Beginning around the mid-1930s, clarinetist and bandleader Benny Goodman engaged with classical music, adding standard solo pieces to his regular performance and record portfolio. He also stimulated the emergence of a modern clarinet repertoire by granting commissions to composers, such as Béla Bartók, Paul Hindemith, Darius Milhaud, and others. In this article, I explore why and how these projects evolved and how the collaborations unfolded. My focus is on the commissions to Hindemith (1941/47) and Milhaud (1941). The newly found correspondence of Eric Simon, a Viennese-born clarinetist who advised Goodman and initiated contact with Hindemith and Milhaud, reveal Goodman's “double life” as a multilayered sphere for various actors, each with their own specific background and agenda. My analysis follows three topics that decisively shaped the investigated projects: Goodman's relationship with classical music, which I discuss in light of the intersectionally biased structures of U.S. musical life; the situation of European émigré artists experienced by Hindemith, Milhaud, and Simon; and the promotion of new music, which linked the lives, networks, and agendas of the aforementioned protagonists and even defined their relationships. By highlighting Goodman taking center stage as a performer-commissioner, I argue for more serious attention to performers’ impact on musical production and repertoire formation, given that they represent the ultimate gatekeepers to the living repertoire.

The Table of the Development of psychological Functions was first published in the research report Rhythmik als Movens der Entwicklung der psychische Funktionen (Garnitschnig, Karl & Neira Zugasti, Helga, Vienna 2006) and in the DVD (incl. CD-Rom) Entwicklung beobachten, erkennen und unterstützen am Beispiel der rhythmisch-musikalischen Erziehung (Neira Zugasti, Helga & Garnitschnig, Karl, Vienna 2008). An updated version of the table with additional explanations will be presented in 2021. Presentations of the two theoretical bases, i.e. the Theory of psychological Operations (Theorie der psychischen Operationen, TPO) and Rhythmics, as well as of the detailed handling of the ‘Developmental Grid’ (incl. video) can be found in the two publications mentioned above and under the link: https://www.mdw.ac.at/mrm/mbe/inklusions-und-heilpaedagogikdiversitaet/ entwicklungsraster-tpo/.

This text gives insights into Eurhythmics in the field of special education (or “Heilpädagogik“ – the term is used in German speaking countries) by focusing on the life and work of Mimi Scheiblauer. She was one of the first women in the German speaking countries to work with children with disabilities. She published her experiences and approaches in articles and films over several decades. The text also gives some background information on Eurhythmics in Austria and its connection to Scheiblauer.

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.

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.”