From April 20, 2020 to April 20, 2021 a preventive music therapy offer was made available free of charge on the website lieblingslied.at with the aim of making a contribution to psychosocial prevention in times of COVID-19-related social distancing in Austria. After individual users had registered, they were each connected to a music therapist or music therapy student who, at an agreed time, played a favourite song of the users’ choices and then talked with them about it. The music-sociological research accompanying this project provided valuable information about this new format of music therapy and how people deal with music in times of social crisis. The participants showed a high level of awareness of the potentially mood-regulating effects of music, and they emphasized the connecting and strengthening element of listening to music together with someone. The potential of a low-threshold preventive-therapeutic music offer, which can also be used without physical co-presence, was confirmed in the consistently positive feedback from the participants. Although the service was widely publicized in newspapers and on the radio, the participation of therapy seekers remained below expectations. The project primarily addressed a particularly music-interested, highly educated audience. Preferred citation: Huber, M., Riedl, H., Goditsch, M., Stepniczka, I., & Stegemann, T. (2022). Musik als Krisenprävention im Corona-Lockdown: Erkenntnisse aus einem musiktherapeutischen Projekt in Österreich. Schweizer Jahrbuch für Musikwissenschaft, 38, 29–40.

Gerd Kühr’s Corona-Meditation premiered on April 30, 2020, in a transnational online performance with more than 50 musicians, hosted by the Graz-based music festival Styriarte. The piece, written for a variable and unlimited number of pianists, is a creative response by Kühr to the social and cultural consequences of the measures implemented in Austria and other countries to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. This essay is a critical musicological encounter with this composition. It aims at providing a close analytical, emically informed, and historically contextualized understanding of the Corona-Meditation’s multi-faceted character, thereby contributing a detailed case study on the impact of the pandemic on musical creativity to the expanding scholarly discourse of “COVID-19 musicology.” In this regard, the essay also seizes an opportunity to expand this discourse beyond the present prevalence of social-scientific and psychological viewpoints by employing approaches more germane to the humanities, especially critical and reflexive engagement with the details and particularities of individual cultural artifacts. The essay’s trajectory begins with an account of the genesis and premiere of the Corona-Meditation, which provides the contextual backdrop for the following music-analytical engagement with the piece. After a section describing the methodological and theoretical frame, a series of salient structural and processual features of the composition is considered in musical analysis. Drawing on comments by Kühr on the compositional design of the Corona-Meditation and considering different actual performances and potential realizations, these investigations move through the macro-, meso-, and microlevels of the piece and are linked in their analytical narrative by a recurrent guiding metaphor of “dialectics.”

This book brings together research at the intersection of music, cultural industries, management, antiracist politics and gender studies to analyse music as labour, in particular highlighting social inequalities and activism. Providing insights into labour processes and practices, the authors investigate the changing role of manifold actors, institutions and technologies and the corresponding shifts in the valuation and evaluation of music achievements that have shaped the relationship between music, labour, the economy and politics. With research into a variety of geographic regions, chapters shed light on the various ways by which musicians’ work is performed, constructed and managed at different times and show that musicians’ working practices have been marked by precarity, insecurity and short-term contracts long before capitalism invited everybody to ‘be creative’. In doing so, they specifically examine the dynamics in music professions and educational institutions, as well as gatekeepers and mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. With a specific emphasis on inequalities in the music industries, this book will be essential reading for scholars seeking to understand the collective actions and initiatives that foster participation, inclusion, diversity and fair pay amongst musicians and other workers. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution- Non Commercial- No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Im Jahr 1959 wurde der „Sonderlehrgang für Musikheilkunde“ als erste akademische Musiktherapie-Ausbildung Europas an der heutigen mdw – Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien eingerichtet. Das vorliegende Buchkapitel rückt die institutionelle Zusammenarbeit mit drei Wiener Kliniken – „Klinik Hoff“, „Rosenhügel“ und „Stein- hof“ –, an denen die ersten musiktherapeutischen Praktika stattfanden, in den Fokus. Insbesondere werden die Rollen und die Bedeutung von Otto Hartmann, Hans Hoff, Andreas Rett, Erwin Ringel, Raoul Schindler und Wilhelm Solms-Rödelheim als Wegbe- reiter für die Etablierung und Theoriebildung der Wiener Schule der Musiktherapie be- leuchtet.

Musikvermittlung wurde in den letzten zweieinhalb Jahrzehnten zu einem wesentlichen Bestandteil des Berufsbildes von klassisch ausgebildeten Musiker_innen. Aus- und Weiterbildungsangebote zur Mitwirkung an Schulworkshops und Community-Projekten oder zur Planung neuer Konzertformate existieren bis dato jedoch nicht in entsprechendem Ausmaß. Axel Petri-Preis analysiert die individuellen Lernwege von Musiker_innen und zeigt, wie sie sich in überwiegend informellen Kontexten Wissen im Bereich der Musikvermittlung aneignen. Davon ausgehend formuliert er Empfehlungen, wie Hochschulen und Musikinstitutionen Musiker_innen auf diese Tätigkeit vorbereiten können.

Professional musicians who perform in hospitals, retirement homes and prisons, creatively stimulated by the residents; babies crawling over exercise mats, enjoying classical music together with their parents; concert-goers who take their seats between the musicians in order to experience music up close with all their senses – the opportunities to make and experience music are almost unlimited. Various actors in the field of classical music have taken this as a chance to develop a wide range of new artistic and educational practices over the last two decades, aiming to facilitate in-depth aesthetic experiences, to diversify and bond with audiences and to encourage active cultural participation. The contributors focus on the innovative potential of Musikvermittlung as a social bridge-builder for concert life, (higher) music education, research and social life.