Darmstadt Summer Course 2025: Festival Program

Two-week festival, international summer academy, discourse platform, laboratory: the Darmstadt Summer Course 2025 will take place from 19 July to 2 August. There will be more than 50 public concerts, performances, lectures, workshops, courses at various venues (including the Akademie für Tonkunst, Bessunger Knabenschule, Centralstation, Designhaus, Kunsthalle, Lichtenbergschule, Orangerie), and an Open Space program created and organized by participants, tutors and guests (21.7.–2.8.2025, Lichtenbergschule).

A special focus of this year’s festival program (artistic director: Thomas Schäfer) is works located within the intermediate area between concert, installation, and performance. In some of these concert installations, the acoustic properties of the performance spaces are part of the composition, or the movement of the listeners, who have no single, fixed listening position in the hall.

US-American electronic pioneer, composer, performer and multi-media installation artist Maryanne Amacher’s fascinating electronic-performative spatial composition GLIA focuses on compositional work with spatial acoustics (31.7./1.8., Orangerie). The performative electronic music piece Rainforest IV (1973) by David Tudor, which is also an expansive sound installation, will be realized in a workshop with Summer Course participants (27.-29.7., Centralstation) and pays tribute to one of the central pioneers of experimental music, who was also an extremely important figure for the Darmstadt Summer Course.

In her three-day live sound installation IONOS – Music in the Ether (25.-27.7., then open as an installation until 2.8. in the Designhaus), Norwegian artist Maia Urstad explores the fascinating world of amateur shortwave radio.

Rebecca Saunders, who has long been working with installation concepts in addition to pure concert pieces, is creating a new version of her spatial composition Chroma for Darmstadt’s Justus-Liebig-Haus with the Cologne-based Ensemble Musikfabrik (2.8).
Composer Mark Andre, on the other hand, is entering new terrain here (26./27.7., Orangerie), for the first time translating into a concert installation his experiences with the echography of concrete spaces and their live electronic projection (SWR Experimentalstudio) into other spaces.

In his new work, Darmstadt-based composer Arne Gieshoff works in a site-specific manner and, with Trio Catch, Paul Hübner (trumpet) and Sarah Saviet (violin), invites us on a sound-archaeological expedition into a high-rise bunker. Referencing the bunker‘s history and acoustic properties, Gieshoff’s music for a concrete structure (20./21.7.) oscillates between installative sound space and composed structure.

At the heart of this programme composite is the exhibition Situations: Kunsthalle. A group of international artists led by the Berlin musician and visual artist Robert Lippok are designing an exhibition for the Kunsthalle Darmstadt, in which all rooms will be interpreted collectively and compositionally and used for individual works. Artists from the fields of experimental electronics, composition and sound-related visual art have been invited: Anushka Chkheidze, Jana Irmert, Nile Koetting, Nicole L‘Huillier, Svetlana Maraš. The exhibition’s curator is Carsten Seiffarth, who also contributes his many years of expertise in the field of installative music and sound art to other Summer Course projects (David Tudor: Rainforest IV, Maryanne Amacher: GLIA, Maia Urstad: IONOS – Music in the Ether, Mark Andre: Raum-Zeiten) as guest curator.

In a two-week 3D audio lab, in cooperation with d&b audiotechnik, 3D soundscape technology‘s compositional possibilities will be tested in practice and made tangible in works by Brigitta Muntendorf, Natasha Barrett and Aaron Holloway-Nahum. Classics such as Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Kontakte (1958–60) can also be heard in a completely new way. The young London duo GBSR will present the piece in the four-channel version at a large concert (29.7., Lichtenbergschule Turnhalle) and in 3D audio (30.7., Bessunger Knabenschule).

In more than 50 public concerts, the audience can experience world premieres by Marcos Balter, Huihui Cheng, Ann Cleare, Chaya Czernowin, Steven Daverson, Arne Gieshoff, Aaron Holloway-Nahum, Yaz Lancaster, Cassandra Miller, Luxa M. Schüttler, Kelley Sheehan, Corie Rose Soumah, Maia Urstad and Kari Watson, among others.

Guest performers include musicians Romane Bouffioux, Claire Chase, Lucas Fels, Cedrik Fermont (C-drík), Antye Greie-Ripatti (AGF), Nicolas Hodges, Robert Lippok, Heather Roche, Sarah Saviet, Patrick Stadler, Håkon Stene, Jennifer Torrence, Jenna Vergeynst and Małgorzata Walentynowicz, ensembles such as the International Contemporary Ensemble from New York, GBSR Duo, Trio Catch, zone expérimentale basel, 4tet laboratoire, Ensemble Contrechamps, Ensemble Zwischentöne and Ensemble Musikfabrik.
The two Canadian formations No Hay Banda and Quatuor Bozzini will be performing in Darmstadt for the first time, as will the Danish “Noise Free Rock” quartet Selvhenter.
No Hay Banda will perform the European premiere of the full-length Il Teatro Rosso by Steven Kazuo Takasugi (composition) and Huei Lin (video), a grotesque hall of mirrors in which the real and the virtual, truth and falsity, become blurred (20./21.7., Centralstation). Quatuor Bozzini, which is celebrating its 25th stage anniversary this year, presents world premieres by Canadian Cassandra Miller and Irish composer Ann Cleare (22.7., Lichtenbergschule Turnhalle).

A Summer Course orchestral project is dedicated to the fulfillment of a long-cherished wish for composer Chaya Czernowin: the world premiere of her new one-hour work The divine thawing of the core. Fascinated by Galina Ustvolskaya’s Second Symphony, Czernowin uses the same unusual instrumentation (1.8., Lichtenbergschule Turnhalle, soloist: Claire Chase, conductor: Vimbayi Kaziboni).

As with every year, some of the most exciting experiences await us in presentations emerging directly from the two-week courses and workshops. Over 400 young musicians and composers from 40–50 nations actively participate in the Darmstadt Summer Course.

The festival and academy program will also be accompanied by the “Words on Music” course participants, led by Flora Willson and Peter Meanwell (both BBC), including a daily radio podcast and blog posts.

The Darmstadt Summer Course, held since 1946, is organized by the International Music Institute Darmstadt (IMD), a cultural institute of Darmstadt, City of Science.

The full program can be found on the Darmstadt Summer Course website:

darmstaedter-ferienkurse.de