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FIRST PERFORMANCES
The Gaudeamus Muziekweek is now in its sixty-ninth year and, as ever, it focuses on young music pioneers, in hopes of presenting a snapshot of the newest ideas in contemporary music being developed across the world. The festival's dense and diverse programming is compressed into five full days, in 2016 from 7 to 11 September, squeezed principally within one labyrinthian building, the TivoliVredenburg, whose impressive monolithic glass exterior imposes itself as a pillar of cultural life in central Utrecht. Amid this density, it is impossible to provide anything but a partial account of the festival, and my presentation is far from impartial, as I was one of the five nominated composers for this year's Gaudeamus Award. If only from these fragments and particular foci, then, I will present my own reactions and estimations of how the festival has highlighted some of the innovations and interests of a few of the newest practitioners of new new music.
I was delighted to see the manifold ways in which the works showcased in the festival pushed the frontiers of the musical experience in ways that extend beyond what can be communicable through pitches and rhythms in a written score. Even the most conventional music I heard, epitomised in a surprisingly traditional opening-night concert with the Amsterdam Sinfonietta, presented an extended vision of concert music with multimedia, theatrical elements, and a rupture of the assumptions behind the sanctioning of musical space, sound and action in concert performance. Michel van der Aa's Up-Close, the centrepiece...