2025 Portugal

May 30, 2025 – Jun 7, 2025
Lisbon, Porto

Festival info

Start: May 30, 2025

End: Jun 7, 2025

Locations: Lisbon, Porto

Hosting member(s)

Description
Description

The ISCM World New Music Days, which has been occurring annually since 1923, has never previously occurred in Portugal. Considering Portugal’s current prosperous and evolving contemporary music landscape, Miso Music Portugal, the Portuguese Section of the International Society for Contemporary Music since 1999, is excited to host the ISCM World New Music Days in the Spring of 2025. For almost 40 years, Miso Music Portugal and dozens of other Portuguese music and art institutions and organizations have contributed to this present exceptional moment for classical and contemporary music in Portugal, which some have already declared as the “Second Renaissance of Portuguese Music”.

In addition to the new music context, we aim to give the ISCM World New Music Days 2025 in Portugal an environmental dimension, emphasized through the subtitle “Thirst for Change”, evoking the significant dilemma that our “blue planet” is facing – growth or life? Water is a crucial element in this equation, especially in Portugal, where its lack and evaporation increasingly threaten the population. How can humanity tackle this pressing issue?

The ISCM World New Music Days festival, with its rich history and global reach, can encourage this reflection, and the WNMD 2025 in Portugal is the perfect opportunity to dedicate space and time to the water issue and agenda. Music is not just sound and silence. It reflects the pulse of the societies, carrying our deepest concerns, fears, and aspirations. The climate crisis needs more than mere political changes or technological solutions. It requires a universal emotional understanding – a call to collective consciousness. Here, artistic and musical creation can make a difference.

For further details, please visit the 2025 ISCM WNMD festival page on the Miso Music Portugal website.

From Contemporaneous Reports

“This year, host country Portugal and its respective organisation Miso Music Portugal, took on delivering an immensely vibrant and substantial WNMD over nine days 30 May to 7 June – where Portuguese orchestras, ensembles and musicians performed 135 works from composers from 44 different countries, across 27 concerts, hosted at 11 prestigious venues in Lisbon and Porto. The ISCM self-ascribed this year’s festival as having one of the highest attendance rates to date by representative composers and delegates alike, and with the aptly subtitled theme of ‘Thirst for Change‘, this WNMD collectively reflected on the urgency of demands from our “blue planet” in light of current environmental and social challenges.”

— Robert McIntyre, “ISCM World New Music Days 2025 Portugal:
representing Australia at the global stage of international music creation,
collaboration, discourse and artistic exchange,” resonate (posted 2 July 2025)

“Choices of curation at WNMD are practically arcane in the intricate rules that must be followed by each host country, but one of the more striking – and, i imagine, optional – decisions made by the Portuguese team was to include a number of works by well-established (and, in most cases, well-dead) composers. i mention this at the start, partly because these works were featured from the beginning through the first half of the festival, but also because of the effect their inclusion had on everything else that followed. … WNMD is unique among festivals inasmuch as its gives a curious kind of portrait of the current state of global contemporary music. This portrait is filtered, twice: first, by each country’s decisions about which works are worthy for consideration; second, by the host country’s decisions about which works to include. These choices are expanded somewhat by the fact that any individual composer can submit their own music for consideration. This is my third time at WNMD, and it’s become increasingly clear that the portrait of new music that emerges is complex, reflecting most strongly the predilections of the host, while also hinting at prevailing tendencies within the zeitgeist.

“The choice to include works by major figures, though a surprise, was in hindsight a good one, as it shone a strong, starkly revealing light on the submitted music, with the result that, before three of the 27 concerts had finished, i found myself wondering (and angrily scribbling in my notebook), ‘when did contemporary music become so fucking polite?'” 

–Simon Cummings, “World New Music Days 2025, Portugal (Part 1),” 5:4 (posted 15 June 2025)

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