MaerzMusik 2026 explores listening as a collective practice, presenting multidisciplinary works and immersive concerts that reimagine sound as a space for encounter, perception and new forms of coexistence. The contemporary music festival, of the Berliner Festspiele brings together international positions from music, sound art, performance, experimentation, improvisation, and installation.
The festival opens at MaHalla with Georg Friedrich Haas’ arge-scale microtonal composition “11,000 Strings”. Fifty pianists join Klangforum Wien to create a vast, immersive sound environment — an experience that transforms the industrial venue into a living instrument.
The human voice forms a focus in this year’s programme. Legendary composer and performer Meredith Monk, recipient of the Berlin Grand Art Prize, appears in a trio formation. Vocal artist Juliet Fraser presents “Lament: a ritual of letting go”, a performative ceremony that weaves together historical laments, contemporary composition and physical gesture.
Using electronics or artistic approaches that incorporate them, MaerzMusik explores sound as a social and political practice. Louis Chude-Sokei and Jan St. Werner present “No Nation Left But the Imagination”, an audiophile essay on listening, migration, and social boundaries. Other projects address entropy, cybernetic systems, gender, and physicality, including performances by Vanessa Porter, Viola Yip and Ken Ueno, as well as installation works by Luxa M. Schüttler. The festival finale “I AM ALL EARS”, co-curated by Wojtek Blecharz, transforms the Haus der Berliner Festspiele into a walk-in sound architecture.
With the ensemble concerts, MaerzMusik explores archipelagic ways of thinking that incorporate poetry, memory, and various forms of spatiality – between instrumental and electronic music. Klangforum Wien presents works by Gerhard Stäbler, Laure M. Hiendl, and Luxa M. Schüttler, the Ensemble Dedalus “open scores”, with works by the resently passed electronic pioneer Éliane Radigue and last year passed Peter Ablinger, by Pascale Criton and Catherine Lamb and KNM Berlin lets us experience cyclical and ritualistic formats in contemporary music.
Ellen Fullman’s new composition for the Long String Instrument she developed and the JACK Quartet intertwines pure tuning, spatial resonance, and movement. Composer and cellist Okkyung Lee shares her improvisational practice with Berlin based musicians and premieres her new performance “Aurora (Mesophase)”, developed as part of her DAAD residency.
