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.
postWinterreise merges artistic practices from chamber music, sound art, theater, ecological art, and artistic research. The work has been shaped by contributions from:
Concept/Bass/Electronics: Andrew Munn
Sound Art/Performance/Electronics: Kat Austen
Pianist/Performance: Elenora Pertz
Electronics/Score Supervision: Jared Redmond
Methodologies and Mise en Scene: Margherita Pevere (consultation)
Artistic Research and Music: Marlene Heiss (residency 2024)
Music: Jacob Greenberg (residencies 2023 & 2025)
Dramaturgy: RR Sigel
Sound Design: Kat Austen, Andrew Munn, Samuel Hertz (consultation)
Videography: Daniele Lucchini, RTR Media
Production: RR Sigel, Studio Austen, A Circle
Supporting and presenting institutions represent the breadth of disciplines and passions that inform postWinterreise. Thank you to our growing community:
postWinterreise is an initiating project of the multi-disciplinary production hub A Circle. A Circle is a fiscally sponsored project of Fractured Atlas. Please support our work on postWinterreise with a donation. All donations go directly to artistic work.
Contributions for the charitable purposes of A Circle are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law (United States).
