Seeking 20 students to be the first participants in The Wandering, a new immersive classical music experience.
The prompt
Yale Schwarzman Center invites undergraduate, graduate, and professional school students to share creative responses to the following questions:
- How might we find wonder, and thus love, in strangeness and difference?
- How might we create community across distance?
- How might we queer the past to imagine possible futures?
To embrace the breadth of students' experiences and creative expressions, we are seeking well-crafted and thought-provoking music, film, photography, poetry, dance, and other genres of multimedia storytelling. Interdisciplinary submissions — projects relating to more than one major or discipline — are strongly encouraged. Prior arts experience is not a submission requirement.
For more inspiration…
“For long years I felt torn between the greatest grief and the greatest love…For long, long years I sang songs. When I would sing of love, it turned to pain. And again, when I would sing of pain, it turned to love. Thus love and pain divided me.”
This quote by Franz Schubert, from his 1822 letter entitled, “My Dream,” serves as the inspiration for a new genre defying classical music experience that bridges the divide between virtual and in-person theatrical experiences. One interpretation of Franz Schubert’s quote suggests that his dream was a coded rejection, however symbolically, of the heteronormative society that his father embraced (Solomon, 1981). Schubert’s struggle for self-understanding begs the question, how might we find wonderment in worlds outside of those which we currently inhabit? Flash forward to 2021, society still labels difference as strange, more so than wondrous or beautiful. Some might argue that survival demands queerness, “the rejection of a here and now” (Muñoz, 2009, p.1).
In a time of unprecedented social, political, environmental and biological transformation, we seek to reimagine the boundaries of wonder, love and longing in order to imagine possible futures.
The Selection Process
The project creative team members will select 20 participants after a full review of all submissions. The creative team will look at the following criteria:
- Relevancy to prompt
- In a stage of development that could benefit from constructive feedback
- Diversity of aesthetic influences
The Reward
Twenty students will be selected to participate in a virtual pre-launch of The Wandering, a multi-media classical music experience coming this spring. Members of the student cohort will not only experience the work in advance of its world premiere, they will also meet with each other and the creative team through facilitated discussions and one-on-one meetings intended to foster interdisciplinary collaboration. Ultimately, students will gain insights from industry professionals and their peers on how they might further develop their submissions into more fully-fledged works — or to envision new interdisciplinary collaborations.