Exposition Of New Music

Founded in 1987, the Exposition of New Music is a six-day festival of contemporary experimental works, which sees the “exposition” of its title not solely as a presentation, but also as interaction, participation and lively communication with people and the public space.

Since 2012, when the Filharmonie Brno became the festival’s organiser, our programming has followed various threads, based on the spatial arrangements of the city of Brno, and responding to a need to reflect the rich gamut of trends present in contemporary musical productions. Thus, the Exposition has focused on sound installations, noise music and musical interventions into the public space, as well as traditional concert performances. Since 2020, the festival has a new programmer, who proposes an entirely new – his own – perspective on contemporary music.

The concept of the 2020 programme is a dialogue between “new and old” and “old and new”, both in the creation of music and other arts, and in creative performance. Over recent decades, there has been in Western culture an evident tendency to “look back at the past”, but not in the same ways as in the first half of the 20th century, when artists – seeking a perspective for their works – explored the paradigms present in the artistic concepts and forms of the past, and adopted various “neo-” styles. Towards the close of the 20th century, artists started to work with “the past” (in many senses of the word) as with “a material”, which they often transformed in ways that had little in common with the past artistic ideals and paradigms. This tendency continues to be felt today. Certainly, the development of new media has been a major factor in this: they make “the past” (captured in various analogue and digital forms) easily accessible and processable.

In 2020, we want to investigate this dialogue that we are witnessing in the art of today. We would like to stimulate the emergence of new projects, as well as present existing ones, which take historical material as their point of departure, recycling it, reinterpreting it or pitting it against new material. We also want to provide options to performers and ensembles that focus on historically-informed practice (another distinct phenomenon in the music-making of recent decades) as well as those who play contemporary music on period instruments.

We would also like to present projects that go beyond music itself or link music with other media new or old, be that in the form of installations, screenings, exhibitions, in situ performances or other.

Daniel Matej, Exposition of New Music programmer

Upcoming concerts