CCC at the mdw: Interweaving Artistic and Musicological Exploration at Music University

Chanda VanderHart

Even at one of the world's oldest and largest music universities, the mdw - University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, the siloing of fields is the norm. Thanks to budgetary and organizational structures, it is rare that artistic practice and traditional musicology teaching are actively combined; what conservatory students learn in music history seminars and what they learn from their performance teachers exist largely separately from each other. This exposition documents an ongoing, pragmatic attempt to interweave traditional music research with artistic practice and interventions, thereby introducing students to Artistic Research at bachelor's and master's levels. The CCC (Content-Concept-Context) module was initiated by Judith Kopecky at the Antonio Salieri Department of Vocal Studies and Vocal Research in Music Education and has enjoyed cooperation with the Institute for Musicology and Performance Studies (IMI) for the past three years. Here she, Stephen Delaney and Chanda VanderHart reflect on the promises, surprises, limits, and potential for intertwining scholarship and artistic practice in an institutional setting.

2021-2022 Women and the Murder Ballad

Implicit and Explicit Depictions of Violence in 19th Century Art Song

Seminar: The Murder Ballad: from Schubert to Dolly Parton

In the weekly seminar, held Monday afternoons at the Institute for Musicology and Performance Studies,VanderHart and the students explored together the genre of the Murder Ballad, a literary and musical tradition that dates back to the Middle Ages. Murder ballads have been transmitted and disseminated through oral tradition, written pamphlets, and more recently through streaming services and sound recordings.

In the 17th century, traditional broadsheet ballads retelling a real crime were regularly printed and distributed at a murderer's gallows, often while the convict was still hanging. During the seminar, student were introduced to research and reception (Burt, Black, Slade, Wilentz, Atkinson, O'Brien, Hastie, Cohen, etc.) and wide range of repertoire from varied musical, vocal, and instrumental styles, including supernatural Schubert setting of Collins' "The Dwarf" and Brahms' "Edward" ballads to rockabilly, Appalachian, blues, country, and bluegrass traditions to modern readings of Dolly Parton and Nirvana.

Emphasis was placed on a collaborative exploration of how women are portrayed and positioned within the genre - as victims, perpetrators, or third witnesses - and how these perspectives are colored by the poetic voice, musical style, gender, and approach of the performers. Students were invited to reflect in depth from artistic, philosophical, and journalistic perspectives and asked to consider how art processes, perpetuates, remembers, and challenges societal issues. Finally, they were tasked with doing their own scholarly and artistic research on Murder Ballads, exploring, developing and presenting their own, unique thematic-aesthetic traditions and performance practices.