The Deep Summer and the Open Ears

Kazuhisa Uchihashi stood among rusty combine harvesters at the Agricultural Museum when he drew the bow across the pickup of his homemade instrument. Out came a sound that at once resembled a vegetable shredder and a groovy, mechanical monster.

She attacked reel-to-reel tape machines, letting the tapes curl freely, twisting and tearing them apart until they became both rhythm and raw noise

During the festival’s ten-hour mini-marathon of electronic music, the machines truly became collaborators: Richard Grimm and Patrik Herman transformed a 3D printer into a stubborn rhythm machine, a droning doom alternating between futuristic technology and old-fashioned threshing mill. Jean-Philippe Gross sculpted sound as if it were a physical substance – layer upon layer – until it burst into the hall like a swarm of New Year’s rockets.

The strongest experience came from Augustė Vickunaitė, who turned sound into a poetic confrontation with the past. She attacked reel-to-reel tape machines, letting the tapes curl freely, twisting and tearing them apart until they became both rhythm and raw noise – a bodily, sensuous clash where nostalgia and destruction fused together.

The underground speaks

Thirty years after Ostrava’s last coal mine closed, the biennale Ostravské dny [Ostrava Days] reopened the underground. Fittingly, several concerts took place in Futureum, a former coal works and tipping hall. Here, Miroslav Tóth’s Nemiesta – Non-Places (2023) unfolded as a poetic reflection on empty spaces, an unfinished highway, and a nuclear power plant that was never switched on. The Mivos Quartet from New York pitted lyrical sensitivity against raw, industrially colored sonorities.

The opening concert already revealed the festival’s will to let the youngest voices stand side by side with the established, which naturally resulted in a level that was at times uneven. Theo Alexander’s Auto-responsive Dream Denial Music (2025) was drawn as a musical labyrinth where the string players sat apart behind screens, each tied to their own tape recorder. Only the audience had access to the whole – a flickering tableau of organ sounds from all over Europe, synthetic imitations, and live strings. The fragments unfolded like a disorienting – and seductive – dream on the edge of dissolution.

Bach’s Goldberg Variations slid in like a ghost from the distant past

In Emma Nagy’s Refractions in My Dream (2023), time itself dissolved as accordion and saxophone shifted tones one by one. The music moved without pulse, in a flowing, meditative space where the smallest changes became slowly growing events.

James Layton’s having never known the piano (2025) was both homage to, and rebellion against, the weight of piano tradition. Notes were drawn out, folded back, repeated through electronic filters like memories one cannot quite grasp. Bach’s Goldberg Variations slid in like a ghost from the distant past.

From asceticism to explosion

An entire evening at Ostrava Days was devoted to automatic and algorithmic compositions: Ian Mikyska’s Still, not still (2025) appeared as a work of ascetic simplicity, with the quartet’s sounds balancing on the threshold between sound and silence. Yet the strict concept soon felt more like an exercise than a musical necessity, and the piece risked dissolving into its own minimalism. Milan Guštar’s Kadence v C dur (2021/2025), by contrast, emerged as both an ironic commentary and a serious meditation on the end of music: a seven-minute string cadence.

Lejaren Hiller’s Sonata no. 3 for violin and piano (1970–71) was hard-hitting, dissonant, uncompromising. Conrad Harris’ violin carved forward with raw energy, while Daan Vandewalle’s piano laid down a dark, relentless rhythmic foundation.

The recently deceased Phill Niblock and Peter Ablinger – both closely tied to Ostrava Days – had new works performed by the Ensemble of Futurist Noise Intoners, on Luigi Russolo’s intonarumori. These wooden crank-boxes, producing everything from deep rumbles to shrill screeches, were originally created as futurism’s rebellion against traditional musical aesthetics.

Tania León’s songs wove a vivid polyrhythmic portrait of Havana into the space

Unlike in previous years, there were only a few American musicians in Ostrava. Ostrava Days has close ties to New York, where festival director Petr Kotík lives. And it was his idea to stage a concert with three orchestras and three conductors on the same stage in four works: Phill Niblock’s Three Orchids (2002–03), Alvin Lucier’s Diamonds (1999), Petr Kotík’s Variations for 3 Orchestras (2003–05), and Bernhard Lang’s GAME XXII (2025). Niblock’s opening in the former industrial hall Trojhalí Karolina was a massive, vibrating sound field: the three orchestras each held to a single tone, but shifted in microtonal intervals so that a stream of overtones, different tones, and resonances emerged. Lucier traced lines of glissandi and overtone play. Kotík made the three orchestras converse in a beautifully chaotic dialogue. Finally, Lang’s unpredictable displacements turned the orchestras into a giant, living loop machine. It was a wild night in every way!

In the Cathedral of the Divine Saviour, Klaus Lang’s cantita christinae IV – past-time (2021) unfolded more austerely, while Tania León’s songs wove a vivid polyrhythmic portrait of Havana into the space.

Afterwards, at Klub Parník, New Yorker Thomas Buckner performed Cornelius Cardew’s Treatise together with music students. This was far better than Roscoe Mitchell’s failed concert some years ago on the same stage. The evening ended with hip hop and Americana – young classical musicians clearly have a broad horizon.

From mists to silence – a panorama of today’s music

Concert after concert, Ostrava Days painted a picture of contemporary music’s breadth. I will never forget how three flugelhorns, three tubas, and percussion created a deep, almost bodily resonance in a work by Petr Cígler. And I will fondly remember how 24-year-old Wei-Shiang Chang made the festival orchestra Ostravská banda whisper like mists through a Taiwanese mountain valley.

While Martin Klusák, in his Lighthouse (2025) piece, let us feel the shifting currents of the sea, Alex Mincek’s work unfolded like a filmic meditation, where rhythmic cells constantly found new constellations – like a mobile in ceaseless motion. And Robert Karpay’s Deep Summer Nocturne (2025) took its point of departure from Bartók’s night music, but ended in drones and melancholy weight with echoes of Radiohead’s Kid A.

One conductor had his hands tied while the piano unfolded in horror-like themes with clear reference to Ligeti

In that concert alone it was clear that contemporary music does not move in one direction but unfolds as a journey through sound’s many possible landscapes. Several young composers worked with simple processes and limited parameters – like Tymon Zgorzelski, who translated his fascination with astronomy into small rhythmic displacements and meetings of timbres.

The panorama drawn by the concert with six world premieres showed how composers today think of music: as nature’s fog, as the darkness of memory, as filmic image – and yes, there was no lack of cinematic imagery in Ostrava this year – as rhythmic construction, as democratic conversation, or as strictly structured architecture. Theatrical concepts also had their place: one conductor had his hands tied while the piano unfolded in horror-like themes with clear reference to Ligeti.

In Ostrava one could encounter several young composers worth following. Szymon Golec’s intense journey into layers of the psyche with small roars from four saxophones played by the Canadian quartet Quasar was marvelous. And Pennsylvania-born Matthew Huang Mailman offered a playful piece where his fascination with trains was transformed into rumbling and clattering. It was both sensuous and imaginative, and you could sense the steam in the saxophones. Incidentally, the Canadian saxophonists opened the concert with their compatriot Claude Vivier’s Pulau Dewata (1977) – a fantastical homage to Bali.

For me, the festival culminated in the kitchen of the abandoned Hotel Palace

Dadaist primal force and French drones

Christopher Butterfield knocked everyone off their feet: stiff as an undertaker, he breathed life into Kurt Schwitters’ Dadaist Ursonate (1923–32), which felt astonishingly contemporary in our TikTok era. Together with pianist Daan Vandewalle he also let Satie’s Socrate (1917–18) unfold its cool beauty with rare elegance.

For me, the festival culminated in the kitchen of the abandoned Hotel Palace, where cellist Charles Curtis performed Éliane Radigue’s Naldjorlak. A single long bow stroke over the strings opened like a microscopic universe – a slowly shifting field of overtones and vibrations where the silence around the music became almost as important as the sound itself.

Ostrava, which this year marked its 13th biennale since its beginning in 2001, reaffirmed its role as both laboratory and meeting place – a space where new ideas can be tested, and where even the smallest tone can open new ways of listening.

Ostrava Days, Ostrava, Czechia, August 21–30, 2025

English translation: Andreo Michaelo Mielczarek. Proofreading: Geoff Cox