Ice slabs hang around a singer and pianist as they embark on Franz Schubert's Winterreise. As they venture into the cycle’s twenty-four songs, the music begins to dissolve. Nearly imperceptible at first, it fragments at a rate correlated to two hundred years of glacial ice melt. Momentary gaps widen into chasms, bridged only by orphaned pitch and timbral material. Rare bursts of intact music emerge like stands of old-growth forest—memories of a nature, a winter, that once was.
A third figure introduces an archive of field recordings: glaciers, traffic-clogged highways, electricity’s hum, rushing water, trees in wind, birdsong, human words. Her sounds and the disintegrating music weave together and reverberate through the melting ice.
In postWinterreise, music, sound, ice, and water are cyclically linked in a dramaturgy of environmental and physical transformation—asking who we will become in a world where winter itself is becoming a memory.
Music: Franz Schubert
Poetry: Wilhelm Müller
Glacial Data: Institute for Interdisciplinary Mountain Research
Concept/Bass/Electronics: Andrew Munn
Sound Art/Performance/Electronics: Kat Austen
Pianist and Performance: Elenora Pertz
Electronics and Score Supervision: Jared Redmond
Methodologies and Mise en Scene: Margherita Pevere (consultation)
Artistic Research and Music: Marlene Heiss (residency 2024), Jacob Greenberg (residencies 2023 & 2025)
Sound Design: Kat Austen, Andrew Munn, Samuel Hertz (consultation)
Videography: Daniele Lucchini, RTR Media
Production: RR Sigel, Tanglewood Linde Center, Studio Austen, A Circle