Für die Krankheitsverarbeitung und Erhaltung der psychischen Gesundheit spielen das Zusammenwirken von Medizin, Krankheitswahrnehmung und Musik sowie die Musik im Krankenhaussetting eine Rolle. Die als musikpädagogisches Seminar der Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst am Comprehensive Center for Pediatrics (CCP) an der Universitätsklinik für Kinder- und Jugendheilkunde (UKKJ) Wien veranstaltete Musikwerkstatt You Smile richtet sich an Kinder und Jugendliche, die aufgrund schwerer und schwerster Erkrankungen für längere Zeit im Krankenhaus betreut werden müssen. Dieses pädagogische Projekt zielt darauf ab, Kindern zu zweit oder in Kleingruppensettings nicht nur einen Zugang zur Musik zu bieten, sondern sie auch in ihren musikalischen und sozialen Kompetenzen zu stärken und ihnen in einer schwierigen Lebensphase emotionale Unterstützung zu geben. Die Instrumentalpädagogik konzentriert sich traditionell auf den Unterricht in formellen Bildungseinrichtungen, so auch in diesem neuen edukativen, kommunikativen musikpädagogischen Kontext im Krankenhaussetting.

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.

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).

In this article, I argue that the dance practice of ‘Khaita – Joyful Dances’ has been intentionally designed as a mindfulness practice with the aim of fostering presence and awareness by the Dzogchen master Namkhai Norbu. The three Khaita principles of awareness (Dems, Gyu and Drig) revolve around aspects of proprioception, smooth movements, musicality, spatial and group awareness and guide dancers to the here and now. They demand non-judgmental, purposeful and non-reactive attention, hence mindfulness, that results in more mature states of awareness and presence.

The study of 16th-century keyboard music, integral to historical performance since the early music revival of the late 20th century, has traditionally focused on structural analysis from notated sources and inferred improvisation practices. A paucity of historical performance sources has left many performance aspects unaddressed, relying heavily on aesthetics established by earlier generations. This article takes a transdisciplinary approach to examine Renaissance keyboard music, unravelling the complex interplay of elements in harpsichord playing, encompassing tangible and intangible factors. It aims to bridge the gap between contemporary aesthetics and the historical context, shedding light on the ideals shaping musical perception and performance. Exploring George of Trebizond’s rhetorical treatise De suavitate dicendi, and its emphasis in the importance of sweetness in rhetoric, the article parallels ideals of speech delivery with the art of harpsichord playing. It introduces a novel method to integrate non-musical historical sources into performance practice, applying rhetorical principles to analyse 16th-century keyboard musical taste, including tempo, rhythm, embellishments, timbral variety, technical aspects, material culture, and the composition-performance relationship. Addressing how to translate theory into guidance for modern performers, the methodology offers a structured framework for studying and performing 16th-century keyboard music, not presenting empirical results but fostering a alternative approach to better understand and convey the era’s musical ideals.

This article approaches the question how people practised at a keyboard instrument in the 16th century by evaluating the most extensive source, Tomás de Santa María’s Arte de tañer Fantasia (1565). Avoiding specific problems such as fingering or hand position, this article focuses on how practising can be organized, and how the advice given in the historical source can be applied in today’s didactic practice. As the hints scattered throughout the treatise suggest, learning is guided by an active engagement with singing, solmization and written-out compositions in various notational formats – instead of merely ‘interpreting works’. Equipped with a plethora of musical ideas and motor patterns acquired through vocal and instrumental experience, a skilled musician – in the sense of Santa María – can play polyphonic pieces based on paired imitations spontaneously, which sound as if they were written-out compositions.

Vor 100 Jahren wurde die Fachhochschule für Musik und darstellende Kunst als eine der Vorgängerinstitutionen der heutigen mdw – Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien gegründet. Sie kann, soviel steht fest, als ein einzigartiges Spezifikum der österreichischen Hochschulgeschichte gesehen werden. Trotz ihrer äußerst kurzen Lebensdauer sowie wenig nachhaltigen Existenz ist es wert, die Geschichte dieser von 1924 is 1931 bestehenden Hochschule zu erzählen: Wie unter einem Brennglas offenbaren sich hier die Folgen von Fehlplanung, Intrige, weltanschaulicher Entzweiung und politisch-ideologischer Einflussnahme. Und obwohl die nur 7-jährige Geschichte der Hochschule fast als kurios zu bezeichnen ist, spiegelt sich in ihr die zunehmend radikalisierende innenpolitische Situation Österreichs in den Zwischenkriegsjahren wider.

This paper presents the conclusions of an experimental study on fingering and hand position guided by Renaissance portraits of keyboard players as well as contemporary theoretical writings on keyboard technique. The author investigates the relationship between theoretical statements and representations in art, comparing and analyzing the different positions of fingers, hands and wrists in both type of sources. Particular attention is paid to a subject that began to appear in the first years of the 16th century and became fully fashionable from the beginning of the 17th century onwards: St. Cecilia at the keyboard. The representations of Cecilia dramatically increased after the ‘discovery’ of the saint’s body in 1599, and they offer a vast repository of images of keyboard players. The results of these investigations are presented in their practical application through images and videos recorded by Maria Luisa Baldassari and Augusta Campagne; the study finishes with a comprehensive reference guide that summarizes the rules for fingering and hand position of the most important treatises.

The commonly-understood conception of Italian keyboard intavolatura as a species of tablature notation carries with it certain implications: that intavolatura shares a basic affinity with lute and figure-based keyboard notational systems; that it is a ‘finger notation’, designed to transmit information necessary for the mechanical actions of playing, but not for voice leading and polyphonic detail; that its functioning was predicated upon a particular set of notational conventions or laws. The identification of intavolatura as a distinct notational system has been primarily established through a reading of Diruta’s treatise Il Transilvano – our most complete historical source describing intavolatura and the process of intabulating music in it – and through the volumes of keyboard music printed by 16th-century houses such as Gardano, Vincenti, and Verovio. However, not fully examined to this point has been conceptualizations of intavolatura on the part of scribes working on the Italian peninsula, mainly because there hasn’t been a thorough examination of extant intabulations in manuscript. An examination of these intabulations further supports the conceptual framing of intavolatura as a system of conventions – a system that was tacitly understood by scribes as well as printing houses. An investigation into scribal habits further highlights the functioning of intavolatura as a kind of lute tablature for keyboard that used mensural notation in place of figures. At the same time, the use of mensural notation allowed for instances in which scribes use intavolatura as a kind of ‘partitura’, ignoring its conventions and rules in order to show the original voice leading of the polyphonic model. In their very divergence from intavolatura convention these instances further solidify the systematic conception of intavolatura; at the same time, they also show that scribes were aware of the possibility of bypassing the rules for the sake of showing polyphonic detail.