Creating Bridges:
Musical Activities and Society - Mutual Inspirations

Dr. Elisabeth Dumont, Teacher, Conservatorium Maastricht, the Netherlands

Daniel Froschauer, Chairman, Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra

Dr. Rubén Gallo, Professor, Latin American Literature, Princeton University

Dr. Helga Rabl-Stadler, Special Advisor for Foreign Culture at the Austrian Federal Ministry for European and Intl. Affairs; Former President of the Salzburg Festival

Dr. Oliver Rathkolb, Professor, University of Vienna; Moderator of the panel

The panelists will discuss and respond to the main messages from the presentations and in a second round elaborate on the options of musicians to do more in favor of society, but at the same time develop strategies on how societies can do more for intensifying musical education and the musical business without pushing colonial, elitist and aggressive nationalistic biases. The third topic the panel will address is whether music can strengthen democratic structures and how people can prevent the misuse of music in totalitarian and authoritarian regimes.

DANIEL FROSCHAUER is the Chairman of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, (recently re-elected for a third term), first violinist and section leader. He was born in Vienna and began his musical career as a member of the Vienna Boys Choir. His studies on the violin led him to the Juilliard School. He made his debut in 1993 in the Brahms Saal of the Vienna Musikverein with an evening of sonatas. He has been a member of the Vienna State Opera Orchestra since 1995 and joined the Vienna Philharmonic in 1998. Mr. Froschauer is actively involved in organizing and participating in charitable projects through concerts and workshops. He performs on the 1727 violin "Ex Benvenuti, ex Halphen" by Antonio Stradivari. 

Dr. Rubén Gallo is the Walter S Carpenter Jr. Professor in Latin American Literature at Princeton University, where he has taught since 2002. He is the author of many books on Twentieth Century culture, including Mexican Modernity: the Avant-Garde and the Cultural Revolution (MIT Press, 2006, winner of the MLA’s Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize), Freud’s Mexico: Into the Wilds of Psychoanalysis (MIT, 2010, winner of the Gradiva Prize), Proust’s Latin Americans (Hopkins, 2014). He is also a novelist and was published two books on Cuba: Teoría y práctica de la Habana (2017) and Muerte en La Habana (2021). His work has been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, Japanese and Chinese. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and serves on the board of the Freud Museum, Vienna.

Dr. Helga Rabl-Stadler  - To follow

Dr. Oliver Rathkolb, is a Professor at the Department of Contemporary History, University of Vienna (Austria); founding director of the Vienna Institute of Cultural and Contemporary History (VICCA); and Chairperson, Academic Committee, House of European History, Brussels. He was Schumpeter Fellow at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University and Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago. He is author of several books focusing on contemporary history and music history (especially focusing on the Nazi Period and post 1945) published in Czech, French, German and English. Prof. Rathkolb published recently a book on "Carl Orff and National Socialism" and received a distinguished book prize at the Leipzig Book Fair 2023.  He is managing editor of "Zeitgeschichte" (Contemporary History), a top-ranking academic journal, and publishes in the New York Times, the FAZ and Süddeutsche Zeitung in Germany