Stephanie Schroedter 
This anthology is resulted from of a research project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) entitled Bodies and Sounds in Motion, which started in fall 2017 at the Freie Universität Berlin and was completed in summer 2024 at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna (mdw).
A symposium entitled Music as a Field of Experimentation for Movement that took place in September 2020 in a stimulating atmosphere in Strobl at the Wolfgangsee (a lake near Salzburg/Upper Austria) provided a significant initial spark. This spark ignited the decidedly broad spectrum of approaches to the analysis of interrelations between music/sound and dance/movement (on and off stage) presented here. Due to the initially unforeseeable restrictions stemming from the drastic tightening of measures against the increasing number of corona infections, the symposium had to be significantly condensed and was held as a hybrid event: only a few of the invited speakers were able to join discussions on site, the others had to be connected via remote access. Ultimately, a virtue was to emerge from the pandemic’s necessity: as numerous other symposia could only be held online in the following months, it was possible to establish an unprecedented range of participants within the international community on this topic.
The “Music and Dance Study Group” (MDSG) of the American Musicological Society (AMS) created the context in which a further symposium on this topic was held in November 2020. This symposium, which was co-initiated by the editor of this anthology—as co-chair of this study group—, was a key pivotal point in the growth of the project. Against this background, a polyphony of approaches to the interweaving of music/sound and dance/movement emerged, the appeal of which lay precisely in the representation of different, even very divergent positions. It became a declared goal to define a broad range of topics in a field that studies music choreographic phenomena as well as sound-performative phenomena at striking points in order to open up further research perspectives.
I would like to thank all the authors for their valuable contributions to this kaleidoscope of extremely multifaceted approaches to this field, approaches which tend to be more theoretical or more practical, more historically or more analytically accentuated. Stefanie Acquavella-Rauch, Rainer Bayreuther, Jan Hemming, Andreas Münzmay and Melanie Unseld were members of the scientific advisory board for the conception of this anthology and provided valuable advice. A further big thank you goes to those who actively supported the editing of this volume, which was quite challenging due to its scope: Sabine Bayerl, Lisa Gonnella, Michael Schnack and Johannes Daniel Taljaard. Also, I would like to thank the German Research Foundation very emphatically for their generous support of my research project and for their cooperative agreement that allowed me to continue this work in Austria. Another heartfelt thank you goes to the Rectorate at of the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna under the direction of Ulrike Sych for funding the translations of the German-language contributions into English, to the Department for Research Promotion under the direction of Therese Kaufmann and the Board of Trustees of mdw-press for the benevolent acceptance of this volume into the newly founded university publishing house, as well as Max Bergmann and Christian Keitel for the conscientious coordination of all publishing agendas.
In its inter- and transdisciplinary orientation, this volume addresses in particular performing arts at the interface of music, dance and theater. In addition to artists, scholars and art-mediators working in these fields, it is also aimed at students of music and movement education/(eu)rhythmics, whose professional expertise—in composition, choreography and improvisation—is particularly focused on the interweaving of music and movement. Their expertise brings people of all ages, sometimes in cross-generational and inclusive groups, into direct exchange with what is probably the most primal artistic-cultural expression: Bodies and Sounds in Motion.
