Klang Festival has turned 16. This annual pulsating offshoot of Copenhagen’s musical life, dedicated to avant-garde statements, experiments, and intricate compositions, has outgrown its teenage phase. The ties to its founding parent, Athelas Sinfonietta – which for years defined the agenda as its opening act – have now been severed.

And the festival wears its independence well. It feels freer, unbound, and manages to present 25–30 concerts for both children and adults, crossing genres and sonic worlds, all united by a shared mantra: a desire to experiment and play.

If I were to highlight one stunningly overwhelming experience, it would be encountering Ensemble Intercontemporain. Only four of the usual 32 musicians from the Paris-based ensemble appeared, but they were more than enough to leave the impression of a group with immense musical surplus – even in truly complex works. More on that later.

»The world is leaking« – the phrase echoed through the opening performance of the Bergen International Festival, an event that traditionally begins with a spectacle. This year was no exception. South African visual artist and director William Kentridge unfolded his operatic work The Great Yes, The Great No as a sensual and orchestrated flow of images, voices, music, and movement.

A South African choir and an ensemble of cello, accordion, percussion, and piano filled the stage, while figures of Stalin, Lenin, Trotsky, Josephine Baker, and André Breton – the pope of Surrealism – drifted in and out without pause. The Great Yes, The Great No tells a story of refugees and border crossings – but also of Surrealism’s detours and survival. A Schubert sonata collided with Charleston and French café music from the 1940s.

One should reject modernity and embrace tradition is a phrase that originated in far-right internet subcultures. Recently, I saw it used by a bakery chain trying to sell me cream buns for a holiday that doesn’t exist.

Returning home from the southern Swiss experimental festival Archipel, I had the impression that the program’s take on contemporary music – especially in its engagement with premodern traditions – felt the most forward-thinking.

Archipel, which humbly and humorously bills itself as a festival for la musique bizarre (April 4–13), is extensive in scope: 50 concerts and performances, eight sound installations, and three artist talks, if my program-counting was accurate. Geographically, however, it’s tightly focused: nearly all events take place in Geneva’s Maison communale de Plainpalais, a 1908 Art Nouveau ballroom turned cultural center.

Musik Installationen Nürnberg has the unique honor of being the only music festival ever to have given me an actual allergic reaction.  Presumably, this was entirely unintentional – yet somehow perfectly in line with the festival’s concept. Its subtitle reads: Festival für Raum Zeit Körper-musiken – a mysterious plural that points to a multiplicity of musical forms and expressions. As audience members, we were invited to meet the music with our bodies (!) as a spatial phenomenon.

So we were told at the festival’s opening reception, held in a defunct department store – the first of many spectacular venues – where the aura of luxurious decadence still lingered, despite the empty shelves, cables hanging like jungle vines from the ceiling, and faded, unlit signs for Chanel and Calvin Klein.

When does music stop being just sound produced by an instrument? And what happens when music no longer concerns a single musician, one instrument, and predictable interplay? At this year’s Spor Festival in Aarhus, it became clear that sound can emerge in new ways – between bodies, in movements, and through collective action. Several performances challenged the classical idea of music as individual performance and instead presented works where collaboration was both necessity and driving force.

The human voice can be irritating, off-key, and fragile. But it can also be personal, engaging, and overwhelming. And suddenly, during the final concert of the Estonian Music Days festival, a small, intimate window opened onto a peculiar and enigmatic musical language. We peered into the shadowy and mysterious world of micro-intervals.

Despite being only 1.3 million people, Estonians live in a musically rich society – so diverse and fertile that they host an annual contemporary music festival spanning eight to nine days, featuring primarily works by Estonian composers. This year’s edition included over 17 concerts with around 60 different composers, all taking place in the capital Tallinn and in Tartu, roughly 200 km inland.

In Denmark, experimentation and originality are often viewed as artistic ideals. In Estonia, however, these are not always central concerns. Perhaps that’s why new music there often feels freer – because composers aren’t pressured to be unique every time. Within this framework, something original often emerges, particularly in vocal music, as was evident at this year’s festival. And that’s no coincidence.

My sister Maj Kullberg, and I are second generation Nørgård collaborators having been brought up with the composer as a regular guest in our childhood home as he taught composition in our hometown as well as collaborated on new works with our parents. 

I remember a frost touched January morning at Frederiksdal Manor on Lolland, as my string quartet and I were awaiting the arrival of Per Nørgård. We had already worked extensively with the composer on his string quartets and had had the honour of having his 10th quartet, Harvest Timeless, dedicated to us. 

With Per humour has always been an integral part of our communication and this morning was no different. My sister and I picked him up from the ferry together with our host, Christine Krabbe, who herself has been instrumental in many Nørgård oriented projects such as the documentary film Les Archers. However, instead of taking him to the beautiful manor where our three day workshop would take place, my quartet, Mrs Krabbe and I had decided to pull the old composer’s leg and take him to an industrial cow stable through backways that would obscure that mansion.

Jon Fosse wrote Wakefulness, the first part of his eventual Trilogy, in almost one sitting. He has described it as »the projection of a state, a mood, a sound«. Like the two novellas that followed, it is archetype Fosse: built on repetition and suggestion; mingling past, present and future; fragmentary, elliptical and aloof. All are qualities associated more with the music of Bent Sørensen than with that of any other composer alive.

Sørensen’s partnering with Fosse, who has crafted his own libretto from Trilogy to frame the composer’s new opera Asle & Alida, should be a creative union made in heaven. It has worked – to a point. But it has also fallen short of what it might have been, both in its failure to access the absolute spirit of Trilogy – what Fosse refers to as »the language behind the words« – and in a staging at the Royal Danish Opera (first seen in Bergen in March) that proves crushingly inept in the face of the material.

It must be shouted loud enough through a megaphone to be heard over all Copenhagen’s streets and alleys, boulevards and avenues, squares and marketplaces: The Sound of Copenhagen is an exceptionally successful exhibition. It is captivating, engaging, and enlightening, and it helped me renew my auditory attention to the city I have known all my life and have lived in for most of my life. Moreover, the exhibition is focused and concentrated to such a degree that this very aspect helped sharpen my own concentration as I walked through the museum rooms, with their display cases, posters, artifacts, and sound sources.

The exhibition’s numerous portrayals and conceptions of Copenhagen as a soundscape particularly concern the chaotic era of industrialization and population explosion from 1870 to 1920 – a span of half a century, sometimes extended a few decades backward or forward. The old days simply grew into my ears along the way, as I realized how much the city’s sounds define this period, frame it, envelop it, prolong it – in short, bring it to life.