And when I began researching the Roma, it soon became clear to me that my work couldn’t primarily serve to build my academic profile-that it was also necessary to take up clear social stances if I was going to work with people who experience such discrimination.
#Iobserve login professional
But practice is a good thing, and it eventually led to my adopting a quite literally professional way of dealing with such mechanisms. So I was frequently someone who had to fight for her position on account of being different. And then I, the pharmacist’s daughter, married a so-called Tschusch -that was the word for it out in the country where we lived-and experienced up close and personal how my husband, as a “foreigner”, had it in everyday life … like when he, with his accent, went looking for an apartment. So it was already as a child that I learned what discrimination entails. I grew up as a Protestant in a Catholic community. UH: Injustice is something that’s always made me furious. Why? The Wittgenstein Award ©Stephan Polzer You wrote your dissertation on the music of the Burgenland Croats, you’ve been researching Romani music in Austria since 1988, and you’re also active in awareness work and public communication. The other was born out of comparative musicology and a colonialist past where people set out to record music made by “primitive peoples” with phonographs, collecting material to support their evolutionist worldview. The one goes back to figures including Herder and the late phase of 19th-century nationalism, during which lay researchers sought to investigate the “voice of the people”. Gerlinde Haid and I engaged in years of discussion and ultimately decided to offer two different specialisations, Folk Music Research and Ethnomusicology, simply because their disciplinary traditions and history are so different. What we’re about is methodology, field research. Drawing distinctions between what’s foreign and what belongs to us here is an outdated approach. But it’s fundamentally about all of the world’s musical styles, of which Austrian folk music is, of course, one. “Ethnomusicology” is the internationally accepted general term. UH: We deal with music in social contexts and in terms of its significance to the people who produce and/or consume it. You head the Department of Folk Music Research and Ethnomusicology.
It’s the hands-down best thing that can happen during a researcher’s career. And on top of that, getting recognised for a specialty like minority research-that’s something I hadn’t even dared to dream about. Because most people don’t even know what it is. Ursula Hemetek (UH): What a fantastic show of recognition for this field, for such an “exotic subject” as ethnomusicology. What was your first thought when you learned that you’d won the Wittgenstein Award? Hemetek, who specialises in minority research, sat down with mdw Magazine to discuss fighting spirit, consistency, and ethnomusicology’s most important tool: listening. This “Austrian Nobel Prize” is worth € 1.4 million-and it will be of lasting benefit to the mdw campus. This past June, the ethnomusicologist, mdw professor, and department head Ursula Hemetek became the first woman professor at an arts university to receive the Wittgenstein Award.
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