Testimonials

Are you still looking for inspiration for a stay abroad? Or would you like to find out specifically about opportunities for student teachers and music students?

Here you will find testimonials from students at the Institute of Music who have completed a stay abroad with various programs. Further experience reports from other Faculties can be found on the website of the International Office.

This page is currently under construction. Further information will follow soon.

Report on the DAAD-funded musicology study trip to Vienna in the summer semester 2025

On May 25, 2025 at 10:00 a.m., the time had come: 15 Kassel students gathered at Kassel-Wilhelmshöhe station to travel to Vienna for five days on ICE 91 with the symptomatic name Donauwalzer, accompanied by Prof. Dr. Carolin Krahn (Historical Musicology). In a study trip funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) in the Promos program line in cooperation with the ethnomusicologist Prof. Dr. Julio César Mendívil Trelles from the Institute of Musicology at the University of Vienna, the aim was not only to experience the much-vaunted myth of the "City of Music Vienna" directly at the numerous sites of music history, but also to question it against the horizon of the constructiveness of music history and ethnography: What image of music history do various music institutions (concert halls and opera houses, archives, museums, etc.) in Vienna convey? Which musical genres, personalities, musical cultures and institutions are relevant here - and which are not? Who and what is included, which audience is addressed, who or what is excluded? Which forms of presentation and which media are used to stage this city as a city of music? How do city marketing and the tourism industry relate to what can be seen or (not) experienced musically on site? How do public and private spaces intertwine? How far does the geographical and cultural horizon of the "City of Music Vienna" extend? Is it only about the presentation of a German-Austrian, a Habsburg, a European music history? Or is it about a multicultural musical hub that goes beyond this, where music history is produced, studied and lived? What does all this mean for the study of Vienna as a musical place? And finally: where and how does music history actually take place in Vienna, how does it affect us and what music-sociological influences are we ourselves subject to when we are out and about in such a place?

The study group had been preparing for these questions, which resonate at every turn in Vienna, since the beginning of the semester as part of three intensive block seminars at the Institute for Music at the University of Kassel, specifically as part of the course Into the field of the 'City of Music Vienna': Intradisciplinary Views on Simultaneous Musical Practicesin the run-up to the trip. Of central importance was both the preliminary confrontation with selected film material on the cultural staging of Vienna and the reading of relevant musicological and cultural-historical literature; not least in order to avoid a one-sided, positivistic approach to categories such as "waltz bliss", "Viennese classical music", "musical high culture" or the idea of the "city of music".In addition to texts on music-related image formation by authors working in Europe, the USA and Latin America, the students gradually familiarized themselves with basic ethnomusicological working methods (e.g. field research, participant observation, documentation techniques) and also became acquainted with more recent developments in the field of intercultural, urban and multimedia music research (e.g. hybrid ethnography, urban ethnomusicology). By confronting different positions from ethnomusicology and historical musicology, they were also able to sensitize themselves to the preformation of the view of music and discuss the transformation of academic disciplines, their historically evolved self-image, their different methods and the relevance of an international academic dialogue.

Once they arrived in Vienna, the program began on the first evening after checking into the idyllic and centrally located "Myrthengasse" youth hostel with an evening full of music in the countryside: at the Alter Bach-Hengl wine tavern in the Viennese suburb of Grinzing, the group was not only introduced to the hearty local cuisine, but also to a potpourri of Schrammel music with violin, accordion and vocals. Local songs in Viennese dialect and musical stylizations of supposed exoticism were heard as well as tributes to the restaurant's audience from Italy and Spain. On this evening, the Kassel students' previous knowledge in the form of dedicated vocal music "in the field" as well as their remarkable knowledge of repertoire from relevant non-university internships was already clearly noticeable and promoted personal encounters with the musicians on site.This prelude continued to determine the group's further expeditions through the city on the following days and resulted, among other things, in a spontaneous choir performance in the foyer of the Museum Haus der Musik in the run-up to the tour there, in a coffee house recital by a Kassel student with the pianist of the famous Café Central at the Stutzflügel and in a very entertaining concert experience with the Vienna Residence Orchestra - each in its own way an impressive testimony to the mediation of local musical practices as well as 'popular classical music' with remarkable international reach. In addition to the experience of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra in the Great Hall of the Vienna Konzerthaus at the explicit request of the students, these various forms of living musical culture beyond the conventional everyday study routine will certainly remain a vivid memory for one or the other for a long time to come.

The excursion program also included visits to selected examples of musical 'high' and memorial culture, e.g. at the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna or at the Vienna Central Cemetery, where the group was also accompanied by Viennese musicologist and lecturer at the Kassel Institute Emilia Pelliccia. In addition, there were music-related guided tours through the first district, from the State Opera to the Hofmusikkapelle and Mozarthaus, and a visit to the equally traditional Vienna Phonogrammarchiv at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, where director Dr. Kerstin Klenke gave the Kassel study group an insightful overview of the current concerns and tasks of this multifaceted academic institution at the interface of archiving and documentation, media and recording history as well as ethnomusicological and (music) historical research. She also raised awareness of the particular challenges of her team's work in crisis and war zones and in the context of colonialism and the protection of personal rights. The Kassel study group gained these insights, including a tour of the recording studios, despite the imminent relocation of the expanding archive to new premises.

Two intensive on-site seminars at the beginning and end of the study trip provided ample opportunity to reflect on the experience and the historiography of music, which for centuries has focused on European art music with strong claims to exclusivity: Prof. Dr. Julio César Mendívil Trelles first provided the Kassel students with an overview of changing working methods in ethnomusicology at the interface of history, ethnography and musicological sub-disciplines in the form of a total of six intensive hours of presentation and lively discussion at the Institute of Musicology at the University of Vienna - the oldest of its kind in the German-speaking world. This encouraged participants to think about the formation of music history in all music-related fields of study from a cross-disciplinary perspective, to deepen their understanding of their own musical activities and to reflect on them against a cross-genre background. In the field of tension between written and orally transmitted musical practices in different linguistic and cultural areas, Julio César Mendívil Trelles provided an insight into ongoing research projects at his professorship relating to Peru and Brazil, Cabo Verde and Luso-Africa, Amazonia and Ecuador, among others. Using numerous examples, he opened up new horizons for the students from Kassel, where there is as yet no professorship for ethnomusicology, in thinking about how diverse music cultures and their history are treated in a didactic context at school and university.

This intensive encounter with research into music as a social practice was rounded off by a musical and culinary evening organized especially for the students of the University of Kassel in the family-run Viennese restaurant Acapulco. Members of the ensemble Camerata Popular introduced the audience to various musical traditions from Bolivia, Peru, Argentina, Ecuador and Chile with guitar, charango and singing, and some students were able to learn new dance steps on this occasion. In a light-hearted atmosphere, with atmospheric music and Mexican-Peruvian food, the days spent in Vienna on the trail of simultaneous musical practices in the "City of Music Vienna" came to an entertaining end. Full of experiences and musicological impulses to rethink the musical canon and much more, the following day, after a last coffee together, the group headed back north by train, not without strained feet.