In Germany, the far right has long propagated anti-immigrant (Nann et al., 2024) and anti-Turkish (Bayır, 2025) ideologies, while instrumentalizing queer-feminist agendas to legitimize racist discourses (Boulila et al., 2025; Hajek & Dombrowski, 2022). All of this collectively poses serious threats to fundamental democratic principles and underscores the growing importance of these issues within music education. Even though migration and gender studies within music education discourse exist separately, and intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989) has been increasingly discussed in Germany (Dunkel et al., 2022; Grow et al., 2022), research on LGBTQ+ individuals with a Turkish-German migration background remains very limited. Therefore, the present study explores how artists who identify under the LGBTQ+ umbrella and move between Turkey and Germany navigate their voice(s) as a site of identity, oppression, and resilience.

The paper focuses on the Berlin-based actress-singer Hayal Kaya, originally from Ankara, Turkey. She is the first trans actress to play a chief inspector on German television (Bakmaz, 2024) and has also appeared in the highly successful Netflix series Woman of the Dead, for which she contributed to the soundtrack as a singer. Drawing on semi-structured interviews, document analysis, and music analysis (using the toolbox by Müller, 2022), and employing content analysis (Mayring, 2022), the study identifies emerging themes such as how her voice becomes a tool for resistance, the challenges she has faced across different axes of oppression—class, gender, body, and race (Winker & Degele, 2009, 2011)—and the strategies she has developed to survive and thrive. Using Kumashiro’s (2000) anti-oppressive education framework, as adapted to music education by Bengonzi (2015), the paper concludes with implications for music education.

Music education is a central arena for cultural and societal negotiation. Teaching music history in particular raises questions of representation, belonging, and cultural participation, and is therefore closely linked to democratic education and diversity. Teachers decide which musical narratives are conveyed, which perspectives become visible, and which are implicitly excluded. While music education discourse has revealed culture-essentialist and normative tendencies aimed at reproducing conservative value systems (Blanchard, 2019; Vogt, 2019), the perspectives of teachers have so far received little empirical attention, apart from a single case study (Grow & Roth, 2024). At the same time, greater diversity in music history curricula is discussed (Walker, 2020).

The presented study investigates the practical knowledge teachers draw upon when teaching music history and how this knowledge is connected to implicit concepts of culture. Based on narrative interviews with eight teachers from secondary schools in Germany, the study applies the Documentary Method (Bohnsack, 2021; Nohl, 2010) to reconstruct teachers’ orientations and to develop a sociogenetic typology that sheds light on the genesis and reproduction of these orientations.

The results reveal different frameworks of orientation ranging from knowledge-centered and canon-oriented to experience-based and participatory conceptions of music history learning. The identified connections between teachers’ orientations and their experiences in higher music education highlight how normative ideas of culture and musical value are reproduced in teacher education. The presentation discusses how teaching music history can be understood as a practice of cultural participation and explores the implications of these findings for diversity-sensitive and democracy-oriented music teacher education.

Eight decades after the Second World War, the question remains how schools, as central institutions of education, can foster democratic dispositions through contemporary forms of memory work (KMK 2014). Artistic and aesthetic approaches enable historical learning not only cognitively but also emotionally and participatorily (Drechsler 2024; ZE 2024; MK 2022; Brauer 2021).

Against this backdrop, the project Vom Schauplatz zum Hörplatz (From the "visual site" to the "sonic site") was carried out in 2025 at the University of Würzburg. It was designed for school students, university students, and the interested public, aiming to make historical sites of Würzburg’s National Socialist past experientially accessible as „Hörplatz“ (sonic site) through musical practice.

Theoretically, the project drew on concepts from history education (learning at historical sites, performative memory work, participatory history education; e.g., Bundschuh et al. 2024 & 2022) as well as on music education discourses (community music, intercultural music education; e.g., Hömberg 2022; Barth 2022 & 2000).

Three subprojects were realized: a public choral event at the deportation memorial at the central railway station, a concert format with participatory elements in the Neubaukirche, and an intercultural concert with a photo exhibition in the Würzburg Residence.

The summative evaluation, based on input/output-oriented self-evaluation, considered organizational, content-related, and pedagogical dimensions. Results indicate that the chosen approach holds considerable potential for student-centered civic education: in particular, the aspect of artistic self-empowerment and self-discovery in relation to historical sites provides significant points of connection for future initiatives. Here, music functioned not merely as a bridge to historical contexts but opened spaces of experience and decision-making that would not have emerged without the interplay of historical site and musical performance.

The presentation outlines the theoretical and project-specific background and discusses the opportunities and limitations of this approach within the school context.