MaerzMusik 2026: Trailer

Klangforum Wien will open the festival with Georg Friedrich Haas’s monumental piece 11.000 Saiten (11,000 Strings) – a microtonal experience that expands the senses. The immersive concert installation for 50 pianos at MaHalla, a former factory hall in Oberschöneweide, touches on questions that have long preoccupied MaerzMusik: how can we rethink the relationship between stage and audience? How can we establish new listening habits beyond traditional forms of music presentation? What counts as music in the first place – and why?

In its second performance, Klangforum Wien explores archipelagic sounds in a matinee concert featuring a new commission by Laure M. Hiendl and works by Luxa M. Schüttler and Gerhard Stäbler. Appearing at the festival for the first time is Ensemble Dedalus, which will present pieces by Éliane Radigue, Catherine Lamb and Pascale Criton exploring the materiality of sound. Dedalus will also pay tribute to the recently deceased composer and sound philosopher Peter Ablinger.

Meredith Monk is this year’s winner of the Berlin Art Prize – Grand Prize of the Akademie der Künste, which is awarded on behalf of the Federal State of Berlin. The interdisciplinary artist is a unique voice in contemporary art and a pioneer of extended vocal technique. As part of MaerzMusik, her music can be experienced in a prize winners’ concert at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele. Meanwhile, the performative concert by soprano Juliet Fraser, Lament – a ritual of letting go, embarks on a search for lost vocal worlds, rediscovering them beyond the realm of classical music.

American composer-performer Ellen Fullman has secured a unique place in music history with her Long String Instrument, which she will play in St. Elisabeth-Church alongside the musicians of JACK Quartet. This extraordinary invention – an installation up to 30 metres long, consisting of dozens of parallel strings – defi es the symmetries and rules of harmony of conventional string instruments. It is explored in greater depth by Pelle Schilling’s LongStringInstallation, stretched between the trees in the garden of the Haus der Berliner Festspiele.

Vibration and resonance, as well as the exploration of different harmonic systems, are recurring themes in the MaerzMusik 2026 programme. This is echoed in Florentin Ginot and Okkyung Lee’s unconventional approach to string instruments. Both musicians have developed exceptional techniques on their respective instruments, the double bass and the cello. While Lee shares her improvisational practice with Berlin musicians, Ginot combines the transhuman approaches of Carola Bauckholt and Lou Kilger, bringing nature and electronics to life in the garden of the Haus der Berliner Festspiele. Performing works by Fang-Yi Lin, Tine Surel Lange, AnA Maria Rodriguez and Zesses Seglias, the KNM Berlin ensemble explores how myths and transcendent encounters merge with individual memories and experiences.

At Radialsystem, Jan St. Werner presents Music for Commons Sensed++, created with collaborators such as Erwan Keravec, Dirk Rothbrust and Louis Chude-Sokei. In this project, music as composed sound connects acoustic impulses, listeners, and space. In Cybernetic Entanglement, Viola Yip, in collaboration with Ken Ueno, deepens her practice as an instrument maker with an extraordinary soundtextile costume for two performers.

The festival’s fi nale, once again co-curated by Wojtek Blecharz, expands on questions raised in the first part of I AM ALL EARS (2025): how can normative forms of presenting and receiving music be deconstructed and changed? How can listeners experience music and sound through tactility – across the whole body? The theatre opens its doors, the stage expands, and the building itself becomes a listening being.