The Impact of Festivals on Contemporary Music MaerzMusik

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MaerzMusik

The Impact of Festivals on Contemporary Music

Monika Żyła

Master's Thesis, April 2014

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MaerzMusik

The Impact of Festivals on Contemporary Music

Monika Żyła

s2056186

m.m.zyla@student.rug.nl

Cover picture: Øyvind Torvund & Splitter Orchester in the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, March 17, 2014, MaerzMusik

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This Master's thesis considers the history of music festivals, and specifically of Berlin's MaerzMusik, in order to show the impact of a cultural institution on contemporary music practice. I focus on two main dimensions of the festival, the first relating to curatorship and programming, and the second to its use of public spaces.

European festivals have since antiquity played a central role in shaping culture, as I examine in my literature review. At the turn of the twentieth century, festivals became sites for the performance of contemporary music, appropriating and secularizing a formerly ritualistic event. Festivals have since become diversified, with each artistic niche having its own, regular gathering.

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I. Introduction 1.1. Research aims

In recent decades, contemporary music and the music festival have become inseparable. Festivals have gained a significant prominence in determining a wide range of aesthetic, cultural and social discourses and practices. The rapid growth of contemporary music festivals had a particular role in informing, influencing and altering the conditions and modes of contemporary music production, dissemination and perception. It also reflected the social and political conditions of cultural production and reception. Contemporary music festivals not only contribute to the promotion and popularization of contemporary music outside concert halls; by commissioning new pieces, they also stimulate creative processes and facilitate the expansion of the twentieth century classical music canon. As such, contemporary music distinctively guide and frame the process of cultural production, presentation and participation. However, their functioning does not constitute a solitary endeavour. Rather, they operate within a larger circuit of cultural networks. These networks include such cultural agents as record labels, event programmers, promoters, venues, magazines, publications, and more recently, website, calendars, internet fora and blogs. They all, to various degrees, remain associated with established networks. At the same time, these networks, institutionalized and institutionalizable, constitute legitimization and value-providing mechanisms which regulate and inform the processes of cultural production and dissemination.

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established and institutionalized music venues, marginalizing such music and ghettoizing it to the restricted enclaves of music festivals.

By analyzing the MaerzMusik festival in Berlin, I show the institutional power and agency of a contemporary music festival in the process of framing and redefining contemporary music and impacting artistic practices. In addition, I analyse the role of the festival as actively incorporating and fostering the social and cultural transformation in Berlin after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. As such, I look at the impact of the festival on contemporary music and cultural practices, especially in terms of reshaping values of contemporary music. Further, I consider at the festival as a particular cultural practice responding specifically to the changing political and social climate in Central Europe. I distinguish three important phases of the festival’s evolution: its first, GDR-phase from 1967 to 1989, a second phase marked by the transformation of the festival in the years from 1991 to 2001, and a third phase under a new director from 2002 to 2014. Documents published by the MaerzMusik festival use the notions of “contemporary” and “new,” attempting to overcome the narrow definition of “progressive” music as the festival delineates a more encompassing definition of the “avant-garde” in music.

In this Master's thesis, I consider two main axes. The first axis is related to festival curatorship and programming. Festival curatorship and programming is seen here as a distinct artistic practice relying on establishing connections between various artistic practices, bringing together composers and performers, critically evaluating and framing them into specific ideas or themes. From this perspective, the festival curator, a maker of connections, is like a storyteller or meta-author, as described by Brian Eno (1991). The second axis concentrates on the issues resulting from the functioning of contemporary music festivals in public spaces. Here, I ask questions regarding the functioning and aesthetization of public spaces through contemporary music festivals, and how these events and our exchange of practices influence our understanding of a public sphere.

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and discourses which prove to have multitudinous consequences on contemporary culture and society. However, the significance of contemporary music festivals, and their impact on contemporary music and other related social and cultural practices and discourses, have not been the subject of substantial academic attention.

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1.2. Historicizing and theorizing studies of cultural festivals

In this section of my Master's thesis I compare and contrast general theories regarding cultural festivals. Before I review various theoretical approaches specifically concerning the newly emerging discipline of music festival studies, and particularly my case study: the Berlin contemporary music festival MaerzMusik, I look at the shared features of cultural festivals and their common background in order to provide a better understanding of the ways in which festivals currently operate. Part of this understanding entails conducting an investigation of the commonalities of cultural festivals, rather than merely distinguishing them from one another by genre. Particularly, I look at the historical developments and transformations of cultural festivals in order to trace the development and characteristics of several generations of cultural festivals in Europe in the twentieth and twenty first centuries. Subsequently, I posit possible ways of theorizing cultural festivals as distinct cultural phenomena. Thereby, I summarize several of the most relevant theoretical perspectives which can be accurately related to cultural festivals and which can deepen our understanding of cultural festivals as important gatekeepers and relevant instances of contemporary culture. These theories refer mainly to the structures and templates of cultural festivals by surveying the very format of cultural festivals and the various ways in which the festival can contribute to the expansion and transformation of other interdependent components of cultural festivals.

1.2.1. Historical developments and transformations

As Geoff Stahl remarks, “cultural festivals are part of a lineage tied to carnivals, parades and other large-scale public events and spectacles that are centuries old” (2013, forthcoming). How strong, however, are those ties which link modern festivals with their ancient, medieval or renaissance ancestors? Which elements of ancient festive forms prevail in our times?

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Indeed, the ritual and religious origins of cultural festivals manifest themselves in the ways festivals structure and celebrate collective activities, ascribe meanings to them, affirm collective identities and strengthen societal bounds.

The elements of ancient rituals, that is, the elements pertaining to various religious, ethnic and secular celebrations and rites such as family or tribal events, can also be found in a special character of cultural festivals. In other words, a particularly distinctive but intangible quality and state, which gave rise during various ancient religious, ethnic and secular celebrations, can be still felt at cultural festivals in forms of collective euphoria or a sense of unity between festival attendees. By a special character I mean the very aura evoked by collective gatherings and activities which can be also experienced during cultural festivals, a particular atmosphere of excitement and anticipation. This type of special atmosphere was described by Émile Durkheim as “collective effervescence” (Durkheim [1915]1964, p. 210). In his book The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim portrays the particular feeling of collective excitement as an ultimate expression of a collective unity and consciousness. He writes:

Beside these passing and intermittent states, there are other more durable ones, where this strengthening influence of society makes itself felt with greater consequences and frequently even with greater brilliancy. There are periods in history when, under the influence of some great collective shock, social interactions have become much more frequent and active. Men look for each other and assemble together more than ever. That general effervescence results which is characteristic of revolutionary or creative epochs. Now this greater activity results in a general stimulation of individual forces. Men see more and differently now than in normal times. Changes are not merely of shades and degrees; men become different. The passions moving them are of such an intensity that they cannot be satisfied except by violent and unrestrained actions, affections of superhuman heroism or of bloody barbarism. (Durkheim, 1964, pp. 210-211).

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earliest festivals. The earliest festivals marked important points within the annual cycle of seasons or were crucial for community events including various transformations, transitions or rites of passage of its members. The paradoxical scarcity deriving from festivals’ cyclicity and simultaneously the intensity of their course, that is, the dynamics of festivals appearing very densely programmed, for a short period of time, alludes to seasonal rhythms of ancient rituals and the earliest festivals. In light of Durkheim’s distinction between the sacred and profane, cultural festivals seem to be located within the sphere of the sacred, even as most have lost all connection to religious themes.

Durkheim’s antagonistic spheres of the sacred and profane can be useful in defining the character of modern cultural festivals and realizing their relationship with ritual origins. And although the religious and ritual ties that linked festivals in ancient Greece no longer ground modern cultural festivals, now wholly secularized and detached from any religious context, some characteristics of modern cultural festivals and the collective experiences they evoke still strongly pertain to a quasi-religious experience. For this reason, positioning cultural festivals in the realm of the sacred, that is, on the side of an idealized, transcendental world, helps me contextualize the festival experience of collective euphoria, and restore the perhaps precarious link between ancient rituals and modern festivals.

Despite multiple and complex transformations, cultural festivals remain occasions that structure collective celebrations and entertainment. They continue to represent a systematic mode of social interaction which celebrates collective participation and enhances cultural, local or national identities. Nevertheless, however deeply bound with ancient traditions, cultural festivals are always mirrored in the times and societies in which they took place. Critical academic reflection on contemporary cultural festivals is thus always a reflection which deepens our understanding of our times, culture and society. Simultaneously, studying historic festive forms helps us understand cultures and societies that were once of central importance.

1.2.2. Festivals as civic mirrors: from antiquity to modernity

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same time, ancient festivals, among them the so-called City Dionysia and the Rural Dionysia, were strongly embedded in the religious context as they combined a series of performances of comedies, tragedies, satyr-plays and dithyrambs with religious rituals honouring Dionysus (ed. Kennedy, 2003, p. 455)1_{. Similarly, strong ecclesiastical circumstances marked medieval festive}

forms. On the one hand, their aim was to confirm the power of the Church and reassure its

status quo. This is why medieval festive forms absorbed elements of religious theatre, liturgical

drama, biblical plays, chivalry and allegory, among others, and usually accompanied important religious holidays (ed. Sadie, 2001, p. 735). On the other hand, medieval festive forms actively contested religious power and dominance. Carnival celebrations, rituals deriving from the popular culture of the market place and traditions of folk laughter, for instance, constituted a popular cultural response to the rigid hierarchy of feudal, ecclesiastical and the political systems of that time. Some forms of medieval festivity, and carnival in particular, incorporated various strategies of acting out different drives and impulses normally repressed by political and ecclesiastical mainstream.

Mikhail Bakhtin in his book Rabelais and His World (1984) gives us a large account of medieval and renaissance carnival culture. He describes various types of carnival rituals and strategies of contesting medieval and renaissance officialdom and seriousness. Among the most prominent of them are mimicking and parodying serious rituals, cults and ceremonies. This is because carnivals were concerned with creating a certain two-world condition, where the hierarchical, feudal structure of society was briefly reversed. As an essential element of carnival festivity, reversion was embodied in its distinctive all-inclusive quality, which means that carnival relied to a great extent on collective participation. This in turn, made all its participants a strong element of the carnival spectacle and carnivalesque festivity, against the class and rank distinction which structured medieval societies.

In the early modern era festivals lost their religious bounds. The process of secularization of cultural festivals accelerated especially under the auspices of monarchical absolutism and in light of the rediscovery and increasing influence of classical modes of

1_{This and the next three paragraphs of my Master's thesis owes a lot to the festival entries in The New Grove}

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cultivating arts. As an expression of royal power and deliberate court propaganda, cultural festivals aligned themselves with various royal celebrations such as coronations, weddings, baptisms, ceremonies of allegiance, states visits or entries, peace treaties and funerals. As such, festive forms embraced processions, competitions, pageants, banquets, balls, masquerades, theatrical presentations, regattas, water shows and fireworks (ed. Sadie, 2001, p. 734). The most prominent festivals included Medici festivals in Florence held between 1539 and 1579 to celebrate various marriage alliances, births and carnivals. Their acts featured music, especially madrigals, composed by Costanzo Festa, Francesco Corteccia, Vincenzo Galilei, Piero Strozzi, Alessandro Striggio. Other prominent festivals accompanied, among others, the coronation of Anne Boleyn in 1533, the marriage of Duke Wilhelm V of Bavaria and Renée of Lorraine in 1568, the coronation of Louis XIV of France in 1654, birthday celebrations for Queen Margherita in 1668 and the coronation of Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II in 1790 in Frankfurt (Ibid.).

With the emergence of a new bourgeois class and the popularization of Enlightenment ideals, the function and character of festivals changed. Since then, the traditional patronage of church and court was slowly giving place to the patronage of entrepreneurs concerned with the tastes of middle class audiences. At the same time, festivals reflected an increasing consciousness about the struggles of the lower class. Here, we find a distinctive philanthropic agenda, which corresponded with the ideals of the epoch and a growing social awareness of the plight of the lower classes and disenfranchised. Regular sacred music concert series, for instance the Three Choirs Festival, with The Gloucester, Hereford and Worcester choirs, were organized with the aim of raising funds for widows and orphans (Autissier 2009, p. 22).

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century, the new function of festivals to commemorate great composers or writers has become more and more prominent. In England several commemorative festivals were organized to honour such prominent figures as William Shakespeare or Georg Friedrich Händel, whose works gained much popularity during their lives. According to Anne-Marie Autissier, many festivals were devoted almost exclusively to Händel, among them Birmingham Musical Festivals (1768), The York Musical Festivals (1979), which flourished especially after his death (Ibid., p. 23).

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, as commemorative endeavours cultural festivals increasingly reflected the formation of a national identity. Betraying strong national and patriotic tendencies and mingling them with artistic purposes, commemorative festivals marked the strong need to further national heritages. This is when the multiple Händel, Bach, Mozart or Beethoven festivals proliferated, especially in Germany, but also elsewhere in the world. The festival in Bayreuth organized by Richard Wagner in 1876 pronounced a peak of that movement, with Wagner designing and organizing this festival with the aim of commemorating his own oeuvre.

The twentieth and twenty-first centuries are marked by extraordinary expansion of cultural festivals of all kinds. Their goals, developments and ongoing transformations strictly corresponded with the political and social climates as well as economic models experienced in Europe before and after the two World Wars. National and ideological aspirations from the beginning of the twentieth century, which later evolved into fascist, Nazi and communist ideologies, as well as subsequent East-West antagonisms, strongly affected the profiles of cultural festivals and their objectives. The Venice film festival, for instance, was a well-known platform for Benito Mussolini’s propaganda in the early thirties (Elsaesser, 2005, p. 83).2 After

the Second World War, cultural festivals in Europe became the agents of a new peace. Their goal was to re-establish the cultural life in Europe, and repaired the damage and chaos caused by the war (Autissier 2009, p. 29). Subsequently, cultural festivals become more and more

2 _{For further commentaries on the relationship between cultural festivals and ideologies see:}

Autissier, Anne-Marie. 2009. A Short History of Festivals in Europe From the 18th Century until Today. In The Europe of Festivals: From Zagreb to Edinburgh. Intersecting Viewpoints . ed. Anne-Marie Autissier., 21-40. Toulouse: editions de l’attribut; Paris: Culture Europe International ed.

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international and therefore reflect the increasingly global condition of cultural production and participation.

The evolution of cultural festivals in the context of political, societal and cultural circumstances is a complex and somewhat confusing process. One of the reason results from the fact, as claims Thomas Elsaesser, that “festivals cluster a combination of economic, cultural, political, artistic and personality-based factors, which communicate with and irrigate each other in a unique kind of arena” (2005, p. 89). Therefore, all attempts to depict their various phases and transformations in a linear and logical way necessitate simplifications and omissions for the sake of clear narration. However, the aim of the above subchapter of my Master's thesis was not to deliver a comprehensive and exhaustive historical narrative of cultural festivals. Rather, it intended to give a brief overview of the possible manners in which cultural festivals reflected the structures, organizations and ideals of those societies that created them.

1.2.3. Theoretical approaches

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Thomas Elsaesser claims that cultural festivals and the organizational patterns that regulate them betray a certain degree of standardization (2005, p. 92). He wonders, therefore, what the general rules that would govern the whole system of cultural festivals would be. How could we understand one festival circuit by comparing it to the other? For instance, how could we understand the film festival by comparing it to the mega art exhibitions that tour the world’s major museum. And although Elsaesser is mainly concerned with film festivals, I believe that theories which directly address the phenomenon of cultural festivals of all kinds can help us understand and define with more precision the object of our studies, since they address the problem of the cultural festival comprehensively. This is why, given the degree of standardization of cultural festivals, I aim first to establish the general theoretical account of possibilities and potentialities of cultural festivals in order to understand and theorize their general inherent capacities for growth, development, and in particular, their poetics, dynamics and roles. Therefore I first trace the specificities of cultural festivals, including their marks of distinctions and the cultural niche they occupy, before I discuss my case study, the contemporary music festival MaerzMusik in Berlin.

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augment particular theoretical concepts, which are equally relevant. In short, in this subchapter I give a brief overview of possible ways of studying festivals and I summarize various approaches for theorizing and conceptualizing them.

The first perspective as conceived by De Valck and Loist, sees the content of cultural festivals, this is, its programme in the form of music, film, theatre, literature, visual, digital arts and others, as its focal point. Regarding film festival studies, they claim that “highlighting the film as the element that guides the study reveals a variety of processes taking places around film festivals” (2009, p. 182). This angle of cultural festivals studies is concerned with analyzing festivals as sites defining and influencing the range of artistic practices and discourses. As such, it relies significantly on the analysis of aesthetic discourse and investigates the degree to which festival programming influences art criticism, scholarship, cannons and genre formation. In this perspective, cultural festivals are seen as legitimization mechanisms and as certain power/knowledge apparatuses which by incorporating certain judgement criteria set a particular agenda. Being important gatekeepers, cultural festivals trigger further circulation of particular art pieces, this is, they influence their reception and govern the acknowledgement or recognition of particular artistic movements, styles and stances. Here, festival programming is seen in light of value addition and distinction making. The choices made while programming, that is to say, the modalities and possibilities of the particular utterance achieved through the very gesture of selecting, collecting, accumulating and displaying at cultural festivals, should be analysed. This research perspective is also strictly related to conceptions which combine the study of cultural festivals with reception studies, on which I will later elaborate.

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the promotion of local music groups by the symbiotic collaboration between the national and transnational music organizations such as Buma Stemra and Live Nation” (Ibid.).

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The third perspective of cultural festivals studies sees festival as an institution, that is, an organization with its own plan, profile and demographic. This perspective investigates the festivals’ interconnectedness, that is, its ability to establish various connections and facilitate multiple encounters between different agents and interest groups who articulate various aims and expectations towards the festival. These interest groups, according to De Valck and Loist, consist of industry representatives of various fields, festival guests, event and festival organizers and regular audience members (2009, p. 184). The institutional perspective on cultural festivals channels festival research devoted to organizational structures, political and cultural context of cultural festivals and a variety of funding strategies (Ibid., p. 185).

The fourth axis of festival studies is related to reception and festival audiences, and, as such, is subsequently associated with the first axis of festival studies, festival programming. This perspective of festival studies is interested in assessing the role of cultural festivals in the processes of dissemination of less-known artistic practices and of cannon extension. In other words, it asks questions about the role of cultural festivals in the process of furthering and expanding the circulation of pieces, artworks, shows and performances. As such, it is interested in the mechanisms of receiving those pieces by international audiences outside the festival environment, and, therefore, in the role of how cultural festivals programming define and redefine cannons. Further, this angle of festivals studies analyses the mechanisms of “programming the public”, defined by Richard Fung, which pertains to the ability of cultural festivals to directly influence the constituency of the audience and the influence festival programmes have on their audiences (1999).

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Warsaw Autumn played a similar role for young Polish composers as Darmstädter Ferienkurse (Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music) for the recognition of such composers as Pierre Boulez, Luigi Nono and Karlheinz Stockhausen, the composers representing radical musical modernism in the twentieth century (Homma 1995, p. 245). At the same time, she states that the international reception of the music of Witold Lutosławski, the Polish composer one generation younger than composers mentioned above, was somehow disturbed and challenged by the fact that his compositions were not eagerly included in the programmes of new music festivals at that time, as they did not follow the radical experiments of younger composers, and therefore did not fit new music festival agendas. Lutosławski’s music was perceived as less radical, less avant-garde, less rebellious, and, as Homma calls it, less “timely”, and therefore less spectacular and less interesting for international observers of contemporary music than music created by his radical twenty years old younger colleagues in post-Stalinist Poland (Ibid., p. 251).

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One of the prominent advocates of the “performative turn” in architecture, Bernhard Tschumi, argues in his book Architecture and Disjunction that “architecture - its social relevance and formal invention - cannot be dissociated from the events that happen in it” (1996). Later on, he claims that “the popular dissemination of architectural images through eye-catching reproductions in magazines often turned architecture into a passive object of contemplation instead of the place that confronts spaces and actions” (Ibid.). Tschumi sees architecture as something fluent and changeable, shaped according to those events taking place in it. In a similar manner, Adam Krims, in his book Music and Urban Geography (2007), discusses music in a broader urban context. This is a relevant context for cultural festival studies since urban cultural festivals, among others, can provide architecture with ‘’spectacle’’ (ed. Sassatelli 2008, p. 82). Clearly, Tschumi’s way of looking at architecture goes hand in hand with Manuel Castells’ theories of the “space of flows” and “timeless time” (1996). Elsaesser strongly associates these theories, and particularly Castells’ notions of “temporal islands”, “discursive architectures” and “programmed geographies” with modern festivals (2005, p. 103). Also the notion of heterotopia coined by Michael Foucault, on which he elaborated in his lecture “Of Other Spaces. Heterotopias”, can be directly related to cultural festivals. This notion proposes a way of thinking about culture which extends our understanding of the distinctive way in which such cultural activities as festivals structure and alter our sense of time and space (1967). And although I further contextualize these theories later in the thesis, I briefly mention them here since they are relevant for the spatial analysis of cultural festivals as they help to explain the dynamic and complex processes resulting from the interplay between festivals, their spaces and time.

In general, the axis of festival studies dealing with spatial elements helps us understand associations with urban spaces, and thus the mixing of the global and the local. I elaborate on this axis of cultural festivals particularly in the fourth chapter where I discuss the role of MaerzMusik in the process of producing, appropriating and transforming public places in Berlin.

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calls this angle of cultural festival studies “a historical missing link and a theoretical challenge” (2005, p. 83). On a theoretical level, he does not link film festival studies with the traditional concepts of film studies. Rather, he refers to modern system theories (Ibid.). Among them, he recalls the auto-poetic feedback loops as delineated by Niklas Luhmann, mentioned already above in Manuel Castells’ theory of the “space of flows” or the theories of complex adaptive systems gathered around the notions of “emergence”, “attractions” and “self-organization”. This angle does not deal with individual festivals. Rather, it investigates the phenomenon of cultural festivals at a more general level as an interconnected network within particular historical developments (De Valck, Loist 2009, p. 187).

1.3. Music festivals studies – literature overview

In the previous subchapter I delineated six axes relevant for the studies of cultural festivals. These general angles of framing the studies of cultural festivals refer to festivals as cultural, social and artistic phenomena. They are relevant for the analysis of festivals featuring any media, including music, theatre, the visual and digital arts, and literature. However, every type of cultural festival motivates a unique set of issues and questions, and consequently stimulates a delineation of both differentiated and specified area for research. These areas are closely related to, if not entirely determined by, the particular type of artistic and creative practices, or genres represented at festivals. Therefore cultural festivals should be analysed in their particularities, with strong emphasis on their individual conditions, specificities and localities, as they constitute distinct cultural phenomena shaped by different socio-cultural mechanisms and traditions.

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music, but also in their different methods and resulting forms of epistemes. At the same time, I am aware that it is extremely difficult to distinguish rigidly between these disciplines and research perspectives as research areas overlap or intersect. Therefore, it is important to keep in mind that rigid disciplinary divisions often lead to various misconceptions resulting from oversimplifying complex processes and dynamics related to different musics and their diverse cultures. This is also important because the nature of music festival studies is highly interdisciplinary and embraces various perspectives.

Literature devoted to music festivals in musicology is mainly concerned with historical narratives regarding classical music festivals and their historical documentation. Musicological perspectives of music festivals studies are interested in both historical and contemporary music festivals. This results mainly from the scope and methods of musicological research and is related to an important facet of historical research in musicology, this is history of musical reception. For instance, in his book on the history of Three Choirs Festival, Anthony Boden emphasizes a historical frame for Western festivals by highlighting the three British cathedrals of Gloucester, Hereford, and Worcester since the first half of eighteenth century (1992). Regarding contemporary music festivals, Gianmario Borio and Hermann Danuser devoted four volumes to the historical documentation of The Darmstadt International Summer courses for New Music (1977). Initiated in 1946 by Wolfgang Steinecke, the courses were regarded as the

locus classicus of post-war modern music (Fox 2007, p. 1). They adopted a somewhat extended

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and informative account of the historiographies of new music, providing an institutional history of new music festivals and tackling historiographical problems in the new music scene. See for instance surveys and documentations by Hentschel et al. (2007), Hilberg, Vogt (2002) and Häusler et al. (1996) are representative of this corpus.

Moreover, the role and impact of music festivals in facilitating aesthetic developments in modern contemporary music is also relatively prominent in musicological literature. In particular, emphasis is placed upon the impact of classical music festivals on the development of a modern musical language, style and other aesthetic values and ideals. Darmstädter Ferienkurse für Neue Musik is especially well-documented and researched in terms of new music practices and techniques. For it contributed to the development and dissemination of such modern musical techniques and styles as twelve-tone technique, serialism and new complexity. As a result, the group of composers who were involved with the Darmstadt courses in the 1950s helped to develop this particular type of modern musical language which is now referred to as the Darmstadt School (see Fox 2013; 2007; 1999, Henze, Spencer 1998; Iddon 2011). Composers of the Darmstadt School include Luigi Nono, Bruno Maderna, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez, all of whom incorporated serial techniques in their musical language. Also publications such as Die Wittener Tage für Neue Kammermusik: Über Geschichte

und Historiografie aktueller Musik provides an informative account of the development of a

new music language (Hentschel et al. 2007).

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emphasizes such qualities as timbre, texture, articulation, dynamics and movement, and treats them as basic formative elements, which is to say as necessary constituent parts of any given musical piece.

Classical music festivals are relatively well-researched for, as Marco Santoro argues, they are the most institutionalized types of music festivals (Santoro et al. 2008, p. 78). Due to the considerable hegemony of classical music and opera conceived as “highly legitimized forms of art sponsored by social elites and often funded by public institutions”, classical music is also relatively well represented in academic studies of music (Ibid., p. 77). This is especially prominent in countries with strong musicological traditions like Germany, Austria, the United States, Great Britain, and Poland. However, musicological literature tends not to treat the phenomenon of music festivals as a principal object of inquiry. Rather, music festivals are seen as vehicles and platforms for promoting music and disseminating new musical ideas. As such, the role of music festivals is evaluated from both the historical point of view and from one conceptualizing music festivals as facilitating and propagating the various developments of musical language, as well as generating stylistic groups. From the historical point of view, music festivals are often analysed as being responsible for rejuvenating historical music pieces which are under-represented in classical music cannons and irregularly programmed in central classical music institutions such as major concert halls and philharmonic symphonies.

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its claims to cosmopolitanism by analyzing the complexities and dynamics of ethnic identities and differences in the light of processes of cultural exchange and hybridization (Jaspal, Cinnirella 2012; Heynes 2005).

The global perspective is also a prominent approach in popular music studies. This perspective advocates the analysis of the social and cultural dynamics between the global and local elements triggered by music festivals and helps us understand them as complex cultural processes related to more distant influences such as cultural tourism or the festivalization of society and cities (Bertho 2009). This perspective encourages, for instance, the analysis of the relation between music festivals and specific subcultures and music scenes. In particular, the theoretical perspective of globalization allows us to investigate music festivals’ impact on the production of social and cultural identities which exceed and transgress traditional national and cultural borders. This perspective is particularly relevant for music festivals which facilitate the formation and functioning of various identity-based groups of people who reveal similar musical tastes and aesthetic sensibilities, but who are geographically dispersed. In their chapter Dowd, Liddle and Nelson analyse the Yaddo Music Festival, a classical music festival in the United States, the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival featuring music made exclusively by women, and Vans Warped Tour featuring SkatePunk music, in light of specific interactions between people within the festival space who share a common aesthetic and taste preference (2004). Referring to these festivals, the characteristics of “intensity, boundary work and impact” have been delineated through which the authors investigate the relation between music festivals and a given scene such as the types of commitment expressed by festival attendees, the impacts of the pilgrimage-like nature related to festival attendance as well as the influence and development of values expressed within a particular music scene surrounding music festivals (Ibid.).

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collectivities are based on fragmentation, fluidity and lifestyle preferences. In his article on the relationship between youth, style and musical taste, Andy Bennett uses the Maffesolian concept of neo-tribalism in order to provide a framework for the dynamics of the socially constructed, fluid and shifting nature of youth’s musical and stylistic preferences, that is, the constitutive elements of various subcultures (2000). The notion of neo-tribes can be beneficial to the study of music festivals by providing an alternate way of thinking about their dynamics and how they constitute patterns of music consumption, resulting in different types of social relations. As indicated by Marco Santoro, participants in specialized or alternative music festivals find the basis for their sociability and sense of community in opposition to mainstream culture and music, and by doing so, they underline the role of music festivals in the process of delineating the social and cultural boundaries and divisions (Santoro et al. 2008, p. 83). For this reason, in addition to contributing discussions concerning issues related to globalization and cosmopolitanism, popular music studies provide perspectives on music festivals which deepen our understanding of the dynamics of collective social experiences as triggering alternative identities through music festival processes and affiliations.

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II. Mapping new music festivals in Europe

2.1. The narratives of innovation: what is new music?

The term “new music” usually refers to contemporary high-art music, that is, high-art music of the twentieth and twentieth-first centuries. New music is often a synonym for modern music. That is to say, it signifies music, which draws on the notion of innovation, novelty and originality in terms of musical language, modes of expression and general aesthetic construction, which brought new music “toward the verges of the aesthetic experience” (Albright 2004, p. 11). In his definition of new music, Alastair Williams states that “new music as a category refers to a repertoire driven by a historical dynamic to develop new material and techniques” (Williams 1997, p. ix). This dynamic means a particular energy with which the new “seeks”, “explodes”, “negates”, and commits “violence” to established orders, conventions and paradigms as conceptualized by Theodor Adorno (Metzer 2009, p. 4). New music has often been associated with the constant pursuit of technical and expressive sophistication, or rather the transgression and violation of the conventional, and seen as resulting in a radical extension of music’s sonic universe.

The condition of new music as an artistic endeavour driven by progress was above all central to modernist music in the narrow sense of this word, which is to say, to the progressive music of 1889-1910. According to Carl Dahlhaus’ account of Modernism, as summarized by Daniel Albright, music from that period was marked by several elements. First of all, it was marked by “comprehensiveness and depth”, as in the case of the symphonies of Gustav Mahler or the symphonic poems by Richard Strauss, which aspired to comprise the whole world’s music and alluded to the wide range of extramusical human experience (2004, p. 6). Secondly, it was pronounced by “semantic specificity and density” with a strong emphasis on chromaticism, details, musical onomatopoeia and heterogeneity characteristic for music of Richard Strauss and Charles Ives, for instance (Ibid., p. 7). Finally, it was marked by “extension and destructions of tonality” which was “strongly related to the Expressionist desire to investigate subtler, more intimate, more powerful emotions that those expressible by diatonic means (Ibid., p. 7).

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scenes as their vitality “comes from the ways in which those idioms have extended impulses of modernist styles from the early twentieth century” (Metzer 2009, p. 1). This means that new music provides a continuation of modernist ideals of progress and newness characteristic for the progressive modern music of 1889-1910. This also means that modern music can be seen as reaching far beyond the mere harmonic novelty and progressive modes of expression as Modernists from the turn of the century understood them, and that the notion of innovation can actually indicate a more general and universal aesthetic pursuit of reaching and transgressing the “ultimate bounds of certain artistic possibilities” (Albright, ibid., p. 11). This is an important perspective, as modern music can often be exclusively associated with the advanced radicalisms of The Second Viennese School and its most extreme representative Arnold Schönberg.

The category of new music is not unique to one historical period, nor did it define a singular aesthetic paradigm. Rather, as a retrospectively-assigned label that was supposed to indicate new tendencies in high-art music, it has recurred throughout the history of music. In classical music historiography the category of new music was employed to classify various artistic and musical stances, trends and currents which were said to revive renovation and innovation of musical language, styles and techniques. This means that the aim of innovation and renovation associated with the twentieth century avant-garde movements is not new at all. Indeed they can be found in the classical music of fourteenth, seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Innovation and renovation in classical music resulted in the emergence of new currents, movements and schools which were said to facilitate new cultural and musical practices. This indicates that the notion of new music always drew on certain more universal dynamics of subversion and negation towards tradition and established styles and canons. As such, new musics, being conceptual labels coined by music historians and theoreticians to frame certain artistic trends, always represented “cultures of subversion” and “a state of rebellion against the cultural mainstream”, as formulated by Robert Adlington, which entailed a dynamic of repetition (2009, p. 3).

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a colloquial label has been granted a posteriori to various historical artistic movements, and has framed discourses of originality and novelty. The notion of avant-garde is associated with conceptions of art involving formal experimentation and which are seen to result in emancipatory potential (Adlington 2009, p. 4). As a historiographic category, avant-garde denotes a certain set of divergent and heterogeneous phenomena that form a single entity, ensemble or configuration (van den Berg 2009, p. 15). This is why, when employed as an umbrella term to identify particular trends in music and arts in general, the notion of avant-garde designates artistic movements with similar relationships to modernity, novelty and originality.

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According to Oxford Music Online, in the fourteenth century the new style of music was introduced in France and Italy. Known as Ars Nova, it proclaimed the expansion and transformation of the musical language of the previous style referred to as Ars Antiqua (from Latin: Old Art), and introduced new techniques, such as isorhythm, and new forms, such as the madrigal (see Fallows “Ars Nova” in Oxford Music Online). In the seventeenth century, the

Nuove Musiche was a style whose name derived from a collection of pieces for solo voice

accompanied by improvised instrumental basso continuo written by Giulio Caccini in 1602 (see Dean “Le Nuove Musiche” in Oxford Music Online). Basso continuo, or figured bass, represented a newly emerging technique of instrumental accompaniment, which relied on performing the harmonic figures written above the bass line. Its function was to provide a harmonic accompaniment to a singular melodic vocal line. The collection of songs titled Nuove Musiche incorporated the new style and techniques introduced by the above mentioned Florentine Camerata, a group of Italian composers, musicians, intellectuals and aristocrats. Shortly after the publication of the collection, the style proliferated and was adopted by most humanistic circles in Italy (see Palisca “Camerata” in Oxford Music Online; Palisca 1985; 1989). In general, this movement called for the simplification of dense polyphonic textures of the sixteenth century and introduced new, more transparent monodic style. This style, unlike the sixteenth century complex polyphony, prioritized the comprehensibility of the text used in songs over the complexity of musical textures which was accused of obscuring the meaning of text. Later on, the new monodic style evolved into the stile rappresentativo, the style characteristic for early opera, and the stile concertato, the style that strongly influenced sacred music after 1600.

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represented by the music of Johannes Brahms (Clapham 1971). These tensions led to vivid aesthetic disputes between proponents of new musical aesthetics and forms, and traditionalists defending an autonomous and independent logic of instrumental music. Austrian conservative music critic, historian and aesthetician, Eduard Hanslick played a prominent role in these disputes to argue in favour of traditional, pure and autonomous musical materials, and strongly opposed the new ideas of programmatic music (Hanslick [1885] 1974; Hall 1967; McColl 1997).

These examples show that the category of new music was always defined not only by a particular relation it had with its own times. It was also defined by the critical attitude, negation and distancing of itself towards its past. This attitude was reflected, among others, by various more or less radical attempts to break with the past in music in order to become modern, that is, to stay in sync with the present times. As I indicated above, such acts of distancing and disconnecting from the past achievements and developments of music were characteristic not only for the twentieth or twenty first century avant-garde music, but also for other avant-garde movements of the past. As such, new music formed a sort of cultural-historical topos, which persistently and consequently reappeared in different epochs, inverting existing paradigms and providing a shift of emphasis of expressive modes and aesthetic idioms.

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with present times, to grasp the spirit of their own times. In other words, they tried to find a way to define their own contemporariness.

What does it mean, however, to be contemporary and to inscribe oneself in the present, as these historical movements desired? Giorgio Agamben, in his chapter “What is Contemporary?” provides a series of philosophical reflections on the nature of contemporariness (2009). He sees contemporariness as a special experience of time where one tries to position oneself in a certain perspective. This experience of time relies on “peculiar discontinuity that divides it according to its relevance or irrelevance” (Ibid., p. 47). For Agamben, to be contemporary connotes a condition which by relating to and by defining present times incorporates disconnection, anachronism, out-of-jointness, noncoincidence not only with the past, but also with the present. Therefore the contemporary for him means a condition between a “not yet” and “no more”, a certain intangible distance or caesura between the past and the present. However, given the temporary nature of its medium, music was always embedded in the presence. As Daniel Albright claims, “music has always been the most temporally immediate of the arts, the medium most sensitive to the Now” (2004, p. 1).

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In this way, new music betrays a scientific nerve in its urge to be permanently innovative and self-reflective. As it openly manifests its theoretical awareness, it attaches a great value not only to aesthetic reflection, but also to those pre-compositional ideas that achieved the greatest significance and their most radical phase in dodecaphony and serialism. As such, the notion of novelty, innovation and originality played a crucial role in modern music and resulted in the assumption that “technical liberation can lead to artistic liberation (...), that tinkering with the basic material of compositional technique (...) is a delight in itself, an end itself, and required no justification (Albright 2004, p. 10). This in turn, deprived classical music of social and political relevance and deepened its social distance (Botstein 2004, p. 45).

The alienation of contemporary music was addressed by Michel Foucault in the essay “Contemporary Music and the Public” where he asked: (...) “this music which is so close, so consubstantial with all our culture, how does it happen that we feel it, as it were, projected afar and placed at an almost insurmountable distance” (Foucault et al. 1985, p. 7). Some of the arguments formulated by Leon Botstein could provide an interesting perspective on that matter:

(...) the emphasis on autonomy, structure and independent logic of musical materials created a negative contrast to the successful synthesis in the popular world between commercial viability and political and social relevance; classical music could not shed its anti-democratic character as an opaque, if not obscure, preserve lacking clear social or political relevance. (Botstein, ibid.)

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stratum within it” (ibid., p. ix). This however, had led new music to withdraw into aesthetical escapism (Rebhahn 2013, p. 11).

The current profound decline of public interest in classical music and, following it, marginalization of high-art music, as well as its elitist, snobby, old-fashioned and socially distant image, finds its source not only in the changing aesthetics, idioms and ideals of classical music (Botstein 2004, p. 44). The ongoing problem with classical music constitutes a much more complex and intertwined issue resulting from various philosophical, sociological and economical factors. Of primary concern here is how classical music detached itself from everyday human experience. And although Robert Adlington, following the arguments formulated by various theoreticians of the avant-garde such as Peter Bürger (1984) or Gabriel-Désiré Laverdant (1968), carefully examines the long-term legacy of the musical avant-garde and shows how it was instrumental for social and political change (2009), the alleged separation of classical contemporary music from worldly affairs is strongly rooted in a Western high-art tradition. It is also rooted in the way scientific and academic discourses about classical music were shaped since the late eighteenth century.

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Furthermore, due to the development and unification of musical notation, the abstract nature of instrumental music was seen as analogue to the development of language and writing, at least this is how Nikolaus Forkel in his “Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik” from 1788 conceived of it (Tomlinson 2003, p. 36). This comparison strongly informed a philosophical reflection on music, which in turn laid the foundations for the process of decontextualization of music, this is, its detachment from its means of production, performance and reception. Since then, due to the separation of classical music from its performative context through the possibilities offered by musical notation seen as “preliminary script for performance”, musical notation was bestowed a particular significance (Ibid.). As “the locus of the truest revelation of the composer’s intent”, musical notation became itself an object of scientific scrutiny and as such became a primary object of analysis in musical historiography (Ibid.).

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Recent discussions concerning new music raise many critical voices accusing music of either being mere craftsmanship, or representing a “self-referential sonic fetishism” available to a limited number of academically trained new music experts and appealing only to an initiated social elite (Rebhahn 2013, p. 1; Adlington 2009, p. 4). New music was blamed for not being able to reach beyond a demonstration of the way it was made, and therefore of having no means for sustaining its aesthetic substance (see Rebhahn 2013; 2012). Moreover, some critics accused new music compositions of resembling each other. They saw new music as becoming an increasingly conventional, homogeneous idiom. Composer Martin Schüttler, for instance, said that “There is a certain framework, which directly impacts the composers’ aesthetics, which limits and restricts the creative process early on and inhibits several ideas. The result is a

standardized music, which runs totally counter to the self definition of New Music” (Rebhahn

2013, p. 8). New music currently undergoes many transformations, and faces many criticisms. This is why it is important to re-evaluate its positions, goals, artistic directions and its institutional structures of legitimization. Besides questioning the methods of its functioning, new music critics and commentators reflect on such issues as the valorization of new music, its social relevance and political significance (Rebhahn 2013, 2012; Austin and Kahn 2011; Adlington 2009, Botstein 2004).

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2.2. Typology of new music festivals

The previous subchapter linked the notion of new music with negation and transgression of musical tradition. Consequently, these reversed established orders and paradigms, brought marginal musical ideas, styles, techniques and practices to the fore so they could be perceived as “new”. Simultaneously, they tested the limits of aesthetic, expressive and musical experience. In the twentieth and especially twenty-first century, new music, however, also triggered different dialectics. It no longer exclusively marked so much the tensions between innovative and traditional, as it underlined the tensions between contemporary and historical. This is why the notion of new music became extremely operative after 1945, as it connoted music, which was made “now” by living composers and therefore music that was literary “new” (Metzer 2009; Albright 2004; Williams 1997). This shift of emphasis testified to the fact that “innovation” ceased being the only prerogative of modern music and that modernism was becoming more inclusive and able to encompass even contradictory musical practices such as minimalism or a new simplicity.

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which led to the formation of a classical music canon, the certain routine of repeating the narrow array of classical music repertoire evolved, and which at the same time resulted in the gradual exclusion of newer repertoire (Botstein 2004, p. 51).

Revival movements marked a change of music’s functioning. From accompanying royal or ecclesiastical celebrations, music was increasingly perceived in terms of an autonomous art, which could be detached from its original meaning and destination. This means that music could be appreciated for its beauty, made and performed for its own sake and presented in specially designed spaces able to enhance its quality through acoustics. Shortly after, it appeared that music composed by living composers was mostly marginal as it increasingly discontinued serving any religious, political or social purposes, and concert halls were filled with musical relics of the past, resembling museums of historical compositions rather than presenting music composed by living composers (Botstein 2004; Albright 2004).

As Leon Botstein notices, “the twentieth century (...) witnessed the death of classical music as an active contemporary cultural form, and its rebirth as a museum catering to a limited public” (2004, p. 49). Botstein here underscores the gradual withdrawal of classical contemporary music repertoire from the programme of various classical music institutions and its replacement with classical music composed in the past. Indeed, due to the radical alteration in the patterns of classical concert life alongside with the shifting roles of concert performers and performing organizations, institutions like concert halls and opera houses acquired the dominant role of being solely the guardians of the past since their programmes relied almost exclusively on classical music canon (Ibid.). As the curators of a museum of performing art, these institutions relegated new music and living composers to the margins of contemporary live performance, recording and broadcast (Ibid., p. 50).

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new attitudes as listeners, that is to say, that they sought something completely different from beauty derived from the harmonical symmetry of the tonal system. This happened because the beauty of new music was no longer to be sustained by traditionally recognized concepts of melody and harmony. In other words, the beauty of twentieth century art music discontinued being seen in terms of pleasant harmonies and catchy melodies. Rather, it started relying significantly on such elements as the complexity and intricacy of its musical language as well as the on the novelty and originality of its techniques and structures. Later on, the categories relating to musical language or applied techniques emerged and new music was classified according to notions such as serialism, new complexity, new simplicity, spectralism, micropolyphony, music conctrète instrumentale, expressionism new objectivity, hyperrealism, abstractionism, neobarbarism, futurism and many others (Albright 2004; Rebhahn 2013).

Embracing such a profound paradigmatic shift in art music aesthetics, often shocking for inexperienced listeners, which were parallel to fundamental institutional transformations in politics of performing new music and shifting social and political role of the composer and performer, new music slowly adapted a new institutional or organizational model which provided a new setting, place and situation for musical performance. In light of these various processes resulting in the transformation of cultural sphere, it was the music festival which constituted a new and more suitable event genre for the performance of new music. The music festival was able to constitute an effective distribution channel for new music. This happened because new music appropriated festival’s carnivalized space, its more spontaneous and ad hoc character and its spatio-temporal circuits together with its mythological, religious and ethnic context which in turn enabled multiple collaborations and creative encounters as its presentation center. Since the festival format allowed for the performance of new music in a more laboratory-like situation, the new modes of listening and performing could be tested. Consequently, the new relations between audience, composers, performers, music critics and organizers emerged and new modes of institutional collaborations were established.

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music as aktuelle musik, as it is in the case of the contemporary music festival MaerzMusik in Berlin for instance, or zeitgenössische musik, as in the case of Weimarer Frühjahrstage für Zeitgenössische Musik. In the Netherlands the new music festival November Music in ‘s Hertogenbosch framed new music as muziek van nu. Muziekvan.nu is also a name of a Dutch online blog dedicated to classical contemporary music in The Netherlands whose editorial team offers an event calendar, reviews, interviews with composers, ensembles, curators and event organizers, and other articles which aim to cover and comment upon classical contemporary music life in this country. By defining contemporary music as music of the now, music of the

present, new music festivals indicated that all modernist postulates of innovation and novelty,

the whole musical radicalisms of twentieth century avant garde movements have been neutralized and that the modern music could also challenge the boundaries between art and the rest of human experience such as industry, domestic life, politics, and related social issues (Albright 2004, p. 12). It indicated that the modernist dictatorship of innovation have been replaced by postmodern ideals which cherish eclecticism and validate all styles in tendencies like bricolage, polystylism and randomness (Ibid.).

2.3. Specialization and diversification of new music festivals today

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extrinsic criteria through which contemporary music can be categorized. The most prominent and popular programming criteria are either medium, or genre. These criteria constitute the intrinsic qualities of new music. Conversely, there are extrinsic categories of new music, which exist outside strictly understood musical realms. These categories refer to the specific region or country of origin of new music, a particular composer, or a certain extra-musical topic guiding and framing a festival programme. Such festival topics or themes may refer to various societal, political, literary, artistic, or other extra-musical aspects. The programming strategy of compiling a festival programme according to a certain extra-musical key has its own consequences and bestows a certain extra-musical meaning and quality to contemporary music. This means that festivals invest contemporary music with cultural, political and social context, on which I elaborate in the next chapter.

Starting from the intrinsic categories of new music according the new music festivals programmes, I first discuss new music festivals according to genre, source of the sound or style. New music festivals which underline the source of the sound or the way sound is generated in their programme can be roughly divided into two categories of new music festivals: electronic music festivals and traditional instruments festivals. “Traditional instruments festivals” here connotes festivals which are devoted to new music repertoire intended for those instruments whose forming process ended in the second half of the eighteenth century, that is, among others, violin, viola, cello or piano. These festivals programme contemporary composed music ranging from the repertoire for solo instruments, via the repertoire intended for string quartets or chamber ensembles and finally to the repertoire intended for larger ensembles and symphonic orchestras. For instance this division manifests itself in the following new music festivals: The CTM: Festival for Adventurous Music and Arts in Berlin and the TodaysArt festival in Den Haag on the one hand, and The Wittigen Festival of Contemporary Chamber Music, on the other side of the spectrum. The former two festivals are exclusively devoted to electronic music and digital culture in general, while the latter programmes new music pieces written for chamber ensembles.

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Münchener Biennale in Germany can be seen as such a genre-specific festival. However, this programming practice is not very common due to the inconsistency and general disagreement in terms of genre division in contemporary classical music, as well as due to the strong dubiousness formulated by contemporary music composers and producers towards a classical music tradition to which a genre division pertains. This in turn destabilizes the relationship between classical contemporary music and genre tradition, and explains why most of the contemporary music festivals tend toward mixing various genres of contemporary music. Moreover, certain festivals broaden their music programme in a much more extended way, such as by incorporating also visual arts, film, theatre or literature, like in the case of the performing arts festivals Holland Festival and contemporary music festival Borealis in Bergen, Norway. These festivals employ the strategy of presenting new music among other forms of art in order to offer a more diversified and all-encompassing program. Such mixed-arts festival programmes are believed to attract a broader audience as they constitute a more efficient means of preventing new music, in contrast to the perceived ghetto of specialized audiences consisting of initiated insiders and professionals. Last but not least, some festivals are wholly dedicated to a certain style of contemporary music, as in the case of the World Minimal Music Festival in Amsterdam and Eindhoven, The Netherlands. This festival is devoted to minimal music, or music introduced by American composers associated with the New York School such as La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass. The festival itself programmes minimal music compositions juxtaposed with their current consequences deriving from both classical and more popular music worlds.

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Finland, which exclusively stages new Finnish music. Finally, the programme of particular editions of new music festivals can be solely devoted to one composer. Contemporary music in Milano, Festival di Milano Music, is one such instance of monographic festivals. Each edition of this festival is dedicated one composer. In 2012 its programme was devoted to Italian composer Nico Castiglioni, in 2011 to Helmut Lachenmann, the German composer associated with

musique concrète instrumentale, in 2010 to French spectralist Hugues Dufourt and, in 2009, to

Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu.

Such programming criteria related to particular intrinsic or extrinsic qualities of new music such as instruments, genre, style, composer or country can of course be successfully substituted with a particular theme or subject given to a festival program. Festival themes usually refer to areas of human and artistic activities including cultural, social or political phenomena. The new music festival practice of providing the festival’s programme with a particular theme is especially relevant in the case of festivals which do not particularly want to narrow their repertoire and programming choices to the above mentioned criteria, and yet still want to guide their audiences by compiling a consistent and cohesive festival programme filtered by a certain idea or concept. For instance, the contemporary music festival Borealis in Bergen, Norway, comes up every year with a theme according to which its programme is compiled and, what is more important, according to which new works are commissioned. The programme of the forthcoming 2014 edition is composed around the theme “Alchemy: Ritual, Magic and the Supernatural”. As a part of the festival’s programming policy new pieces are commissioned around this theme, like for instance the lecture performance “Paralectronoica” by Felix Kubin which was commissioned for the forthcoming edition of the festival. The piece is very explicitly related to the theme of the festival as it examines the correlation between electricity and paranormality in the context of sound media archeology. In the last few years the programme of the Borealis was arranged in relation to such subjects as: “The End” in 2013, “Protest” in 2012 and “Tripping and Light Fantastic” in 2011, to mention just a few.

The Impact of Festivals on Contemporary Music MaerzMusik

MaerzMusik

The Impact of Festivals on Contemporary Music

Monika Żyła

MaerzMusik

The Impact of Festivals on Contemporary Music

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