+++ Study Information Days 2026 for many of our studies: all dates can be found in the event calendar! +++
In 2024, the Platform on Politics of the Past was established at the Mozarteum University Salzburg. As a public platform, its purpose is to provide a forum for discussing questions and presenting research findings relating to the historical political positioning and decisions of the Mozarteum University. All university members are welcome to become involved and support its work.
2025 offers countless opportunities to look back on the past 80 years. The Second World War ended in Europe on 8 May 1945 with “Liberation Day,” marked by Germany’s unconditional surrender and the final collapse of the Nazi regime. In the months leading up to this, Allied forces had liberated the concentration camps.
Leonor Dill received an Award of Excellence for her dissertation entitled ‘Schubert's Metamorphoses. C.G. Jung's Archetype Theory as a Basis for Musical Analysis – An Investigation of the Creative Process’. Congratulations!
Yvonne Wasserloos, university professor of musicology, has been awarded the International Grand Prize for Science & Research (worth €12,000) by the Cultural Fund of the City of Salzburg for her outstanding achievements as a researcher, including her work on ‘Music and Power – Dimension and Context’ and her research on the social, political and cultural significance of music – especially in connection with democracy and the culture of remembrance. Congratulations!
The handbook compiled by the inter-university research initiative ‘Music and Migration’ Wolfgang Gratzer / Nils Grosch / Ulrike Präger / Susanne Scheiblhofer (eds.), ‘The Routledge Handbook of Music and Migration: Methodologies and Theories’, Routledge 2024 has just been nominated for the prestigious 2025 Award of the American Musicological Society.
In cooperation with the International Mozarteum Foundation, the Institute for the History of Musical Reception and Interpretation (IMRI) at the Mozarteum University Salzburg is organising a symposium on ‘Mozart Interpretations in Sound Recordings up to 1950’ in the Mozart Sound and Film Collection from 19 to 21 November 2025. We ask for proposals for papers relevant to the topic.
Music and Sound Beyond the Human: This conference aims to contribute to this ongoing development, and to put special emphasis on the ethical and political dimensions that come into play in regard of other-than-human creativity and aesthetics. Submissions from all musicological (sub-)disciplines are welcome, as well as from the music-related domains in neighboring scholarly and scientific disciplines and in interdisciplinary fields like human-animal studies, critical animal studies, critical plant studies, multispecies ethnography, and AI music studies.
Martin Schneider (graduate baroque violin / baroque viola with Mayumi Hirasaki, master's degree in historical performance practice with Reinhard Goebel) was awarded the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research's appreciation prize on 21 November 2024 in Vienna.
The annual conference of the Austrian Society for Musicology will take place at the Mozarteum University from 17-19 October 2024. It will focus on and discuss music-related phenomena that are related to ideas of democracy and democratic principles.
Democracy" is associated with numerous values such as freedom, justice and humanism, which must be constantly renegotiated. It is understood as a form of rule, society and life and is differentiated accordingly in terms of time, culture and state. Democracy can be symbolically demanded or consolidated through musical performances, because music is a possible practice for shaping, accompanying or commenting on the negotiation process of what is understood by "democracy".
Anna Barbara Kastelewicz, a graduate of the Department of Musicology at the Mozarteum University, was recently honoured with the Award of Excellence for her dissertation on "Music, culture and cultural activities in the special camps of the Soviet occupying power 1945 - 1950 in the Soviet Occupation Zone and the GDR". Congratulations!
The theory and method handbook "Music and Migration", which was published in July, is dedicated to the manifold aspects, phenomena, interactions and perspectives in the research field between music and migration in 16 thematic complexes.
Although cultural life in various Nazi-occupied countries manifested distinctive differences in outlook between 1939 and 1945, partially accountable to specific national traditions and their historical and ideological relationship to German music and the political situation, one factor that appears to bind all musical activity in these areas is the consistent presence of the music of Ludwig van Beethoven.
Four work contracts were awarded to gather more detailed information on the history and development of schlager, folk music, rock and pop music, and dance schools in the city of Salzburg in the run-up to the symposium "Those were the days. Salzburg's popular music cultures in the 1950s and 1960s". Soundtracks, newspaper clippings, and other materials were collected; the focus of the survey, however, was an oral history project, in the context of which numerous interviews were conducted and documented with eyewitnesses or people who had provided information.
![Titelblatt des Librettos Extemporanea Theatri [...] | © UB Salzburg Rara 3988 I](/cache-buster-4/Service/ASM/3705/image-thumb__3705__newsCard/5_Titelblatt%20des%20Librettos%20Extemporanea%20Theatri%20%5B...%5D%3B%20%28c%29%20UB%20Salzburg%20Rara%203988%20I~-~media--7c69c365--query@2x.e068d456.webp "Titelblatt des Librettos Extemporanea Theatri [...] | © UB Salzburg Rara 3988 I")
The libretti of cantatas, oratorios and operas in Salzburg's archives and libraries were listed.
In the present data collection, manuscripts and prints with music were recorded that were produced in or for Salzburg in older times. Salzburg" is understood to mean the medieval archdiocese of Salzburg, which extended over the present-day province of Salzburg including the Bavarian Rupertiwinkel and also included parts of Carinthia, Styria and Lower Austria. Included are the proper bishoprics of Chiemsee, Gurk, Seckau and Lavant. Independent institutions, such as the monastery of St. Lambrecht, have not been included in the survey, since they went their own liturgical ways, nor has the monastery of Mattsee, which belonged to the diocese of Passau from 907. On the other hand, the music sources of the Benedictine monastery of Michaelbeuern were included, which, despite its ecclesiastical independence, was liturgically oriented to St. Peter and maintained close exchange with Salzburg. The abundance of material - information on about 270 sources was collected - was first divided into music manuscripts, music prints, and music theoretical representations according to the type of source, and then recorded in a chronological order according to centuries. Work contractors: Veronika Obermeier and Karina Zybina. Project management: Andrea Lindmayr-Brandl.
In a first phase of work, 47 short profiles of a selection of personalities from Salzburg's music history of the 20th and 21st centuries were compiled within the framework of three work contracts. In each case, the curriculum vitae, achievements, awards/prizes, a bibliography, and a concise photo documentation are included. Work contractors: Julia Hinterberger (2012), Sarah Haslinger (2013, 2014). Project management: Thomas Hochradner.
A work contract was used to record the holdings (especially sheet music) of Salzburg's music history in the archives of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, the manuscript and music collection of the Vienna Library, and the collection of manuscripts and old prints of the Austrian National Library, which cannot be searched online until further notice. Work contractor: Alison Dunlop.
![Johann Michael Sattler, Ansicht der Dreifaltigkeitsgasse [Kosmorama] 1827/28 | © Salzburg Museum](/cache-buster-5/Studien/Musikwissenschaft/4295/image-thumb__4295__newsCard/Hubert%20Sattler_Ansicht%20der%20Dreifaltigkeitsgasse_c_Salzburg%20Museum~-~media--7c69c365--query@2x.518b9b87.webp "Johann Michael Sattler, Ansicht der Dreifaltigkeitsgasse [Kosmorama] 1827/28 | © Salzburg Museum")
With the aim of comprehensively documenting the history of the house at Mirabellplatz 1, surveys were conducted of the relevant archival records in the Provincial and City Archives of Salzburg, the Archives of the Archdiocese of Salzburg, and the Archives of the University Mozarteum. In addition to an overview of the holdings relevant to the history of the house, important passages of text were excerpted from the records, and a documentation of the available photographs was prepared. Work contractor: Roger Michael Allmannsberger. Project management: Thomas Hochradner.
