Biennale Musica 2024

The return to pure form, devoid of references to texts, images or links to other languages, is for Lucia Ronchetti the cornerstone of Absolute Music, which is under her direction. (...) In the sense assumed as the premise of the 68th International Festival of Contemporary Music, music is absolute insofar as it is sound detached from every other connection, image, or memory. Music, Ronchetti tells us, is an art that is enclosed within itself in direct relationship with the spirit, that needs nothing but the truth of those who compose, perform and enjoy it.
Stripped of similitudes, associations, content, and narratives, only the essential, the absolute, remains. Among the arts, it is the only one capable of floating in the ether, of breaching the categories of space and time.
Invisible, like all that is sacred.
Hieratic fixed star of humanity.
Meditative instrument of elevation and purification.

Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, President of La Biennale di Venezia

The Biennale Musica 2024 is dedicated to the concept of absolute music, highlighting its contemporary relevance with new works commissioned by Biennale Musica from the most original living composers. In sixteen days of concerts, lectures and encounters the Festival will bring out the meaning of music as an autonomous language and the ontological status of sound, showcasing the state of the art of this fascinating, alchemical discipline. And it will let us into the workshops of the most rigorous and inventive composers and musicians who create scores, programmes, codes and performances without any extra-musical or visual references.
The expression absolute music, invented by Richard Wagner in 1846 to emphasise how inconceivable he found the idea of a work of art completely detached from the world around it, was taken up by many theorists (including Carl Dahlhaus, Mark Evan Bonds, Peter Kivy, and Sarah Collins) to extol, on the contrary, their conception of music as a language of pure forms evolving over time.
The repertoire generated by the various forms of musical creativity in absolute music today embraces a wide range of very diverse compositional and performative realms. In addition to the European tradition of written contemporary music, fundamental to the development of music as an autonomous discipline, there is also the vast repertoire of electronic music as well as the repertoire generated by improvisational practices witnessed by means of sophisticated recording techniques.

Lucia Ronchetti, Artistic Director of the Music Department

Texts taken from ABSOLUTE MUSIC, catalogue of the 68th International Festival of Contemporary Music - La Biennale di Venezia 2024