The Work

Oakland, California · May 11, 2019

The Winter's
Journey
Project

Franz Schubert · Wilhelmina Müller · and the women of Oakland

Venue Resurrection Lutheran Church, Oakland, CA
Performed by Gwendolyn Kuhlmann, soprano
Voices Mothers living through housing instability
Coverage KQED

Schubert's Winterreise is a cycle about a man walking away from everything he loved into an uncertain winter wilderness. It was written in 1827. Its emotional landscape turned out to be exactly right for what the women of Oakland needed to say in 2019.

Coverage KQED

The parallel

A 19th-century song cycle
about heartbreak meets
the mothers of Oakland.

Schubert's Winterreise — the pinnacle of the German art song repertoire — follows a wanderer through the stages of heartbreak, using the winter landscape as a metaphor for grief and the slow arrival of spring as the metaphor for working through it. It is one of the most emotionally precise pieces of music ever written.

While working in housing advocacy and community organizing in the Bay Area, I kept hearing its emotional landscape in the stories of the mothers I was meeting. Women navigating housing instability with their children. Carrying loss with remarkable dignity. Teaching their kids that they matter in a world that is not telling them that. Working through something the rest of society didn't fully understand — and finding their way to the other side of it.

The parallel was so exact it felt like the piece had been waiting for them.

Schubert's journey

A wanderer in winter, moving through grief, loss, and alienation — and the slow, uncertain arrival of something like hope.

The first half

The women's own stories — the experience of housing instability, of raising children in crisis, of finding dignity inside impossible circumstances.

The second half

Their perspective on the wider forces — the systemic and societal conditions keeping families in desperate situations — and what it will take to change them.

The arrival

Their own healing. Their own vision of what it looks like when society gets this right. The spring, arrived at last.

The form

How the voices and the music were woven together in the room

01

The clip

Before each song, the audience heard a 60–90 second recorded clip of one of the women telling her story. Each clip was chosen to dovetail precisely with the emotional territory of the song that followed — so that the transition from her voice to Schubert's music felt not like a cut, but like a continuation.

02

The projection

Translations of each song's text were projected on a screen behind me as the clips played — so the audience could make the connection between what the woman was saying and what Schubert was about to sing, without being buried in their programs trying to find the right page. The connection was immediate and visible.

03

The performance

The concert was staged — but lightly. At its heart, it remained an art song recital in form: one voice, one instrument, a room, a cycle of songs. The classical container was intact. What changed was what it was holding.

04

The arc

The two-part structure of Winterreise mapped onto the two-part structure of the women's testimony — personal experience in the first half, systemic analysis and healing in the second. By the final song, the audience had traveled the full journey: from crisis to wisdom, from winter to something that felt like spring.

The people at the center of society's hardest experiences know the way out.
We just need to listen.

This is what I learned making The Winter's Journey Project — and it is what I have confirmed in every project since. The women of Oakland did not need the concert to explain their situation to them. They needed a room where their own understanding of it could be heard. The classical music tradition gave that understanding a container large enough to hold it. The audience didn't just feel moved. They were educated, by the people who actually knew. That is something a lecture or a documentary cannot do in quite the same way. Only art does this.

The two halves

First half

The personal

The women speak about the lived experience — housing instability, raising children through crisis, finding dignity in circumstances that strip it away, teaching their kids that they matter in a world that is not teaching them that. Schubert's wanderer walks beside them, song by song, through the same emotional territory. By intermission, the audience has been inside the experience, not merely told about it.

Second half

The systemic — and the way through

The women widen their lens: the societal forces, the policy failures, the conditions keeping families in desperate situations. And then — the healing. Their own perspective on what it will take for society to get this right. The cycle ends not in winter but in the first warmth of something opening. The audience leaves not with despair but with the specific knowledge that the people closest to the problem have already worked out the answer.

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