Anja Brunner is Assistant Professor in Ethnomusicology at the Department of Folk Music Research and Ethnomusicology at the mdw– University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. She was Principal Investigator of the research projects “Women Musicians from Syria: Performance, Networks, Belonging/s” (2020–24) and “Reverse Ethnomusicology: Migrants as Researchers” (2023–25), both funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and carried out at the Music and Minorities Research Center (MMRC). Her research spans issues of music and migration, postcolonial politics and decolonization, and intersectionality in music and music research.
mdw–University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna
Tessa Balser-Schuhmann (she/her) is a guest researcher in the Austrian Science Fund research project “Women Musicians from Syria: Performance, Networks, Belonging/s” at the Music and Minorities Research Center (MMRC) at the mdw–University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. She studied musicology at the University of Vienna, researching the audibility of social class in singing voices in her master’s thesis. Currently, she is doing her dissertation at the University of Vienna, working on musical and sonic practices as transformative processes.
This article explores processes of exclusion and inclusion in classical music institutions in Western Europe. The field of classical music, also called Western art music, is highly classed and widely exclusionary in its performance traditions and practices. Over the last decade, an increasing number of initiatives have been implemented to increase diversity in this particular cultural field. Using a case study of a renowned concert house in Vienna, Austria, which “invited” ethnically marked musicians to perform in a concert series, this article explores the discourses, challenges, chances, and experiences of both performers and audiences that emerge from such musical encounters. We examine how the underlying conditions of class and ethnic inequality have been addressed in this context. In addition, we show how musicians and audiences engaged with this “invitation” and how they used the opportunity provided—whether consciously or unconsciously—to navigate and challenge existing power structures. Overall, we put forth the argument that, while diversity initiatives in classical music commonly focus primarily on ethnic differences, the mechanisms of inequality in this field can only be meaningfully identified and addressed through a thorough intersectional analysis of ethnicity/race and class—particularly given to the deeply class-exclusionary nature of classical music practices.
