A conversation about music in the cinematic realm, communication, and royalties paid in tuna fish with the newly appointed film music professor Walter Werzowa, media composition and applied music professor Judit Varga, film directing student Wolf-Maximilian Liebich, and film editing graduate Barbara Seidler.

The early decades of the 20th century witnessed three waves of emigration from Europe, the first of which occurred prior to and during World War I. European artists thus played a role in shaping US film from the very beginning—and the studio system, which became a foundation of American film’s success story, was in fact largely created by émigrés.

The “language” of conductors consists of gestures and motions. For those who haven’t mastered them, they’re frequently intriguing to watch—and for all those who have, they represent just one aspect of those numerous important skills that are essential to communicating with musicians, an orchestra, or a choir.

To numerous Viennese music lovers, Sian Edwards has been a familiar name for many years, now—thanks to her collaboration with Klangforum Wien and the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra and by virtue of numerous Theater an der Wien appearances conducting works such as Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking, André Previn’s A Streetcar Named Desire, Benjamin Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia, and Giuseppe Verdi’s La traviata.

This October, the internationally celebrated 44-year-old conductor Andrés Orozco-Estrada will begin teaching at the mdw. In the following conversation, he explains the approach he’ll take.

It is as dictators at the rostrum that figures such as Teodor Currentzis, Arturo Toscanini, and Herbert von Karajan are frequently described, in contrast to the principle of democratic leadership exemplified by such figures as Bruno Walter, Marie Jacquot, and Johannes Wildner. But must a conductor indeed work differently these days, and have the demands being made of conductors changed?

“What we see of the conductor at the rostrum is really just the tip of the iceberg. A deeper look reveals a veritable pyramid of competences made up of skills ranging from music to management,” says Alois Glaßner, head of the mdw’s Department of Conducting. mdw Magazine spoke with Glaßner about the University’s comprehensive training of conductors, the conducting programme as such, and the profession’s ongoing transformation as well as the department’s own plans.

When we get goosebumps at a concert, when our eyes tear up at the words we hear spoken onstage, or when we hold our breaths out of excitement during some other type of performance, what we’re experiencing are one-of-a-kind moments that can’t be reproduced in all their aspects—or, for that matter, repeated in exactly the same way.

“Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns, driven time and again off course…” Homer’s epic poem that recounts the wide-ranging journeys of Odysseus begins with an invocation of the muse (here in the English translation by Robert Fagle). She is asked to tell us of these heroic deeds. We will listen, promises the voice in the prologue, and the Odyssey begins…