An Editorial for the Special Collection of Articles "Contemporary Views on Romani Music and Romani Music Studies."

The concept of the Vienna School of Comparative Musicology, later renamed as Vienna School of Comparative-Systematic Musicology, plays an important role in received historical accounts of musicology in twentieth-century Austria (used as shorthand for the various political entities to which the territory of post-World War II Austria belonged). The concept was developed in the second half of the twentieth century, most notably by Walter Graf (1903–1982) and Franz Födermayr (1933–2020), both former professors of comparative(-systematic) musicology at the University of Vienna. Proponents of this concept point to Richard Wallaschek (1860–1917) and especially Robert Lach (1874–1958) as the founders of the school and emphasize the synthetic character of the Vienna School, combining approaches from the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. The Vienna School of Comparative-Systematic Musicology can be analyzed as a historiographical narrative, as a coherent story of how a particular branch of Austrian musicology developed over time, mostly as a kind of “Whig history.” This paper examines key aspects of this narrative: Who contributed to its construction? How did the narrative evolve over time? Which scholars, institutions, and types of research are part of the narrative? Which are excluded or appear only as supporting characters? How is this particular form of comparative-systematic musicology represented in relation to other forms and schools of (comparative) musicology? What discursive function(s) did this narrative serve? How was it received? And to what extent has it remained relevant in the present?

Bislang sind künstlerische Fächer weder Teil von large-scale-Studien zur Unterrichtsqualität, noch partizipieren sie an der entsprechenden forschungsmethodischen Entwicklung. Der folgende Beitrag geht der Frage nach, inwieweit ein fachübergreifendes Verfahren zur Beobachtung und Erfassung von Unterrichtsqualität, das auf generischen theoretischen Modellen basiert, auf die Domäne Musikunterricht sinnvoll übertragbar ist und als Grundlage empirischer Forschung und reflektierter Praxis dienen könnte. Dazu wurde das Unterrichtsbeobachtungssystem aus der Videostudie "Global Teaching InSights" (GTI) betrachtet, dem dritten Zyklus der Large-Scale-Studie "Teaching and Learning International Survey" (TALIS) der OECD. Die dort implementierten Beobachtungskriterien und -kodierungen wurden einerseits explorativ zur Analyse videografierter Musikstunden genutzt und andererseits systematisch mit Kriterien für Unterrichtsqualität aus dem musikpädagogischen Fachdiskurs verglichen. Dabei zeigt sich, dass das untersuchte Forschungswerkzeug und die zugrundeliegende Modellierung von Unterrichtsqualität sowohl für die musikpädagogische Forschung als auch für die musikpädagogische Praxis vielversprechende Impulse bieten können. Der Versuch, als generisch konzipierte Qualitätskriterien auf Fachunterricht anzuwenden, bringt die Gefahr mit sich, fachübergreifenden Aspekten zu viel Gewicht einzuräumen, während spezifisch musikpädagogische Kriterien aus dem Blickfeld geraten. Dennoch bieten die gut reflektierte Modellierung und Operationalisierung von Unterrichtsqualität unseres Erachtens grundsätzliche Chancen für unser Fach – und hierbei sind insbesondere  jene Punkte interessant, an denen sich allgemeine und fachspezifische Kriterien “reiben”. Eine systematische Diskussion von Qualitätskriterien könnte dazu beitragen, unsere Sichtweisen und unser Verständnis von schulischem Musikunterricht zu schärfen, musikpädagogische Forschung besser mit interdisziplinären Diskursen zu verknüpfenund den dringend notwendigen Austausch mit den Bildungswissenschaften zu intensivieren.

Am 28. September 2023 fand in der Aula am Campus der Universität Wien die „Tagung wissenschaftliche Abschlussarbeiten und Hochschulschriften-Repositorien“, kurz tawiab2023, statt. Diese stand im Zeichen der Schwerpunkte Urheberrecht, Plagiatsprüfung, Ablieferung von Dissertationen an die Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Barrierefreiheit und Vergabe von DOIs.

Physical modeling may be used to simulate the motion of a vibrating string under frictional excitation by a bow. This study compares the measured transient behavior of a bowed string with predictions from a physics-based simulation that assumes a finite-width bow, incorporates bow-hair compliance, considers the string's torsional motion, and utilizes an elasto-plastic friction model. The model is first evaluated by comparing simulated Guettler playability diagrams to a measured diagram obtained from a robot arm bowing a monochord. The playability regions are qualitatively similar, but some significant differences in the underlying waveforms are not captured. In order to improve the reconstructions of individual waveforms, inverse modeling is employed to derive parameter values for the elasto-plastic friction model, demonstrating the ability to generate accurate reconstructions of measured signal transients. The findings highlight the importance of accounting for variable friction coefficients that change with bow force and bow acceleration. This observation is consistent with prior research indicating that static and dynamic friction coefficients vary within a Guettler diagram.

Rechtspopulistische Bewegungen und Diskurse greifen auf neue, ästhetisierte Politikstile und bis dato links konnotierte, künstlerisch erprobte Provokationsformen zurück. Zudem besetzen sie Geschlecht, Familie und Sexualität als Trigger-Themen. Die Beiträger*innen bringen die Populismusforschung mit geistes- und kulturwissenschaftlichen Ansätzen zusammen und fokussieren dabei auf das kulturelle Feld und Geschlechterdiskurse als spezifische Aushandlungsterrains. Neben einer Analyse, wie der »rechtspopulistische Komplex« jeweils aktuelle gesellschaftliche Problemlagen instrumentalisiert, eröffnen sie auch Gegenstrategien im Sinne radikaldemokratischer und emanzipatorischer Politiken.

Municipal housing in Vienna, called Wiener Gemeindebau, is gaining new significance in research and cultural work in the discourse on affordable housing in the city and the increasing heterogeneity of urban life. However, it has also been a field imbued with the ideological projections, desires, and anxieties of various political parties. In the revival of the historical myth as a sociopolitical utopia of the so-called Red Vienna period and the simultaneous culturalization of conflicts and precarious living, municipal housing is a sensitive field within which questions of cultural coexistence are constantly negotiated. This article draws on insights gained through fieldwork in the context of the research project “Klingender Gemeindebau” (Sounding out municipal housing), which was conducted in the Anton-Figl-Hof, a medium-sized complex from the late 1950s in Vienna’s fourteenth district. Approaching municipal housing primary through the lens of music consumption, this study examines the potential of music for understanding neighborhood relationships and creating spaces for encounter: How does the diversity of origin, languages, age groups, and interests resonate in the musical preferences expressed by the residents? What role do sound and music play in everyday life and in the ways in which municipal housing is imagined and narrated by its residents? And how does public music consumption affect interpersonal relationships between so-called longtime and new tenants in providing space for both conflicts of non-belonging and inclusive forms of musical sociability?

Digital music encodings are machine-readable representations of music score documents. Beyond the visual information captured by score images or PDFs, music encodings explicitly capture the musical semantics of the score. This makes it possible to use them as research data objects for musicological analyses (Rizo & Marsden, 2019) and to build digital score interfaces for applications in music scholarship, rehearsal, and performance (Pugin, 2018). mei-friend is a friendly, interactive, browser-based editor for music encodings. It opens music encodings in a variety of formats and converts these to MEI, the XML-based format developed by the Music Encoding Initiative, a community of music scholars, librarians, and technologists. Alongside a rich set of interactive editing operations, mei-friend offers specialized functionalities targeted at music scholars, including panels to display facsimile score images and to author score annotations. Collaborative encoding practices are supported through integration with GitHub and Solid, and by remote configuration capabilities via hyperlink (URL parameters). Important MEI community resources are also integrated, supporting direct reference to documentation (Music Encoding Initiative, 2023) for currently-selected elements, and auto-completion and validation using the MEI-XML schema definitions. Also provided are curated links to openly-licensed reference music encodings. The editor targets an audience of music scholars, students, librarians, performers, and enthusiasts. It is not conceived as a replacement for commercial music notation software, but rather as a complement opening up the affordances of machine-readable semantic music encodings to a broader audience. Our tool is the only currently available editor with comprehensive, native MEI-editing support in Common Western Music Notation (CMN). Editing directly in MEI avoids conversion errors (due to bugs or inherent differences in supported features) from other formats while supporting interactive use of those capabilities of the MEI schema that other formats simply do not support, such as editorial markup, annotation, and facsimile integration.

This article focuses on four digital resources for researching nineteenth-century women in music. Two are over two decades old and hail from the German-speaking world: Musik(vermittlung) und Gender(forschung) im Internet (MuGI) and the Sophie Drinker Institut online lexicon. The remaining pair are emerging digital resources based in the United States: Art Song Augmented and the Boulanger Initiative Database (BID).