The Open Access University Press of the mdw mdwPress is the open access academic publisher of the mdw–University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. With this press, the mdw aims to increase the visibility of its research in all its diversity. Free from commercial motives, mdwPress makes research results freely accessible and reusable for the interested public. The quality and …
A Musical-Gestural Perspective Barbara Lüneburg Introduction In this article, I introduce the reader to the artistic research project “Embodying Expression, Gender, Charisma—Breaking Boundaries of Classical Instrumental Performance Practices,” funded by the Austrian Science Fund in the program PEEK (project no AR 749), and explore first case studies from the pilot project that preceded it. As described in the research …
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 …
Birgit Abels is professor of cultural musicology at Georg August University Göttingen. Her research interests include neo-phenomenological and Pacific Indigenous approaches to the performing arts. The geographic foci of her research are the Pacific Ocean, North India, and the Southeast Asian Island world. Her books include Sounds of Articulating Identity. Tradition and Transition in the Music of Palau, Micronesia (2008), …
Exploring the Field in Artistic Practice and Theory Stephanie Schroedter At first it seems self-evident that music has something to do with movement: it is unavoidable and unmistakable that we move when we make music. On the one hand, we make movements that are required to produce a sound: for example, the pressure that must be exerted on a …
Sophie Benn The film Le Piano irrésistible (1907), produced by the studio Gaumont and directed by Alice Guy Blaché, depicts a situation that would have appealed to working-class Parisians grappling with an increasingly dense and noisy city: two movers set down an upright piano in an empty apartment, guided by its new occupant.1 The tenant takes off his top …
Choreography and Music in Igor Stravinsky’s Early Ballet Compositions Christoph Flamm There is no question that Igor Stravinsky not only significantly enriched the dance theater of the twentieth century, but also fundamentally transformed it. However, as his fame grew, he increasingly absolutized the importance of the music in his ballets, and at the same time relativized or completely devalued the …
Igor Stravinsky’s Choreodrama The Rite of Spring in the Context of the “Theater Reform around 1900”1 Leila Zickgraf The Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev’s company Ballets Russes broke with conventions and presentation principles of classical ballet. This was apparent at the latest on 29 May 1913 with the premiere of The Rite of Spring2—a ballet (as it is generally termed) created jointly by Igor Stravinsky, Vaslav …
Jeremy Coleman 1 First performed in Paris, 1911, the “burlesque” ballet Petrushka stands today as a central work of the modernist canon and an unruly assemblage of artistic media that eludes any attempt to define it simply in terms of a single “author” or as a work independent of its original production. In this chapter, I focus on Petrushka’s …
