MaerzMusik 2025: Towards Sonic Manifolds
MaerzMusik 2025 will take place from 21 to 30 March under the artistic direction of KamilaMetwaly. Marking the 24th edition, organized by the Berliner Festspiele the festival will open on 21 March with “MELENCOLIA” by Brigitta Muntendorf and Moritz Lobeck. Further festival highlights have been published and advance ticket sales have started (today, 9 January, 2 pm). The full program will be announced in February, when accreditation will also begin.
MaerzMusik 2025 challenges dichotomies and dualities by presenting a multitude of multidisciplinary works and concerts that offer new, networked perspectives in music and sound worlds. In addition to verious German and world premieres, invited works are expand to sonic relaties through theatre, electronic and digital experiments, but also movement and dance. Compositions for unique constellations of instruments will be presented in a new light; drum sets, percussions and voice will be made tangible to the ears in all its facets.
The 24th edition of the festival opens with the experimental music theatre show “MELENCOLIA” by Brigitta Muntendorf and Moritz Lobeck at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele in cooperation with the Staatsoper Unter den Linden. In a series of immersive soundscapes, the musicians of the Ensemble Modern and the Apollo Choir take the listeners with them to explore the transformative power of melancholic worlds.
At the Haus der Berliner Festspiele an icon of contemporary music, the American composer and vocalist Joan La Barbara, will present a programme of her own works. Two current compositions that are performed at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele delve deeper into the riches of the percussive arsenal: In the work “POETICA” by Israeli American composer Chaya Czernowin, the solo percussionist and vocalist Steven Schick is accompanied by four members of Les Percussions de Strasbourg, pre-recorded strings and electronics, including an audio immersion of sounds recorded at protests in Paris, Tel Aviv and the USA by the composer.
In his composition “Streik” (Strike) for ten drum sets German composer Enno Poppe explores the sound and narrative spectrum of this special instrument and addresses the challenge of coordinating several “alpha instruments” as an ensemble, the work successfully premiered in Donaueschingen in 2024 and is on its way to Berlin. With its special line-up of two percussion sets and two pianos, the New York-based ensemble Yarn/Wire has been attracting international attention for over 15 years. At MaerzMusik, it celebrates its Berlin debut with four commissioned works by Sarah Davachi, Jad Atoui, Clara Iannotta and Catherine Lamb – exploring the intimacy, focused and micro-listening.
Also appearing at the festival for the first time is the Swiss-based Ensemble Nikel, an international quartet led by guitarist Yaron Deutsch. It presents two performative concerts at Radialsystem: “Minor Characters” by vocal artist and composer Jennifer Walshe and composer Matthew Shlomowitz is a “song cycle for the 21st century” that examines how the internet communicates reality to us with a collage of styles ranging from rock to vaporwave to ASMR influences.
In combination, and performed for the first time in Germany, the composition “limina” by Berlin-based American composer Mark Barden juxtaposes with the solo dance piece “Sensation 1” by American choreographer Ligia Lewis, the work seeks to slow down the perception of time through an immersive, hypnotic sensory environment both physical and embodied. In collaboration with dance artists from Chiang Mai in Thailand the new commission “Drifting to the Rhythms at the Southeast of Nowhere” by Nguyễn + Transitory is being developed. In the German premiere at Radialsystem, five folkloric dancers from Thailand enter into a dialog with contemporary electronic music to transcent sound and movement into new realms of experientiality.
In Ute Wassermann's new comission “The Art of Camouflage” at Sophiensælen, performers use aquariums and mini loudspeakers to create mutations between human and amphibian voices, blurring the boundaries between the binaries of animal/human, object/human and nature/technology. In the subsequent performance “The Urban Tale of a Hippo”, the Ernst von Siemens Award winning Lithuanian ensemble Synaesthesis makes its debut by exploring post-human states through a blend of instrumental and electronic sounds. The multidimensional project was developed by composer Panayiotis Kokoras in collaboration with choreographer Andrius Katinas and set and lighting designer Nanni Vapaavuori.
The QuerKlang project is once again a guest at MaerzMusik and creates world premieres of collective compositions by pupils at Berlin schools. For the second edition of the pilot project QuerKlang+, and in addition to the artistic disciplines of music, theatre and visual arts, the field of dance will now be added to the 21 years of expertise within the programme and the UNESCO model project “QuerKlang – Experimental Composing at Schools”.
Accreditation for MaerzMusik 2025 will start with the publication of the complete programme in February.
We will be happy to arrange interviews with artistic director Kamila Metwaly and with participating artists.
MaerzMusik is funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media. The 2025 festival's sponsors and project partners are: Akademie der Künste, Berliner Künstler*programm DAAD, Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung, Goethe Institut, ircam Centre Pompidou and others.
Media partners: radio3, Deutschlandfunk Kultur, arte, field notes, Monopol – Magazin für Kunst und Leben, Wall und Yorck Kinogruppe