Biennale Musica 2025: The star within

The Star Within is the title of the 69^th International Festival of Contemporary Music, which will be held in Venice from October 11-25. A poetical-symbolic image that, in the words of the director Caterina Barbieri, is “the desire for great things and for vastness. Spark of new worlds, it opens us to infinity. A vibration that permeates the cosmos and pierces through us with awe, from molecule to planetary motion, sound escapes the boundaries of the ego and opens us up to the encounter with the Other — the unknown”.

The Festival will explore cosmic music.  “Through using this poetic expression,” writes Caterina Barbieri, “I am not referring to a specific musical style or tradition but rather to the generative power of music to create new worlds, beyond rigid definitions of genre or historical affiliations. [...] In the ecstasy of listening, rigid notions of time and space dissolve: music teaches us much about the relativity and limits of human perception. In this it is similar to Venice and its vocation to mutability: the play of reflections, the vanishing perspectives, the perpetual motion of water and light that dissolve boundaries and open to the space of the multiple and the infinite”.

“The Festival’s programme is rooted in electronic music and minimalism, but then branches off into various directions that explore connections between past and present, bringing together musical traditions that are apparently distant from one another in style, era, and geographical area, and are the expression of a community: there are forays into ancient music, contemporary music, folk music, drone music, techno, and Afrofuturism. Programming through resonance that offers the most vivid and fluid gaze possible onto the present time, representing the music of today in its richness, diversity, and inclusivity”.

The following are a few of the projects and artists present at the Festival, in anticipation of announcing the complete, detailed programme.
A musical procession on the water by the multidisciplinary artist and musician of Bolivian origin Chuquimamani-Condori will be the Festival’s opening event, to celebrate and restore the value of sound as a collective ritual. A musical procession of small boats will glide down the canals of Venice and culminate in a live concert by Los Thuthanaka, the duo composed of Chuquimamani-Condori and his brother Joshua Chuquimia Crampton, in front of the basin of the Gaggiandre at the Arsenale.
Another commission by Biennale Musica that engages with the presence of water is the new monumental work by the avant-garde American composer William Basinski, who reimagines the tape loops of Garden of Brokeness for a number of grand pianos, percussions, and vaporetto motors, a world premiere in Venice.
Plus: Resonant Vessel, by the Japanese sound artist Yosuke Fujita, alias FujiIIIIIIIIIIIta, is a site-specific work that explores the generative power of sound and water; he has created his own 11-pipe organ that interacts with a system of water tanks, in which liquid and air interact to generate a landscape of tones in constant evolution. The Teatro alle Tese is transformed into a sound chamber, becoming a vessel that navigates the fluid interaction between the terrestrial and the cosmic.

The Festival will host the European premiere of The Expanding Universe, a seminal work created between 1974 and 1977 by Laurie Spiegel, a forerunner of electronic experimentation at the dawn of its analogic applications. The work explores the relation between sound and cosmogony, reinterpreted by the Dither Quartet, an electric guitar quartet from New York, known for its versatile interpretation of experimental repertories.
Another pioneer of electronics in the analogic era is the Italian-American Suzanne Ciani, who will participate at the Festival in a new and stimulating collaboration with Actress. A transgenerational musical meeting that merges the fluid and organic style of Ciani’s expressivity on Buchla synthesizers with the rhythmic eclecticism of Actress’ so-called “R&B Concrète.”
There will be a rare appearance by the Kamigaku Ensemble, originally founded by Catherine Christer Hennix; on the occasion of the Festival, the ensemble will reunite for a special, site-specific performance in tribute to the Swedish composer who passed away in late 2023. A unique figure for the abundance of her artistic research, which ranges from composition to performance, installations, poetry, visual art, and mathematics, Hennix is another pioneering female figure, whose work has only recently been rediscovered and properly recognized.
The German multi-instrumentalist and composer Moritz Von Oswald will present the Italian premiere of Silencio, a collaboration with a 16-voice choir challenges and expands the boundaries of electronic music and the traditions of choral music, intertwining the organic with the electronic in masterful ways.

From historical minimalism to some of the most unusual voices in contemporary music, which have opened new and surprising pathways in this musical expression. The Swedish composer and organist Ellen Arkbro, a former member of the Kamigaku ensemble founded by Catherine Christer Hennix, will present a new composition, commissioned by the Festival, for three viola da gambas, a work that continues her exploration of harmonic sound and its transcendental qualities.
Another artist who explores the fusion between acoustic instrumentation and electronic synthesis is the Italian Agnese Menguzzato, trained in violin and Renaissance lute; she will be in Venice to present a new work for electric and eight-string guitars entitled Undici.
Maxime Denuc is a musician who merges the expressive abundance and emotional power of the church organ with a contemporary electronic music sensibility; she will present the Italian premiere of Elevations, an installation that incorporates the inspiration of the dub techno aesthetic into the fragile ephemeral sound of an organ controlled by computer via midi specifically created by the artist with the Belgian organ-maker Tony Decap. The Festival will open with Into the Blue, a world premiere by the Norwegian saxophonist Bendik Giske, the star of performances that transform the saxophone into an extension of his body, making the act of playing music an experience that is as visual and physical as it is acoustic. A unique voice in contemporary percussion, Enrico Malatesta explores the physical nature of sound through an approach that is both minimal and radical at the same time. He will perform the world premiere of the composition Solo VI by the German composer and organist Jakob Ullmann for percussion and audio reproduction devices; and Occam XXVI (2018), which the French pioneer of electronic and drone music Éliane Radigue wrote specifically for Enrico Malatesta.

The Festival will present many connections between different musical traditions that push the envelope of contemporary music. Peacock Dreams is the title of the concert performed by the Egyptian poet, rapper, composer, and vocalist Abdullah Miniawy, whose verses resound throughout the Middle East, with the trombonists Jules Boittin and Robinson Khoury. A new trio that freely intermingles baroque and operatic influences, Sufi and Coptic themes, and music from the Arabian Peninsula, blended together with the chaotic symphony of Cairo traffic.

A reference point of experimental electronic music, known for his work using the microtonal Colundi Sequence, Perälä has constructed his own sound universe in continuous expansion, made of digital sounds inspired by instruments and natural elements. In Venice, Perälä will present a site-specific musical concert in quadraphonic sound for the Teatro alle Tese, in collaboration with Melissa Briand-Speirs.
A pioneering figure in glitch music, Christian Fennesz will present an expanded version created especially for Biennale Musica of his seminal work Venice, an absolute manifesto with the unmistakable signature sound of the Viennese guitarist and electronic musician.
The cult drone metal duo Sunn O))), formed by Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson, whose monolithic sound evokes the transcendent and transformative power of distortion, resonance, and volume, will be in Venice with a set created for Biennale Musica.

The vocal ensemble Grandelavoix led by Björn Schmelzer, who founded it in 1999 in Antwerp, brings its transformative approach to ancient music to the Festival with Epitaphs of Afterwardness . At Biennale Musica, they will present a programme in which the Messe de Notre Dame by Guillaume de Machaut, an absolute masterpiece of Medieval religious polyphonic music, dialogues with the great revolutionaries of the twentieth century – György Kurtág, György Ligeti, Iannis Xenakis.
Aligned with the theme of the Festival that explores music as a generative principle and form of cosmogony, the FontanaMIX Ensemble proposes a repertory that fosters a dialogue between two figures who come from different historical and geographical contexts but share a focused research into the metaphysical nature of the cosmic dimension of sound: Giacinto Scelsi, the visionary Italian composer who celebrates the 125^th anniversary of his birth this year, and Vahid Hosseini, a composer born in Tehran in 1984, who will present the premiere of a new version for ensemble of his composition Le sensibilità delle tenebre.

Afrofuturist experimentalism and forms of Black-rooted electronic music innovation traverse the Festival. With the above-mentioned Actress, who has channeled her explorations of the Afrofuturist language into clubbing. And with the theorist, musician, and cultural critic DeForrest Brown Jr., who presents the Italian premiere of his electronic project Speaker Music, a pulsating and high-velocity exploration of rhythm, improvisation, and sonic futurism that channels the African-American modernist tradition of rhythm and soul music.
The Belgian-Congolese musician and artist Nkisi (alias Melika Ngombe Kolongo), who has presented her works at Tate Modern, the Haus der Kunst in Munich, and the Centre Pompidou, will present in Venice the world premiere of the most recent evolution of her research into the archeology of ethnographic sound. Nkisi’s work combines percussive influences from the musical traditions of Central and Western Africa, forming rave, noise, and industrial sounds that explore the historical memory and collective rituals tied to sound and states of trance.
A key figure of the second techno wave in Detroit, where he was born and raised, and still lives today, Carl Craig brings his visionary sound to the Festival with a DJ set that embodies the city’s rich legacy of Afrofuturism and sonic innovation.

The cellist and singer from Guatemala Mabe Fratti, recognized for her ability to interweave classical training and experimental research in sound, will present a site-specific performance in collaboration with the Venezuelan artist I. la Católica and the Mexican drummer Gibrán Andrade.
On the Festival’s opening night, there will be the world premiere of Traveling Light by Rafael Toral, a new work that continues his exploration of jazz harmonies through the expressive possibilities of guitar dialoguing with acoustic soloists – the clarinetist José Bruno Parrinha, the saxophonist Rodrigo Amado, the saxhorn player Yaw Tembe, and the flautist Clara Saleiro. On the Festival’s closing evening, Ecco2k will present in Venice an extended and immersive set on the borderline between performance and DJ set.

Biennale College: 235 applications from 35 countries throughout the world were sent to Biennale College Musica which, aligned with the Festival’s theme that explores music as a form of cosmogony, will select 5 musical projects – live performances or acousmatic compositions diffused through multiple channels. These works will debut at the 69^th International Festival of Contemporary Music at the end of the programme of residence, research, creation, and production that the selected musicians will follow in Venice over the course of three sessions between May and October.

The mentors of the selected musicians, who come from different fields of artistic and theoretical research in contemporary music (from the field of academic research to performance practice, from audiovisual multimedia research to club culture, from electroacoustic music to sound design), will be: Ellen Arkbro, DeForrest Brown Jr., Chuquimamani-Condori, Thierry Coduys, Lorenzo Senni, and Marcel Weber (MFO).

Our thanks go to the Italian Ministry of Culture for its important contribution and to the Veneto Region for its support of the programmes in the Dance Music Theatre departments of La Biennale di Venezia.

Media partner of the Dance Music Theatre departments is once again Rai. Through its information channels and Rai cultura - in particular the TV channel Rai 5 and Radio3 – the various activities taking place in Venice will be described and offered to the public.

We would like to thank the following for their collaboration: Comune di Venezia, Fondazione Forte Marghera, Fondazione Teatro La Fenice, Teatro Stabile del Veneto “Carlo Goldoni”, Polo Museale Veneziano - Ministero della Cultura, la Marina Militare e Difesa Servizi, Fondazione Forte Marghera, and APS Live artscultures ETS.

Our consolidated collaboration continues with Vela – Venezia Unica, a commercial company of the City of Venice specialized in mobility and marketing, with an agreement of reciprocal promotion and visibility.