2013 Košice, Bratislava, Vienna

Nov 4, 2013 – Nov 14, 2013
Košice, Bratislava, Vienna

Festival info

Start: Nov 4, 2013

End: Nov 14, 2013

Locations: Košice, Bratislava, Vienna

Hosting member(s)

Description
Description

The expansive three-city, two-country festival held in 2013 was presented in conjunuction with Košice serving as a European Capital of Culture (ECoC), the 12th Melos-Ethos Festival of Contemporary Music in Bratislava, and the 26th Wien Modern festival in Vienna.

From contemporaneous reviews…

“The World New Music Days festival was first held in Salzburg in 1922 — around the time Arnold Schoenberg was perfecting his 12-note compositional system — and it remains a robust champion of new music. This year the 11-day program, sponsored by the International Society of Contemporary Music, was spread over three cities — Kosice and Bratislava in Slovakia, and Vienna — and included some 25 concerts, which were supplemented by many others thanks to partnerships with local organizations. A new opera was among the many works to receive their world premieres.

“‘Some people think of us as the last bastion of European modernism,’ said John Davis, the president of the society’s executive committee, during a concert intermission, ‘but our membership is increasingly diverse.’ Three years ago the festival was held in Mr. Davis’s home country of Australia; Hong Kong is another recent site. ‘The character of our festival depends a lot on the local scene,’ he said. 

“The Slovak component included works rooted in European modernism as well as more recent ones showing greater stylistic variety.” 

–George Loomis, “A Music Festival Features Premiere of the Opera ‘Dorian Gray’,”
The New York Times, 13 November 2013

“[T]he only way to make the ISCM an organization that is more representative of the new music that is being made all over the planet is to have a broader definition of what constitutes “new music” and, more specifically, a definition that is considerably less Eurocentric. This will be a challenge for many of the delegates who seem to still cling to a Darmstadtian new music aesthetic, which was an aesthetic that informed a great deal of the music I heard during the ISCM concerts I attended two weeks ago in Bratislava, Slovakia and Vienna, Austria.”

–Frank J. Oteri, “From Darmstadt to the Shopping Mall,”
NewMusicBox, 26 November 2013

The complete program book for the 2013 ISCM World New Music Days is available online via ISSUU.

Programme information
Locations