This contribution examines program booklets accompanying a long-running opera production at a major opera house in Western Europe as communicative and educational media through which institutions, curators, and scholars address specific audiences and organize musical knowledge. Using a discourse-analytical approach, it maps historically situated constellations of voice, authority, and learning fields—from listening guidance to analytical and ethical framing—without assuming linear progress.

The study asks who speaks with what authority, which readerships are envisioned, and how thresholds of access are raised or lowered. Program booklets are approached as educational media that not only transmit information but as arenas of participation that shape who can participate in musical discourse. In this sense, they construct or restrict democratic access to knowledge and engagement with art.

The analysis highlights how communicative choices configure participation and narrative emphasis around power, violence, and gender, revealing how mediation practices both reflect and challenge broader democratic and pedagogical aims.

This contribution explores music textbooks as communicative media in which knowledge is not transmitted neutrally but framed, reduced, and canonized. Focusing on upper secondary textbooks from a German-speaking region, it analyzes how women composers and their works become visible and audible in these materials - and how processes of inclusion and exclusion structure students’ access to music history.

Textbooks necessarily distill a vast field of possible knowledge into a limited set of “essentials.” This reduction assigns considerable power to curriculum designers, publishers, and authors in shaping what is presented as relevant, authoritative, and representative. The analysis therefore asks who gains visibility as a “representative figure", how canonical paradigms such as the “great master” narrative define recognition, and what opportunities for identification are opened or denied.

From a democratic theory perspective, the contribution argues that the visibility of women composers is closely linked to questions of participation, diversity, and equality in music education. The recognition of multiple musical voices is not only a matter of representation but also a precondition for inclusive and socially cohesive learning environments. By revealing how educational materials open or restrict musical narratives, the contribution positions textbooks as key media in which democratic values and cultural participation are negotiated within the context of music education.

This practice-based reflection examines the participatory processes involved in a music-theatrical performance that premiered in 2025 at the Beethovenfest Bonn, a major European music festival. The production was developed by collaborating with deaf artists and a local sign language choir, creating a work that centers on mediation as an artistic and communicative foundation.

In partnership with a deaf poet and an access dramaturge, the project explored how music can be translated for deaf audiences and how audience perceptions can be expanded within an unconventional setting. Striving toward an inclusive, barrier-free environment, the project brought into focus how deaf individuals perceive and access musical experience.

Sign language communication opened new perceptual dimensions for hearing audiences, while dialogue with deaf audiences broadened participation. The presentation emphasizes process-oriented collaboration between hearing and deaf communities on equal terms and the creation of shared communicative spaces that challenge conventional separations between audience, artist, and educator.