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.

We very much regret that the cellist of the Arditti Quartet broke his arm a few days before the start of the planned major anniversary project ARDITTI 50 (01/02 November 2024 Wiener Konzerthaus, 04/05 November 2024 Musikverein) and wish him a speedy recovery.

In view of the quartet's intensive preparations and rehearsals for this project, which have been ongoing for months, we have jointly decided to maintain the integrity of the programme and the quartet and not to look for short-term replacements for parts of the programme.

Just three days after the festival opening, the Wien Modern Festival Pass 2023 broke the barrier of 750 issued passes.

Due to the strong demand, some individual events at venues with limited seating capacity are already sold out. For the sake of the audience, it is important to us to avoid sudden bottlenecks at venues such as the Jesuitenkirche, the Reaktor, the Berio-Saal or the Odeon as much as we can. For this reason, the sale of festival passes has now ended (passes already ordered in your name can still be collected).

Vermehrt Schönes! For once, this invitation, well-known in Vienna, to bring more art into life and more life into art is specifically directed at people under 27. We already know that our rather large Viennese autumn festival with rather strange music may seem rather odd. But we are convinced that it is absolutely worthwhile to listen to strange music – it’s never too early or too late for that.

If only everything were this simple - in keeping with the festival theme for 2022, this year we have radically eliminated everything that has made the pass so complex over the course of its 35-year history (score cards, assigned seats, personalisation, quotas and various editions). What remains is what has always made the Wien Modern Pass so unique: Five weeks of a full programme at an unbelievable package price.

To close off a memorable edition of Wien Modern, Pauline Oliveros’ piece The Tuning Meditation will be played –  for free, live, online and for anyone to join in. The artist Ione, widow of Pauline Oliveros, will personally lead this performance (in English). Participation is very simple thanks to the playing instructions. The complete text score by Pauline Oliveros can be found below. To participate, all you need to do is to register to the event for free in our Online Shop, the Zoom access data will be sent to you via mail before the performance.

I assume the Federal Government knows what it means to turn crucial economic sectors of this country down to 0% for the second time. In Austria, culture is a sector with over 100 000 official workers, which doesn't include the immense dark figure of people in precarious employment situations, and the enormous effects that culture has on the stability of tourism, gastronomy, transportation, commerce, education and science, not to mention its contribution to the stability of countless individual people. The atmosphere in this sector at the moment makes one thing clear: to ensure that culture isn't viewed as a victim of public health, winter tourism in the mountains and the Christmas business, new signals are desperately needed. It is also clear that a captain has to try to evade an iceberg at all costs, but now, he must do everything to make sure that the ship doesn't run aground on the other side.

The pandemic can last many more months, and this virus might not be the last. The cultural sector is among those areas of society which were widely recognised as being pioneers and examples when it came to the development of sustainable safety measures. Highly complex prevention concepts and the best contact tracing thus contributed the least to the spread of the pandemic, but now due to the new measures, culture is in danger; urgently and also in the long run. This is nothing other than a financial and existential crisis of the "Cultural Nation" of Austria.

The cultural sector has spent decades of austerity tolerating enormous financial pressure and widespread precariat. I now urge everyone, truly everywhere, from the big institutions to the free scene, across all artistic and stylistic fields, to make a strict calculation and to put on the table how much culture truly costs. For months, the government has been expecting extremely elegant reactions to the most brutal red pens and the sharpest scalpels. For months, the cultural sector has done everything in its responsibility to master all these tasks and to accomplish the most impossible things. In the current extreme situation, the cultural sector has to expect the government to follow this sledgehammer blow with the necessary steps, unbureaucratically, substantially, and quickly.

In many ways, 2020 is a remarkable year. We wouldn't necessarily have chosen this year to make over our website, which has been the same since 2012. But (just a small anecdote on the side) the company that used to run our website switched business and decided to focus on

We are happy to announce that our Call for Scores for new organ compositions for Wien Modern 2020 received a very exciting response: Over 40 international submissions from well-known composers as well as new talent followed the call in January 2020.

After detailed consideration of the anonymised scores and extensive deliberation

Wien Modern is looking for new works for organ to be premiered on four special historical organs in Vienna as part of the upcoming festival.