Students will immerse themselves fully in performance in an intensive three-week residency in Vienna, Austria, rehearsing daily and giving several public performances. They will also attend performances and study them from an ethnographic perspective, observing and analyzing the behaviors of the audience and performers, the ways in which the venue affects the performance, and performance conventions that we often take for granted. To effectively undertake this work, students will learn the principles of participant observation, and how to take field notes and write ethnographies. We will also study performance from an historical perspective, examining several of Vienna’s legendary musical premieres, including Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, with the audience’s rousing response that Beethoven could not hear, and Alban Berg’s Altenberglieder that incited a riot in 1913. To better comprehend how the audiences behaved and responded to these and other premieres, we will situate them in their social, historical, economic, and musicological contexts.