Der Forschungsbericht „MUDIL 2.0 – Musikalisches Distance & Digital Learning: Erfahrungen, Auswirkungen, Perspektiven“ schließt die kooperative Studie MUDIL ab. MUDIL wurde 2020 begonnen, um die Arbeitsfelder von Musiklehrenden an Schulen und Musikschulen unter den Bedingungen von Distance Learning während und nach der Covid-19-Krise in Österreich in unmittelbarer wie auch längerfristiger Perspektive zu beforschen. Der abschließende Bericht enthält ausgewählte Ergebnisse einer zweiten österreichweiten, quantitativen Online-Befragung im Sommer 2022, an der sich 585 Musiklehrende aus Musikschulen und Regelschulen der Sekundarstufe in ganz Österreich und Südtirol beteiligten. Neben Kontinuitäten und Konsolidierungstendenzen in der Nutzung von digitalen Tools artikulierten einige teilnehmende Musiklehrende auch deutliche Bedenken und Skepsis gegenüber digitalen Tools und Arbeitsformen. Ein Vergleich der Ergebnisse mit der ersten Befragung aus dem Jahr 2020 ermöglicht die Darstellung von wesentlichen Entwicklungen in diesem Zeitraum sowie einen Ausblick auf zukünftige Entwicklungen im Bereich des digitalen Lehrens und Lernens im Musik(schul)unterricht.

The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra’s New Year’s Concert is an annual, live-broadcast New Year’s Day staple for a vast international audience, with an alternating line-up of star conductors and an ever-changing repertoire that incorporates the same favourites – most notably, the Blue Danube Waltz and the Radetzky March – year after year. We are gathering, digitizing, and aligning the concert recordings of this series with audio features, score encodings, records of historical discourse, and other ephemera, interconnecting this multimodal music information and making it available as a digital corpus of linked open data following the principles of Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) research data management. Here, we raise musicological research questions motivating our work; describe the approach to assembling our corpus and developing associated editorial and analytical tooling, building on and extending recently established semantic music information workflows; and, provide insight into ongoing digital musicology research incorporating this data. Our work is motivated both by the pursuit of our own research interests in musicology and performance science, but also by a desire to provide a useful and reusable dataset for the wider digital music research community, bringing publication practices between these fields into further dialogue.

Erich Simon (1907–1994) was a Viennese-born performer, conductor, editor, concert manager, teacher, and composer. Being Jewish and socialist, he escaped from Austria in 1938 and emigrated to New York, where he rebuilt his career. He contributed to the musical cultures in Europe and the United States in many ways. His network contained prominent names from intellectual, cultural, and musical life on both sides of the Atlantic, such as Benny Goodman, Darius Milhaud, Fritz Stiedry, Erika Wagner, and Hans Weigel. However, as Simon himself was no famous composer, conductor, or virtuoso on which musicological research on exile and migration in the 1930s/1940s has focused in the past, he has been largely overlooked by historians and musicologists. This article presents, for the first time, major source findings related to Simon in the form of personal documents, letters, and musical manuscripts from archives in the United States. Each group of documents provides a different perspective on Simon’s life and career. Through a close reading of these sources, this article reconstructs his social background and life in Vienna, his involvement with left-wing intellectual circles, his family’s dramatic escape, his personal and professional network, which helped him settle in the United States, as well as his musical engagement with American history and culture. Bringing Simon’s story out of the margins contributes to broadening our understanding of the diversity of refugee and migration experiences in the 1930s/1940s and the various ways in which individuals confronted a new social, cultural, and political environment.

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.