Will you Play your Hurdy-Gurdy to my Songs? A Mobile Configuration of Questions at the End of Schubert’s Winterreise Lecture with video documentations, presented within the framework of the Ringvorlesung lecture series “Mobile Gefüge. Zum Verhältnis von Kunst und Wissenschaft im 19. Jahrhundert” (Mobile Configurations. On the Relationship between Art and Science in the 19th Century) during the 2005/2006 winter semester, as part of the cooperation Schwerpunkt Wissenschaft und Kunst ("Focus area Science&Art") being carried out by the Paris Lodron University of Salzburg and Mozarteum University Salzburg.

5:00 p.m. – 6:30 p.m
Venue: Faculty of Law of the University of Salzburg, Toskanatrakt, lecture hall 208

One of the bridges between present-day arts and science is the parameter of experimentalism, which was (re)discovered in the Romantic era. In the meantime, this parameter has brought a great deal of “mobility”, which is another way of saying potentiality, to the relationship between arts and science: open search processes, bifurcation with various options, categories of indeterminacy, imprecision and uncertainty. The resulting relativism has increasingly put the spotlight on phenomenology, in other words, on manifestations and the forms that they take.

The music and dance theater project Willst zu meinen Liedern Deine Leier drehn? (Will you Play your Hurdy-Gurdy to my Songs?), developed with students of Mozarteum University Salzburg in the academic year 1994/1995, is an example of such mobile processes. Excerpts from documentations on film enable us to see and hear divergencies in connection with the physical and audible socialization of the performers. In nearly all the scenes, the piece seeks possibilities for communication with the “other”, the cultural outsider, through body movement and sound.

Note: Willst zu meinen Liedern deine Leier drehn? – quoted from Der Leiermann by Wilhelm Müller and Franz Schubert, the last song in the poetry collection and Lieder cycle Winterreise of 1827

Project Page: Will you Play your Hurgy-Gurdy to my Songs?