In recent decades, social and economic changes have brought about a growing awareness of the role of art and culture in society. As a result, scholars have turned their attention to a sociological view of arts, developing hermeneutic approaches and conducting empirical research that have led to a wealth of insights into the organization of arts. These studies of the creation, production, distribution, evaluation and consumption of arts are clearly sociological, but they include approaches from other disciplines, notably arts management studies and cultural policy research. Volker Kirchberg and Tasos Zembylas critically discuss seven major theories of the social organization of arts in Western societies, with the aim of encouraging further research and theoretical developments.

The electroacoustic works of the Greek-French composer Iannis Xenakis (1922–2001) captivate with their radical ideas, sounds and compositional models. They were often conceived as multimedia works for specific locations and architectures. The richness of the approaches and processes gave rise to an extensive body of sources. Therefore, this volume is particularly dedicated to a philological approach, combining contributions by companions of Xenakis and renowned experts in Xenakis research with studies in philology of electroacoustic music. It concludes with a roundtable discussion of the performance of these electroacoustic works, thus linking the philological questions back to musical practice.

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.

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.

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.