Walzersymphonie

It’s Just Noise 
Johannes Brömmel (DE/AT) 

How can acoustic chaos be organized, and when does it become music? With It’s Just Noise, Johannes Brömmel (Mozarteum University Salzburg) explores acoustic perception amid today’s flood of information. Using the AI Ricercar, he created five overlapping music layers from fragments of Strauss’s Donauwalzer – a musical chaos. From this, he shaped a piece between noise and structure: an experiment in how much Strauss’ captivating music must be distorted to disappear behind a wall of information. 

Dialog im Walzer (Dialogue in the Waltz)
David Bock (DE/CH) 

With Dialog im Walzer, David Bock (Zurich University of the Arts) explores the exchange between human and AI creativity in composition. In collaboration with the AI system Ricercar, he pushes limits by regulating information density, establishing additional rules, and deliberately incorporating errors to investigate how AI results can influence and even inspire us in our creative processes. The outcome is a hybrid dialogue between human and AI, pursuing innovative creative expression. 

Scherzo
Carolina Caballero-Bastidas (CO), Matthias Guntner (AT)

With Strauss’ deep affinity for dance music and its link to current trends as a starting point, Caballero and Guntner (University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna) interact with the AI system Ricercar to imagine Strauss’ approach to dance today. Throughout the process, input and output blurred into a continuous, reciprocal exchange: a feedback system sustained by each’s divergent creative processes. Every part of Scherzo was thus shaped by both AI and human, in a challenge to such duality. 

Der Flederfrosch
Danielle Lurie (IL/DE) 

Paraphrasing Strauss’ famous operetta Die Fledermaus, Danielle Lurie’s 
(University of Music and Theatre Munich) short semi operetta casting scene, Der Flederfrosch, explores AI as a mirror of society. The exaggerated bias and discrimination in the casting scene are also reflected in the music: the AI system Ricercar, trained on classical European music, was challenged with non-European musical traditions. The result is a humorous symbiosis between man and machine. 

Organum Ex Machina 
Yurii Riepin (UA/DE)

Artificial intelligence is the “deus ex machina” of our time, a driving force behind the emergence of new forms of sound. With the AI system Ricercar, trained on the music of Johann Strauss, Yurii Riepin (University of Music and Theatre Munich) enters into a dialogue between industrial sounds of the 19th century and electronic soundscapes of the present. The organ piece combines tonal motifs of the past with modern sounds, in a field of tension between tradition and innovation. 

Zwischen den Welten (Between worlds)
Micha Fazeli-Pour (DE/AT)

In his piece, Micha Fazeli-Pour (University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna) explores musical and symbolic contrasts. Starting from a piano excerpt by Arnold Schoenberg – an aesthetic opposite to Strauss – he used the AI system Ricercar to develop material combining Strauss’s tonality with Schoenberg’s contrapuntal density. In the tension between march and waltz, density and lightness, the work does not resolve opposites but brings them into joint motion.

Eine Polka für den Fortschritt (A polka for progress)
Fabian Blum (DE)

In his compositional work, Fabian Blum (University of Music and Theatre Munich) explores industrial noises of the 19th century and the present day, thus building on Johann Strauss’ musical explorations of mechanical and motor sounds.