Welcome to Bled Contemporary Music Week.

 

This festival celebrates music of the present day: in over 160 world premieres by composers and musicians from more than 55 countries. We are delighted to welcome participants from Africa, Asia, North and South America, Australia and across Europe.

 

In this way, the programme offers a snapshot of what it means to make music in 2026. From Lima to Hong Kong, from Amsterdam to Lagos, our featured artists bring their individual perspectives and peculiarities, their unrepeatable idiosyncrasies. Yet together they form a shared voice — a global community of contemporary practitioners connected through common creative insights. The music presented this week reflects these, the delights and the anxieties of the world today.

 

This is the sixth edition of the festival, founded by Institute .abeceda in 2022. The inaugural edition was a much smaller affair bringing together myself and three other composers-in-residence, Dré A. Hočevar, Tilen Lebar and James Pecore. I remember that week fondly, not least for the performance of Hočevar’s Opus I. in the castle’s intimate summer heat. It felt like a musical manifesto for a new way of working. Indeed, while I have been encouraged to exercise restraint in this introduction, I cannot help but express my genuine admiration for what has been achieved since: a Fitzcarraldo-like feat of will from a group of dedicated, irrepressible Slovenians who have dreamed this out of thin air. It is remarkable.

 

Today, the festival features an expanded composer-in-residence programme alongside a series of guest composers invited by ourselves, reflecting a decentralised approach to curation that is characteristic of the institute’s ethos. The programme also presents the outcomes of several workshops which I am privileged to run, including the formation of new ensembles, the development of compositions and the presentation of research projects in a lecture series. Beginning well in advance of the festival itself, these workshops create opportunities for sustained conversation and dialogue on the nature of contemporary music.

 

“Contemporary music” is a curious phrase. Music, by its nature, is perhaps the most contemporary of the arts: ephemeral, existing only in the moment of its sounding. Whether a bone-flute melody from the depths of recorded history, or an electronic suite composed with A.I., music always takes place in the present. In practice, the term often means “contemporary classical” — an oxymoron if there ever was one. But one that points to a shared inheritance of this week’s premieres regarding the legacy of modernism within the art music tradition.

 

Like developments in visual art and literature, composition was subjected to radical experimentation in the twentieth century. Pitch and rhythm, material and form, sound and its notation…all were transformed under the avante-garde injunction to “make it new.”  But these innovations have not entered the public imagination in quite the same way. As the philosopher Frederic Jameson observes, “not only are Picasso and Joyce no longer ugly; they now strike us, on the whole, as rather ‘realistic.’” The same cannot be said of music. Why? The only way to experience a piece is to give yourself over to it entirely. You must be present. Yet such demands have contributed to a certain siloing of composition, where the practice is divorced from contemporary life into what composer Helmut Lachenmann has called “a complacently tolerated ghetto.”

 

Of course, music is not this. It is less like knowledge and more like faith: transcendent and quotidian. From whistling in the shower to mosh pit bruises and the mysteries of Bach, music is divine in its immanence. It cannot be separated out from the business of living.

 

For me, Bled Contemporary Music Week is a moment when life and music realign, when music is made whole again in a shared encounter with the new. Because at a world premiere, the role of the audience becomes absolutely crucial. We already know what we think of Beethoven’s late string quartets or Mozart’s great symphonies. But this week, your reflections, your enthusiasm (or even your boredom, your disgust) become part of the work itself.

 

It is to you, whoever you are, whether a dedicated specialist or a curious passer-by who has wandered in from the lake, that these works address themselves. It is for you to decide what they are. After they sound, the world will have changed, and you with it. It is a wonderful, exciting responsibility.

 

I look forward to joining you in it.

—Alastair White