The festival theme wants to reflect on the multitude of positions any form of contemporary music can take today in the wider cultural landscape, and on the various ways through which the music of today reaches an audience. Throughout the last decades it has become clear that our contemporary music experiences are no longer to be confined to the concert hall alone, and that this music can share its audience with other artistic output. Moreover it seems that in these days of I-pods and internet radio, classical or contemporary music audiences might not have become bigger, but are certainly coming from a much wider base.
The ISCM World Music Days 2008 will therefore explore a multitude of ‘musics’ of today, with local and international performers, in the many concert halls, theatres and arts venues of the Lithuanian capital Vilnius, hidden treasure of the Baltic, has to offer.
Central in this festival edition will be the music of ISCM members, and of two composers in focus – Jonathan Harvey (with an exciting world premiEre) and Peter Eötvös (both as a conductor and a composer), as well as an exploration of new ways of presenting contemporary music to newfound audiences, trough multimedia, crossover programmes, installations, fringe programmes and interactive web-based content. To its foreign guests the festival wants to offer an outstanding showcase of the rich music life of the Baltic area.
New and newest music
The Gaida Festival, hosting ISCM World Music Days in 2008, is among the younger international new music festivals, and therefore strongly advocates the reaching out for a young audience. Presenting the music of the 20th and 21st centuries is one thing, bringing this music into the context of young people’s rich musical experience quite another. Of course we all agree there is no such thing as an ideal new music audience today, so a multitude of options is explored. In its recent editions, the Gaida festival has shown to be at the forefront of this endeavour. To some the vast number of youngsters in Gaida concerts might come as a surprise, but not to the (hip and internationally oriented) incrowd, which seems to have embraced the festival as its own.
Thus Gaida in the past welcomed such remarkable projects as London Sinfonietta meets Warp (a refreshing confrontation of 20C repertoire and electronica DJs from the popular WARP ‘electronica’ record label) or Microwaves (the artistic fusion of Italian ensemble Alter Ego ensemble and Finnish electronica artists Pan Sonic). Other ventures in this direction included an Opera in da House project, with exciting remixes of opera repertoire, the multimedia dance performance Time Line by the young Lithuanian composer Vytautas V. Jurgutis or the One, the quintessential video chamber opera by the young and successful Dutch composer Michel van der Aa, among many others.
Building on this track record, ISCM World Music Days 2008 want to extend its outward reaching policy by transforming the city of Vilnius into a musical platform for all to enjoy. There will be DJ-performances from a floating ‘island’ in Vilnius’s main shopping mall, giving a fresh look on some ‘New Music Classics’ such as the works of Reich, Glass and Stockhausen. We plan a reworking of Luciano Berio’s classic Laborintus II in which the improvisational element will lead into a jazz concert, followed by a Laborintus party, and we plan to bridge Jonathan Harvey’s quintessential electronic piece Mortuos Plango with the iPod generation trough a multimedia installation.