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.

»Did you see Björk just walk past? She’s here often – she loves new music.« Someone in red has indeed just passed us on the way to the escalator in Harpa, Reykjavík’s iconic concert hall. Because this is Myrkir músíkdagar, also known as Dark Music Days.

The festival (January 26-31) opened with a group of teenagers from The Vesturbær School Orchestra, founded in 1954, followed by an opera singer with bare feet who ended her performance in a yoga pose. Now we descend into the parking basement, where Masaya Ozaki spins cymbals against the concrete floor, strikes a snare drum forcefully, and pulls noise from his guitar. When the young Japanese composer first came to Iceland to record the sounds of a glacier, he found – deep inside an ice cave – the sound of melting ice. It transformed him as a composer.

There’s something about Spot Festival that continues to haunt me. It’s not just the throbbing bass in your gut or the endless marathon between venues – the musical experience is never linear, but rhizomatic: unpredictable, without a center, always in motion. And then there’s that feeling of witnessing something unfinished, something potent. For one weekend, Aarhus is transformed into a sonic lab where the voices of the future are tested in the acoustics of the present. Here are six insights I took with me from Spot 2025.

1. Bowling alleys and death drive: when the noise spills off the record

Nausia – a Copenhagen-based quintet, and Latin for »noise« – created a mesmerizing groove with two saxophones at the helm, swirling tones, howls and minor-key fanfares into each other. The concert took place in Aarhus Bowling Alley (touché!) and was a 30-minute journey of dissonance, collapse and repetition.

»I’ve never felt better.«

Warren Ellis is in top form. From the moment I walk into the backstage room at Bremen Teater, the Australian bundle of energy is intensely present—constantly talking, eyes shining, his body language hyperactive. Along with his characteristic massive beard and sharp suit, he’s wearing rings and bracelets, and often waves his arms so enthusiastically that the jingling of jewelry makes it sound like he’s playing a tambourine.

Ellis is in Copenhagen to promote the film Ellis Park, which premiered at CPH:DOX and is currently touring film festivals around the world. While Ellis is best known as a musician – Nick Cave’s closest collaborator in The Bad Seeds and as part of the instrumental trio Dirty Three, which last year released its first album in 12 years, Love Changes Everything – Ellis Park shows him in a new light.

»Have you really never been here before? I’ve played here many times. First time was in 1998. I was still a student at the conservatory,« says Danish drummer Kresten Osgood as he continues swimming in the rooftop pool on the eighth floor, overlooking Tallinn’s church spires, orthodox domes, and smokestacks. The city, one of Europe’s best-preserved medieval towns and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, smells of Estonian cedar from the saunas and bursts with music festivals.

Last night, the Estonian-Danish composer and saxophonist Maria Faust performed a concert version of the theatre piece Rahamaa, or Moneyland – the talk of the town, though impossible to get tickets for. Faust’s group The Economics – consisting of a drummer and three horns – moved like a procession through the dark: marching drums, wailing saxophone, and a trumpet sounding like an open wound, while two actors in stiff suits recited lines about Danske Bank, collapse, and the moral downfall at the altar of the stock exchange.

Peter Ablinger is dead, and no metaphor suffices. Writing a eulogy for Ablinger cannot be »like« anything. To do justice to his invaluable work – his contribution to music, visual art, and philosophy – one must write with clarity and precision: fine lines on white paper. Canvases in the wind. A window through which we glimpse the blue sky.

To remember Ablinger himself is an impossible task. What fascinated him most, »the greatest of all questions, the greatest of all riddles,« was the wonder and the question of what another person sees/hears/thinks when I see/hear/think something. It was »the impossibility of thinking (feeling) the other.« To fully understand how he experienced the world, how he was able to turn it upside down, to turn it inside out and reveal the construction of reality itself to our ears and eyes – our astonished minds – is impossible. But because he conducted fundamental research into perception, because he persistently showed us the difference between how we thought the world was and how the world really is, he also showed us that something in human perception connects us all as sentient beings.