You’ve probably heard all about Venice Biennale, which this year is back to turning the Italian city into the global meeting point of art. But there’s more to that. From October 10 to 24, the Biennale Musica is also shining a light on contemporary creation, more specifically, musical creation. Headed by returning Music Director Caterina Barbieri, it takes A Child of Sound as its theme. Here’s what you need to know.
The Biennale Musica returns to the festival’s origins in renewed form. The theme seeks to reignite music as a space for “collective catharsis” in an expansion of last year’s curatorial approach. With evident inspiration from poetry, childhood innocence, faith in the age of technology, and the intangibility of sound, the festival questions not only what music can entail, but what listening itself means in a world filled with noise.
“The aurora of the soul, music precedes the logic of language and strikes us in the most vital, purest and deepest part of feeling. Music also means singing the pain of birth, the loss of fusional unity, to find it again in the ecstasy of sonic unison. For many artists, music has been an instrument of purification and healing since childhood: a natural cathartic process, through which the pain of the world is transformed into beauty thereby protecting the human essence. This is a gift, as well as a duty for the artist: to share and offer the community the therapeutic and redemptive power of music,” says Caterina Barbieri in an official statement. “A Child of Sound is thus the starting point to build a Biennale Musica that first and foremost restores the deepest value of sound as a collective catharsis.”
Beyond its philosophical scope, the programme includes an unprecedented number of world premieres in the festival’s history, blurring the lines between genre, form, tradition, and place. Language, sound, and music become fluid, pushing the boundaries of both borders and distinctions in art. Musicians from Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia collaborate on projects that radically reimagine music as a form of communication on a scale the festival has yet to see. The line-up includes works from Keiji Haino (this year’s Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement), Sarah Davachi, the Mazaher Ensemble, Lyra Pramuk and Mohammad Reza Mortazavi, Walter Zanetti, KMRU, and Caterina Barbieri, among other musicians, as well as a documentary screening, dance and vocal performances.
A Child of Sound, as its name suggests, explores music as a site of birth and rebirth. Barbieri uses the tradition of the Biennale Musica to return to music not only as a strict discipline, but as a disarming, enchanting power that connects all humans.