ISCM General Assembly Unanimously Supports Romania’s Bid to Host the World New Music Days in 2026

March 6, 2025 / Frank J. Oteri
2026 ISCM WNMD Festival Director Dan Dediu has described Columna Infinita, a 1918 sculpture by Constantin Brâncuși (1876-1957), pictured above, as suggestive of a musical waveform stretching vertically from the ground into the sky; it is a poignant image for the latest edition of this international festival of contemporary music.

On 4 March 2025, during an extraordinary general assembly of the International Society for Contemporary Music held over Zoom, the delegates unanimously voted in support of the ISCM Romanian Section’s bid to host the 2026 ISCM World New Music Days in Bucharest, Romania.

Subtitled “Columna Infinita” after the famous sculpture by 20th-century Romanian art icon Constantin Brâncuși (whose sesquicentennial will be celebrated in 2026), the 2026 WNMD will take place from 23-31 May at multiple concert venues including: the landmark Ateneul Român (which first opened in 1888); the even older National Opera Bucharest (founded in 1885); the Sala Radio (built in 1959); Horia Bernea Cinema Hall at the National Peasant Museum; the Romanian Youth National Art Center; Goethe-Institut and the Cervantes Institute, both ideal for intimate chamber music recitals; George Enescu Hall as well as the Opera and Multimedia Studio, both at the National University of Music, the latter of which is a state of the art space ideal for electroacoustic and multimedia performances; and finally the opulent Mogoșoaia Palace (built between 1698 and 1702) which is located 10 kilometres from Bucharest. The artistic director for the 2026 ISCM WNMD is composer Dan Dediu and festival partners include the Romanian Ministry of Culture, Artexim (organizers of the George Enescu Festival), UNMB (the National University of Music in Bucharest), New Europe College (which will host an international musicology symposium during the festival), Goethe-Institut Bukarest, the Cervantes Institute, the Austrian Cultural Forum, the National Peasant Museum, the Romanian Radio Broadcasting Company, and TVR Cultural (the cultural channel of Romania’s government-funded television network).

The Call for Works for the 2026 ISCM WNMD will include 14 categories ranging from symphony orchestra, string quartet, and choir to audio-video and electroacoustic compositions as well as music for solo cimbalom (a hammered dulcimer that is central to Romanian folk music). Details for the 2026 Call for Works are scheduled to be announced in mid-April 2025 and will be open from the end of May until the beginning of October 2025 with the final jury adjudicated selection scheduled to be announced in mid-January 2026. All in all, 25 concerts featuring selected works are planned for the 2026 ISCM WNMD as well as programs by the Romanian folk ensemble, Byzantine music performed by the Psalmodia Choir, a concert by the Bucharest-based nujazz-progressive rock trio Opening Theory, and a staged performance of The Tempest, an opera by British composer Thomas Adès, who received the very first-ever ISCM Young Composer Award back in 2002 for his string quartet Arcadia which has since entered the repertoire.

Since 1923, there has been a major international contemporary music held somewhere in the world under the auspices of the International Society for Contemporary Music every year with the exception of the years when World War II was being fought and the years of the lockdown due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. The 2026 festival in Bucharest will be the second time that Romania has hosted an ISCM festival. The 1999 festival–which in addition to Bucharest took place in Cluj-Napoca, Bacău, Iași, and Timișoara as well as Chișinău, Moldova–was an epic undertaking spanning more than 30 concerts over the course of 2 weeks; it was arguably the largest festival in ISCM’s history. In the past decade, ISCM World New Music Days festivals have taken place on five different continents: 2017 in Vancouver, Canada (North America); 2018 in Beijing, China (Asia); 2019 in Tallinn, Tartu, and Laulasmaa, Estonia (Europe); 2022 in Auckland and Christchurch, New Zealand (Oceania); and 2023 in Johannesburg, Soweto, and Capetown, South Africa (Africa), all of which were first time locations for this event. Last year’s festival took place in the Faroe Islands in the North Atlantic Ocean (another first) and this year’s festival, which runs from 30 May to June 7, 2025, will take place for the first time in Lisbon and Porto, Portugal. Explore the pages of this website to learn more about previous ISCM festivals and please return to this website in the coming months for further details about the 2026 Festival.

Frank J. Oteri

 

Frank J. Oteri

New York City-based composer and music journalist Frank J. Oteri is an Assistant Professor of Musicology at the College of Performing Arts at The New School as well as Vice President of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM). In his own musical compositions, which have been described as “distinctive” in The Grove Dictionary of American Music, Oteri combines emotional directness with an obsession for formal processes. His most recent work, Already Yesterday or Still Tomorrow, received its world premiere performance by the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Delta David Gier in January 2021. MACHUNAS, a performance oratorio created with visual artist Lucio Pozzi and inspired by the life of Fluxus-founder George Maciunas, premiered in Vilnius, Lithuania in 2005. Oteri received the 2007 Victor Herbert Award from the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) and the 2018 Composers Now Visionary Award.