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.

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.

This newly published dissertation (2015) by Wei-Ya Lin promises insights into the “holistic musical concept” of an indigenous population known as the Tao on Lanyu (one of the islands of Taiwan) “that is inseparably interwoven with all areas of life”.

A symposium and a lecture series that took place in 2018 at the mdw have now given rise to the open-access multi-author volume Knowing in Performing, which includes contributions in English and German.

The theme of this multiauthor volume, which presents lectures from the 29th Annual Conference of the German Society for Popular Music Studies, hits a socio-political nerve for more reasons than just the increasingly nation-centred coronavirus mitigation strategies.

Even if the field of cultural management—to which Cultural Institutions Studies as developed in Vienna belongs—is a relatively young field of study, there do exist a number of introductions to it that are intended for use in academic teaching.

How does the music education field deal with socio-political shifts, culturally relevant re-assessments of value, debates on norms, and new qualities?

Writing about writing is a paradoxical act—seeing as it involves articulating oneself using the very tool that one is attempting to describe.

If conscious and unconscious orientations are fundamental to human experience, then sounds can “simultaneously drive and be the object of orientive and disorientive processes”.

This anthology arose as a follow-up publication to a 2015 conference with which the mdw’s Department of Music Sociology celebrated 50 years of existence.