Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s association with Schubert’s Die Winterreise stands out among performer-repertoire pairings, both for its nearly 50-year duration and his reputation as ‘the’ iconic singer of the cycle. While substantial attention has previously been devoted to both assessing and shaping this reputation and the creative practices that sustained it, much has relied upon hermeneutical musings about performance events by critics and scholars. Music performance is ephemeral by nature, posing challenges for engaging with auditory phenomena thereof in concrete ways. The performance and digital turns in musicology enable an expanded milieu for interdisciplinary examination of recorded performances of this cycle and the creative partnerships involved in them, while also encouraging reflection on the habitus of musicological praxis.
This presentation offers an overview of digitally-enabled and/or -enhanced approaches to assessing Fischer-Dieskau’s creative history with Die Winterreise. Following the convention of page-to-stage, new usage of philology—inclusion of performer annotations—results first in construction of an “Interpretations Edition.” Second, encoding extracted performance data within the MEI ecosystem enables machine-readability for computational approaches and data preservation. Data-driven analyses of each of the (recorded) performances and their relations across time and contexts then enrich probing of musical creation and consumption. Alongside these efforts, consideration of the unique art world of Fischer-Dieskau and his network of collaborators offers sociological perspectives on the functioning of this art world. Together, these methods point toward an updated conceptual and methodological framework for assessing how this distinctive example of a singer spending so long with one work continues to inform modern understandings of both.
Biography
Dr. Joshua Neumann is a research fellow in the Centre for Digital Music Documentation at the Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur | Mainz, Germany, where he is currently running a multi-year project focused on Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau's long association with Schubert's Die Winterreise. His research focuses on digital preservation, representation, and integration of written and audio musical sources and the ontology of musical works, with a particular emphasis on how individual and collaborative creative processes frame musical practice and reception. In addition, his research examines data standards, editions, methods, and infrastructures in digital and analog spaces from sociological perspectives.