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. These 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:
music: Franz Schubert
poetry: Wilhelm Müller
bass: Andrew Munn
piano: Elenora Pertz
live electronics: Jared Redmond
video design: Daniele Lucchini
cyclical sound environment, data sonification and scoring: Andrew Munn
field recordings: Ludwig Berger (glacial recordings), Sabrina Bühn, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Kilian Jörg, Daniele Lucchini, Andrew Munn.
neck piece research, design, and creation; aesthetic consultation: Margherita Pevere
technical development & score supervision: Jared Redmond
musical & conceptual thinking: Kat Austen, Jacob Greenberg, Marlene Heiß, Andrew Munn, Elenora Pertz, Jared Redmond
environmental data: Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule in Zürich, Institute for Interdisciplinary Mountain Research at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Centers for Environmental Information*
technical advice: Samuel Hertz, Timo Kreuser, Phønix16, Sebastian Reuter
performance producers: Qingqing Ji (Shanghai Concert Hall DigiMuse), Natsumi Kirscher(Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel), Armands Sils (Sansusī Festival)
creative producer: RR Sigel
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).
