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Party Modern | Adriana Celentana, DJ Armonia, S. Nicolussi

Photo: Markus Sepperer

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New Music for an Audience

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.

New music for the city

With around a month of events at countless locations all over the city, Wien Modern is the biggest festival for contemporary arts music in Austria and one of the biggest of its kind worldwide. It was founded in 1988 at the initiative of Claudio Abbado, conductor and the general music director of the city of Vienna at the time. Since then, it takes place every year in November in Vienna.

Exactly what is to be expected from "contemporary arts music" and from a festival with the name "Wien Modern", which is at odds with all the clichés of Vienna?

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