Memories in Music

Festival of Contemporary Music

Concerts, Installations, Audio Walks, Symposium
digital & outdoor & indoor
6 – 9 May and 6 – 8 August 2021

The "Memories in Music" festival is presenting a broad spectrum of contemporary music practice that challenges canons and aesthetic norms and contributes to the writing of history, the culture of remembrance and social transformation. The participating composers and musicians are members of the Akademie der Künste, activists of the Berlin scene and numerous international guests.

The second part of the festival "Memories in Music" (6 to 8 August 2021) will focus on two full-length concert programmes and five sound installations. With the Friday programme "Focus Lebanon" we take a special look at this politically and culturally crisis-ridden region and artistic lines of memory. The concert by ensemble mosaik on Saturday and five installations will also explore various forms of remembrance and set them in dialogue with indigenous sound imagination, natural sounds and languages, addressing the question: What is recollected in music and sound and what processes of interchange lie behind this process? The festival is part of the Akademie’s programme focus “Arbeit am Gedächtnis – Transforming Archives”.

In the first part of the festival (6 – 9 May 2021), which was digitally transmitted, we presented, among other things, new compositions that dealt with the natural scientist Ludwig Leichardt in Australia as well as with dialogue projects between Europe and Brazil / Bolivia.

The four day programmes are still accessible in their entirety or as individual projects on this page below, under "Digital Programme" and as a playlist on the Youtube channel of the Akademie der Künste.

Project partners