To call a festival Sacrum Profanum is to invite extremes. Kraków’s international festival of new music, founded in 2003, lived up to that promise from the outset, presenting a programmatic range that stretched from Cat Roberts’ organic electronica to Mariam Rezaei’s industrial turntable scratching, produced on her fiercely percussive decks.

Yet the festival’s most striking gesture took place far from the concert halls. The Swiss ensemble Alponom performed Stephen O’Malley’s You Origin four times: twice at sunrise and twice at sunset. First, the musicians were positioned in five pairs on a mountain outside the city. The distant roar of traffic slipped between the tones as alpine horns built deep, cyclical resonances. Passing dog walkers – and their dogs – stopped and listened.

For a long time, we measured the vitality of the Danish composing scene by its ability to present the newest of the new. I’ve stood talking to concert programmers who laughed indulgently when I mentioned a young composer by referring to a work that was three or four years old: »That’s an eternity ago«, they said. »He doesn’t write like that anymore – now it’s much better; he thinks so himself too!« And then the look that says: You’re a dinosaur, mate. I actually rather liked that arrogance.

But recently something has shifted. At the genre organization Art Music Denmark, the project »GENSTART« (RESTART] has been launched to help artists get works revived that are no longer brand new. And all around, this return of old acquaintances is flourishing: when the otherwise forward-looking SPOR Festival celebrated its 20th anniversary last year, it did so in part with works by Simon Løffler, Sandra Boss, and Ea Borre that had already been performed at the festival before. Why buy new when you can reuse?

On the Faroe Islands, opera is a contemporary art form and an intensely national one – more inextricably bound up in ideas of nationhood than anything happening right now at La scala. You can write that unequivocally, when there are only two Faroese operas to discuss. 

The second of them has just been born. Regin smiður arrived amid the deep snow of a Klaksvík Christmas in the final days of 2024. Its predecessor, also composed by Sunleif Rasmussen, dates from 2006. Í Óðamangarður adapted a story by the nation’s bard, William Heinesen. It was deemed »a work of haunting originality and beauty« by a critic dispatched to the North Atlantic review it, all the way from The Times in London.

Two decades later, music stands with knitwear and candle-smoke waterfalls as one of the Faroe Islands’s most recognized commodities. Eivør’s voice unfurls itself over film and gaming soundtracks and Rasmussen’s scores are broadcast by BBC orchestras. Also new – very new – is Varpið, the Faroese answer to Reykjavík’s Harpa: a hybrid of proscenium theatre and shoebox concert hall whose metal-box housing leers at an angle over Klaksvík’s main street, like part of a satellite fallen from space.

It’s 5:20 p.m., and I am boarding the train to Kyiv. I don’t yet know what to expect. Two weeks earlier, I accepted – without hesitation – an invitation to a study visit organised by the Mieroszewski Centre and the Ukrainian Institute. I checked the news before leaving: Kyiv is considered relatively safe, but the country is at war. Russian forces have been attacking the Sumy and Kharkiv regions, with reports of destruction and casualties appearing day after day, the number of attacks having almost doubled in early April. A stormy meeting between Trump and Zelensky at the White House has just taken place. It strikes me that although I know something about the war, I have no clear sense of how the attacks actually unfold. Could something happen to me on the train? Probably not – certainly not – there have been no such reports so far. But who knows…?

»Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to its own vomit.«

No, this is not a quote by Marie Koldkjær Højlund. She does know its author, Samuel Beckett, who in 1930 published an essay on Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, pointing to the power of habit to trap people in uncomfortable patterns. Højlund is an associate professor of sound studies and thus has a broad academic frame of reference. Still, she does not know this particular quote when I (naturally, a little way into our conversation) cautiously introduce it at the small café on Jægergårdsgade in Aarhus, which – like many other mornings – forms the setting for Højlund’s itinerant working life.

Prologue – Warsaw, September 2025

»We only rehearse on farms and in hotels,« says Eivind Buene as he lands in Warsaw. As usual for this band – Tværs – Kullberg’s hotel room is transformed into a rehearsal space, this time with a view of the Palace of Culture in the Polish capital. And after the concert at Opera Warszawska, 400 Polish audience members drift singing into the night – the melody was written on a dusty roadside somewhere in Louisiana.

Tværs began as an idea dreamed up by cellist Jakob Kullberg. Two years earlier, he had persuaded composers Niels Rønsholdt and Eivind Buene, guitarist Jakob Bangsø, and the Copenhagen-based Canadian Bradley Axmith to join him on a road trip through the American South to explore a single question: Could they become a band?

Aldrig har jeg før befundet mig så yderligt på Refshaleøen, når jeg altså ikke har været på Copenhell: Jeg er nærmest helt ude ved den nordlige ende af den, da jeg en smule tøvende går rundt om nogle tilforladelige bygninger for at finde det øvelokale, som den taiwansk-danske slagtøjsspiller og komponist Ying-Hsueh Chen har sat mig stævne i. Heldigvis regner det ikke, selvom himlen er meget grå, og heldigvis er det ikke rigtigt koldt endnu, selvom der er små stænk af kulde i novemberluften. 

I netop samme øjeblik som min telefon pludselig synes, den skal udsende en alarmlyd, bliver jeg råbt an fra et nærliggende hus. Med sine store briller, stor hue og en forventningsfuld attitude kommer Chen mig i møde. Vi har mødtes en enkelt gang før, men det ligger otte-ni år tilbage, og vi når aldrig at tale om det, fordi så meget andet tager over. 

Det burde sige sig selv: Ja, kvinder komponerer opera. Fantastisk opera. Og det har de gjort igennem hele kunstartens 400 år lange historie. Skulle det alligevel komme bag på nogen, skyldes det formentlig, at ældre opera komponeret af kvinder stort set aldrig bliver opført herhjemme. 

Bladrer man i Dansk Komponistforenings nylige Repertoirestatistik for sæsonerne 22/23 og 23/24 er der særligt ét diagram, der skriger til himlen: kønsfordelingen i opera komponeret før 1994. Her fremgår det, at mikroskopiske 0,3% af den samlede operaproduktion på 982 timer og 12 minutter er med en kvinde som komponist. Lidt over tre timers spilletid kunne det blive til – cirka det samme som en halv Wagner-premiere. 

Andreo Michaelo Mielczarek (Seismograf):

How are your ears? How did 2025 sound like to you?

Bastian Zimmermann (Positionen):

This year, something essential shifted. For obvious reasons, I finally moved from Spotify to Tidal – which meant leaving behind years of saved albums and playlists and starting from zero. It brought back a memory from when I was seventeen or eighteen, when a hard drive crash erased my entire archive of ripped CDs from the jazz club where I used to play. A loss that felt both devastating and strangely liberating.

There is something refreshing in starting over, but also something painful. Maybe that’s why I began buying vinyl again – selectively, intentionally – replacing albums that have accompanied me for years, even decades.

The first half of the year was shaped by my own festival. I barely traveled, instead immersing myself in the sound worlds of the artists at Musik Installationen Nürnberg. 

A few years ago, I threw myself into the adventure of learning to play the church organ. In conversations with friends about this project, I have often reflected on how the organ is an instrument that at once appears extremely niche and utterly commonplace. For many, it is surrounded by a certain mysterious aura, and yet air is blown through its pipes Sunday after Sunday in every corner of the country, and organ music keeps a multitude of musicians occupied. The organ exists on a paradoxical threshold between the esoteric and the democratic.

It is precisely this paradoxical threshold that the Organ Sound Art Festival manages to activate – a task the festival has undertaken for the past ten years within the walls of Koncertkirken in Nørrebro, Copenhagen. Just as organs – at least the large ones – are integrated into the space in which they sound, as a kind of architecture within the architecture, so too does the Organ Sound Art Festival seem conceived specifically for Koncertkirken’s room. Koncertkirken itself occupies a threshold between the sacred function to which the former church space points back and the secular venue it houses today – a venue that also actively explores a fruitful dialogue between early music and new experiments.