When Wien Modern celebrates Schönberg's birthday in 2024, it will not be retrospective, but very contemporary: For the 150th birthday of the famed Viennese pioneer of New Music, we have invited exciting and vastly different artists to, with the eyes and ears of our time, inquire into Schönberg's impulses and impacts and make them tangible once again.

Music brings people together. How does it do that? What does it feel like? And why don't we talk about it much more often?

For what feels like forever, music history has revolved exclusively around masterpieces and ‘individual strokes of genius’, and this includes what has been known as ‘new music’ since 1919. Festival Wien Modern, with its tens of thousands of yearly visitors, is the perfect setting to shift the perspective a little.