The Borealis festival plays with our expectations – precisely because it constantly undermines them. Marketed as a »festival for experimental music” and a well-kept secret among music lovers across Europe, it is actually at its weakest in the classic concert and performance formats, where it rarely becomes truly experimental. One example is the traditional concert with the Norwegian Navy Band, which this year featured premieres of works by Herborg Rundberg, Jason Yarde, and Kari Beate Tandberg. Here, the truly experimental move would have been to take a critical approach to the format itself – to the wind band as a historically and politically charged formation, also in Norway. But none of the three composers took up this challenge, and the result in Bergen Cathedral sounded exactly as one might expect from a military band – spiced with some impressionistic wave-like movements, since it was, after all, the navy and not the army playing.

Jennifer Walshe stod sjældent stille på scenen. Den irske komponist og performer speed-snakkede, sparkede ud efter trommeslageren og kæmpede med rummet som en prædikant fanget i sit eget feedback-loop. Hun gentog mantraet »We want eternity«, men rablede også om exorcisme og selvudslettelse. Keyboardisten fra Ensemble Nikel rullede en sovepose ud midt i det hele. Performancekoncerten Minor Characters – skabt af Walshe i samarbejde med Matthew Shlomowitz – fremstod som en kakofonisk sitcom i opløsning. Et skævt, lækkert skrattende Herzlich Willkommen til Berlin.

Melencolia – åbningsforestillingen på Berlin-festivalen MaerzMusik, skabt af Brigitta Muntendorf og Moritz Lobeck – greb samtiden an på en helt anden måde.

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.