music and Art in Europe, the first European Universities Alliance in the field of music and one of only two alliances of arts universities among the 64 EUAs currently in existence.