Editorial
Elective Affinities
The Salzburg Biennale: the new contemporary music festival in the city of Mozart. For the first time the principal Salzburg concert organizers for contemporary music have joined forces to create a new festival: the first Biennale will take place on four weekends in March 2009.
Four great musicians of our time will take centre stage; four influential composers from three continents. Music, and indeed art in general, lends itself particularly to promoting the currently much-invoked dialogue of world cultures in a meaningful and mutually fruitful manner – to widen horizons, to bridge gulfs.
Contemporary Western music is more open than ever before to the music of the Orient. Contemporary musicians are forming cultural connections that extend beyond the former boundaries between Western and Oriental music, between so-called classical and folk music. Composers from the Orient who received a Western education go back to their roots. The Salzburg Biennale will bring about encounters between Beat Furrer (born in Switzerland, resident in Austria) with Spanish flamenco inspired by Moorish sources; American Steve Reich and Balinese gamelan music; Japanese Toshio Hosokawa with traditional music from his homeland; and Swiss Klaus Huber with sound worlds of Arabia.
International ensembles from both hemispheres and leading Salzburg musicians will meet at the Salzburg Biennale.
Parallel to the first Salzburg Biennale, the Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery will open an exhibition that analyses influences from outside Europe on the fine arts.
Hans Landesmann