It’s a Monday evening in September 2019, the supporters of KFC Uerdingen and SV Waldhof Mannheim have occupied their respective stands at the Merkur Spiel-Arena in Düsseldorf and the floodlights are gleaming – the perfect scene for a great, casual football night to start the week. But there’s something wrong with the atmosphere. The people around me, usually supporting their club with chants, choruses and shouting in every match – the epicentre of the acoustic atmosphere – remain silent. All I am hearing is restrained chatter from the crowd and the strident commands of the 22 guys we came to watch on the pitch. I’m holding an Olympus field recorder in my right hand. Luckily, if held at waist level, this device is small enough not to strike anyone’s attention. So I’m listening not only with my ears in real-time – my recorder is also alert, saving its perception for the future. Truth be told, I’m at work.

‘I honestly don’t really know what is going to happen. But I believe I will feel, while doing it, kind of similar to what I go through now.’ On 30 and 31 May, for fifteen and a half hours straight, the German pianist Igor Levit played the entire Vexations (1893) by Erik Satie – the iconic piece in which a single theme is to be played 840 times – at the recording studio B-Sharp in Berlin. Before the marathon performance, which was live-streamed on Twitter, Levit spoke to The New Yorker’s Alex Ross. ‘There will be ups, there will be downs, there will be devastation, there will joy, there will be literal pain,’ he continued. ‘Just this monotonic repetition of just the same thing, of a piece which in a way has no apparent musical content – just this staring at a wall, waiting, waiting. At some point, you lose the perspective of time – like now. You lose the perspective of an end – like now. I think at some point I will lose the hope that this will ever end – like now. Maybe I won’t make it. It’s just about surviving. Like now.’

Right about now, Christian Winther Christensen should have been standing in front of a room full of people, introducing this year’s edition of the ‘avant-garde music festival’ Klang. Then 2020 happened. Klang has been commuted to November, when it will take a more modest, domestic form. Very little about this spring feels normal and that includes my meeting with Christensen. We walk hesitantly into a café near his studio in Nørrebro and order food and coffee, which are dutifully delivered to a table. It’s the first day in more than two months such decadence has been permitted in Denmark. Every small element of pleasure involved in the process is magnified.

Normally when I cover a festival, I have to at least try and maintain a certain degree of professional critical distance. In this case, it is simply not realistic. It is probably not possible to be closer to the Pulsar festival than I currently am without being directly in it myself. I am a recent graduate of the Royal Danish Academy of Music, where I studied for four years, which meant four years of having my works played at Pulsar. I know all the teachers and the majority of the students personally. I know how this festival works behind the scenes. I am even working for the festival’s education outreach project – going into gymnasiums with the student composers, and moderating presentations of their works – which means I have some insider knowledge of the pieces beforehand.

A few years ago I indulged the fantasy that most interesting Nordic music written in the last nine decades was, to some extent, a reaction to Sibelius’s symphonic poem Tapiola (1926). In my mind, Sibelius’s score had come to embody the very essence of both an ending and a beginning; its ultimate tabula rasa, in a purifying B major, representing not just a semi-conscious prelude to the composer’s own three-decade silence but also a laying of the ground for a new aesthetic, one for the coming generations to define.

Sometimes a debut concert is not really a debut concert. Bára Gísladóttir had released three albums, won a spree of awards and heard her works performed by the Iceland Symphony and Frankfurt Radio Orchestras before she checked-out of the Royal Danish Academy of Music last week, on Wednesday, with this performance. Her career appears to have moved far beyond the confines of that institution and she had no use for its concert hall on this occasion, instead luring hundreds of curious folk away from the city and up to Denmark’s prototype for Reykjavík’s Hallgrímskirkja, Grundtvig’s Church in the Bispebjerg district of Copenhagen.

Seismograf doesn’t normally sit down for a chat with ensembles but has made an exception for Neko3 on the grounds that a) the group itself isn’t very normal and b) if you haven’t already found yourself in one of its audiences, you’re probably about to. In the coming weeks, Neko3 will be pretty much unavoidable for the sorts of people who read articles like this one. Not that you’re Neko3’s target market. The ensemble rails against the peripatetic nature of the contemporary classical music audience: the same people at the same concerts for the same (mostly professional) reasons. Something of that thought process sprang the group into adolescence after the baby steps of its first concert in November 2017.

‘Could you review Marcela Lucatelli’s debut concert? It’s likely to be absolute mayhem.’ Sure I can and yes it was.

We might as well start with the dogs. The first dog was the soft toy dog dragged on stage by the policeman in the latex bondage uniform.

The second dog was the stuffed fox on the skateboard (fair enough, not a dog but four legs, sharp teeth and a furry tail).

Donaueschinger Musiktage is one of the world’s oldest and most historied contemporary music festivals, and has been taking over the tiny town of Donaueschingen – population: 22,000 – in Southwest Germany every October since 1921.

It is a massive cultural event, selling out months in advance.

No venue is smaller than colossal, even the smallest chamber concerts selling out packed auditoriums in a way Danish festivals such as Klang, Spor, Gong Tomorrow, etc. could only dream of – even competing with the largest audiences for a DR orchestra concert.

How do you write about a festival that, in practical terms, does not actually exist?

Obviously, it does exist in the sense that it is an event that takes place: every year thirty-five young composers convene somewhere in one of the Nordic countries and hear each other’s pieces – this year, Piteå in Sweden.

But there is no centre to the Young Nordic Music festival (UNM, Ung Nordisk Musik). There is no artistic director, no programming council, no board of directors, no administrative leader.