MaerzMusik 2026: The programme has been published
The contemporary music festival, of the Berliner Festspiele and directed by Kamila Metwaly, brings together international positions from music, sound art, performance, experimentation, improvisation, and installation. The 25th edition of MaerzMusik will open with Georg Friedrich Haas' immersive composition 11,000 Strings. The various facets of the human voice is the focus of Meredith Monk, this year's winner of the Berlin Grand Art Prize, and of the new project by vocal artist and composer Juliet Fraser. In the 10 festival days (20 to 29 March) the 28 concerts will feature a total of 16 world premieres, including a new work by Ellen Fullman for her Long String Instrument and the JACK Quartet, and a commissioned composition by Laure M. Hiendl for Klangforum Wien. The Ensemble Dedalus from France and the KNM Berlin will unfold hybrid soundscapes between instrumental music and electronics. Exhibitions, installations, performative formats, and the festival finale I AM ALL EARS enable new sound experiences beyond linear concert settings. The Library of MaerzMusik supporting programme combines artistic positions with discourse in various discussion formats.The festival programme is online as of today, ticket sales start at 2 p.m., and accreditation begins.
MaerzMusik 2026 is an open artistic space where listening has
long been a way of being together and sound can be understood as a laboratory for new perceptions and new forms of coexistence. This year's festival edition opens with Georg Friedrich Haas' large-scale microtonal composition 11.000 Saiten (11,000 Strings). Fifty pianists and the Klangforum Wien surround the audience and create an immersive sound field. The Berlin performance at MaHalla deliberately ties in with the work's conceptual origins in a Chinese piano factory and combines music, architecture, and industrial history.
With the ensemble concerts, MaerzMusik explores archipelagic ways of thinking that incorporate poetry, memory, and various forms of spatiality – between instrumental and electronic music. Klangforum Wien presents works by Gerhard Stäbler, Laure M. Hiendl, and Luxa M. Schüttler. To mark its 30th anniversary, the EnsembleDedalus presents three portrait concerts with “open scores” – with works by Éliane Radigue, Catherine Lamb, Peter Ablinger, and Pascale Criton. The Ensemble KNM Berlin is dedicated to cyclical and ritualistic formats in contemporary music. The works of Fang-Yi Lin, Tine Surel Lange, AnA Maria Rodriguez, and Zesses Seglias combine myths with personal memories and transcendent experiences.
The human voice in all its facets is another focus of the festival programme. On the occasion of the presentation of the Berlin Grand Art Prize to Meredith Monk, the composer, performer and interdisciplinary artist will give a concert on the main stage of the Festspielhaus, in a trio with Katie Geissinger and Allison Sniffin. In her current programme, Lament: a ritual of letting go, Juliet Fraser develops a performative sound ceremony that combines historical laments, new compositions, and physical movement into a contemporary farewell ritual.
The “strings” theme is already present in the opening and continues in the world premiere of Ellen Fullman's new composition for the Long String Instrument she developed and the JACK Quartet, intertwining pure tuning, spatial resonance, and movement. Pelle Schilling's LongStringInstallation enters into a sonic dialogue with Fullman's impressive instrument and opens up unusual listening and viewing perspectives in the garden of the Festspielhaus. At the same venue, double bassist Florentin Ginot dedicates a solo concert on nature in the post-Anthropocene with works by Carola Bauckholt and Lou Kilger. Composer and cellist Okkyung Lee shares her improvisational practice with Berlin based musicians and premieres her new performance Aurora (Mesophase), developed as part of her DAAD residency.
Using electronics or artistic approaches that incorporate them, MaerzMusik explores sound as a social and political practice. Louis Chude-Sokei and Jan St. Werner present No Nation Left But the Imagination, an audiophile essay on listening, migration, and social boundaries. Other projects address entropy, cybernetic systems, gender, and physicality, including performances by Vanessa Porter, Viola Yip and Ken Ueno, as well as installation works by Luxa M. Schüttler. The festival finale I AM ALL EARS, co-curated by Wojtek Blecharz, transforms the Haus der Berliner Festspiele into a walk-in sound architecture and radically questions concert formats that have become standard practice.
MaerzMusik 2026 will take place from 20 to 29 March at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele, MaHalla, Akademie der Künste, Radialsystem, silent green, KW Institut for Contemporary Art, SAVVY Contemporary, Spore Haus, Berlin University of the Arts, St. Elisabeth Church and Parochialkirche.
Forming collaborations and rethinking artistic practice will remain central in the years to come, particularly as society’s relationship to culture evolves. As a response, the festival continues to present works that question, expand, and redefine what it means to be human, inviting artists, collaborators, and audiences to imagine new possibilities for the future.
– Kamila Metwaly
Sponsors & Media Partners
MaerzMusik is supported by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.
With the kind support of: Hauptstadtkulturfonds, Österreichisches Kulturforum, Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung, Canada Council for the arts, Polish Institut Berlin, Fond Podium Kunsten/ Performing Arts Fund Netherlands
Festival partner: Akademie der Künste, Auswärtiges Amt, Berliner Künstler*programm des DAAD, Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler Berlin, Radialsystem, silent green, SAVVY Contemporary, KW Institut for Contemporary Art, Kulturbüro Elisabeth, Universität der Künste Berlin, kultkom, MaHalla, Spore
Medienpartner: radio3 vom rbb, Deutschlandfunk Kultur, arte, Monopol – Magazin für Kunst und Leben, WALL und Yorck Kinogruppe.
Press Contact
Photos of the projects and artists can be found in the press section. Please feel free to contact us if you would like to conduct an interview.
Anna Hinz, Patricia Hofmann
presse@berlinerfestspiele.de
+ 49 30 254 89 223