New Music Forum 2024

At the centre of the fifth edition of the New Music Forum 2024 is the composer Fabio Nieder, who embodies the European interfaces – he comes from a German family, but spent his youth in Trieste, Italy, where a significant Slovenian minority also lives, and now spends a lot of time in the remote Romanian mountains. It is therefore not surprising that the festival and the programme revolve around the question of the local and the global, i.e. the relationship between traditional/folkloric and artistic culture. Nieder understands folklore as the common property of a traditional society in which music, labour, religion and rituals were usually tightly integrated into a single cultural complex tied to a specific geographical area – such music thus bore the signature of the local culture. This changed with the invention of musical notation – the notated pieces bore the inseparable signature of an individual. At the same time, this original music increasingly lost its ties to a specific place of origin, so that the contemporary music of 20th and 21st century modernism paradoxically became a kind of “world music” – its methods and materials seem to be interchangeable in every part of the world. The curator’s central concept is thus linked to the music in which composers of “notated” music have “appropriated” folk music.

The New Music Forum 2024 presents a broad spectrum of contemporary composers from different generations, cultural backgrounds and stylistic positions. The seven concerts will focus on different instrumental and vocal ensembles, ranging from larger chamber concerts to smaller chamber ensembles and site-specific installations. The concerts will be complemented by a masterclass in composition, a musicology seminar and a special concert dedicated to children, as well as public talks before the concerts, allowing the art and ideas of the New Music Forum to reach a new and diverse audience. The New Music Forum 2024 in Ljubljana is supported by the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation.

Further information:
ljnmf.org

Dates

November 23 – 30, 2024
Various locations, Ljubljana