MaerzMusik

MaerzMusik is a festival of the Berliner Festspiele and has been held annually since 2002 in March at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele and other venues. It is the successor festival to the Musik-Biennale Berlin and is considered one of the most important festivals for Neue Musik in Germany. The artistic director of MaerzMusik is Kamila Metwaly. MaerzMusik is the successor festival to the Berlin Music Biennale. Founded in 1967 in East Berlin, the International Festival of Contemporary Music was organised until 1989 by the union of composers and musicologists and the Ministry of Culture of the GDR as a biennale in February. From 1991 to 2001, the festival was continued under the direction of Heike Hoffmann by the Berliner Festspiele. Several important composers premiered works at the festival, including Friedrich Goldmann, Johannes Kalitzke, Georg Katzer, Siegfried Matthus and Ruth Zechlin. In March 2002, the festival took place for the first time under the new name "MaerzMusik – Festival für aktuelle Musik" (MaerzMusik – Festival for Contemporary Music) under its new artistic director Matthias Osterwold, also with a new programmatic orientation. Alongside new music in its current developments as well as in works of historical significance, there was a new "presentation of experimental, conceptual, interdisciplinary and also media-artistic positions." The works of other disciplines such as performing (music theatre, performance) or visual arts (sound art, installations) are included. Another focus was placed on non-European developments in music. The program ranges from established positions of new music such as John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Wolfgang Rihm or Sofia Gubaidulina to younger composers such as Beat Furrer and Enno Poppe and visual artists such as Rebecca Horn and musicians from the field of electronic music such as Aphex Twin, Ryoji Ikeda and Stefan Goldmann. The transformed festival quickly became locally successful, for instance with Maerzmusik attracting around 15,000 visitors in 2014.