FUTURE NOW
The festival within the festival as part of Young Euro Classic
📅 Every festival weekend
🕔 4.30 pm, Werner-Otto-Hall
The festival-within-the-festival FUTURE NOW Musical Diaries opens musical journals whose pages are still blank: ensembles from Argentina, Morocco, Vietnam, Tajikistan and the FUTURE NOW Ensemble, in which different musical worlds come together, invite you to share collective sound experiences. Join us for five concerts, five unique stops on a journey through cultures and genres that will broaden your horizons and enable new listening experiences.
The young musicians of the MOHIRON Ensemble from Dushanbe combine traditional and contemporary Tajik melodies with works by international composers, all performed on traditional Tajik instruments. Tradition and modernity also converge in the “Lách Tách” programme: composer and performer Lương Huệ Trinh, who combines everyday sounds with electronic sounds and traditional Vietnamese music in her soundscapes, meets singer Vũ Thị Thuỳ Linh, who practises Ả Đào, a millennia-old musical tradition from Northern Vietnam. The ni-va ensemble from Buenos Aires, on the other hand, creates dense sonic spaces in which electronic, recorded and seemingly familiar sounds are constantly remixed. In the ensemble JISR // جسر // BRÜCKE, five musicians from Morocco demonstrate just how rich and vibrant our shared cultural history is, creating musical moments brimming with energy, depth and luminous timbres. Finally, Joaquín Macedo from Buenos Aires, Hatem Hamdy from Cairo, Laris/Lara Bäucker and Vinh Tran from Berlin experiment with the music emerging when people come together with a healthy dose of mutual curiosity and openness in the FUTURE NOW Ensemble &ñịoن, founded especially for the festival.
Thus, the musical diaries of FUTURE NOW are filled with new entries born of curiosity, openness, and the impact of shared sounds. The musical future resounds in the present.
Traditional Tajik sounds meet international works and merge into a captivating concert experience. MOHIRON combines musical heritage with fresh artistic ideas.
TAJIK MELODIES FROM DIFFERENT REGIONS · Qalb (en. Heart)
IDIBEK TOSHEV · Jilva (en. Radiance / Graceful Allure)
ANTONIO VIVALDI · Escala Palladio (arranged for Tajik national instruments)
HAKIM MAHMUD · Zavqi Javoni (en. The Joy of Youth)
JONIBEK SATTORZODA · Guftugu (en. Dialogue)
ZEQUINHA DE ABREU · Tico-Tico
KHUSHBAKHT NIYOZOV · Badakhshoni (en. From Badakhshan)
JOVIDON HASANOV · Kuhistoni (en. Of the Mountains)
VITTORIO MONTI · Csárdás
IDIBEK TOSHEV · Khusnoro (en. Radiant Beauty)
IDIBEK TOSHEV · Sarchashma (en. Source)
Lương Huệ Trinh combines traditional Vietnamese music, everyday sounds, and electronic textures into multilayered soundscapes between reality and illusion. In dialogue with singer Vũ Thị Thuỳ Linh, the Lách-Tách concert gives rise to cross-temporal musical encounters in which past and present flow into one another.
Vietnamese composer and performer Lương Huệ Trinh builds her musical practice by exploring materials from traditional music, everyday life sounds, and electronic sounds. She shapes and places them in new relationships, creating multilayered sonic landscapes that blur the boundaries between reality and illusion. Her music becomes emotional wanderings that guide listeners through layers of memory, through space, through the sharing of personal thoughts.
In the Lách Tách concert, Lương Huệ Trinh invites Vũ Thị Thuỳ Linh, a traditional Vietnamese vocalist, to join this voyage. Vũ Thị Thuỳ Linh presents the ancient melodies of Ả Đào, a millennia-old traditional music form from Northern Vietnam blending poetry and music with highly refined vocal techniques and the most complex tonal system, accompanied by Phách (claves) and Trống chầu (drum). Two artists, two distinct approaches to sound, collide and create a space with folds in time.
What belongs to the past and what is unfolding in the present do not remain separate but interweave, generating sonic moments where the boundary between old and new becomes blurred – at once strange and familiar. The music here does not explain but poses questions – about time, about memory, about what still resonates.
Five musicians from Morocco unfold the tradition of Arabo-Andalusian chamber music and combine classical works with contemporary compositions. Historical depth and contemporary sonic artistry weave into a journey through the North African and Mediterranean cultural space.
TRADITIONELL ANDALUSISCH · حبك القمر (en. Even the moon has fallen under your spell)
ANDALUSISCHE MUWASCHSCHAH · ريم رمتني (Reem cast me aside)
N. N. · يا قلبي خلي الحال (en. My heart, let things rest in their own truth)
TRADITIONELL CHAABI · العار يا العار (en. Have mercy, have mercy on me)
ANDALUSISCHE MUWASCHSCHAH · لحبيبي أرسل سلام (en. I send my greetings to my beloved)
TRADITIONELL ANDALUSISCH · أنا قد عيّا صبري (en. My patience has grown weary)
The ni-va ensemble from Buenos Aires combines live electronics, improvisation, and algorithmically generated sequences into continuously evolving sounds. In their performance, fragile and dense soundscapes emerge that oscillate between the familiar and the indeterminate, calling the very act of listening into question.
Chamber music on a laptop? The ni-va Ensemble from Argentina brings it to Berlin. This live digital music project was founded by students on the Electroacoustic Composition programme at the National University of the Arts (UNA) in Buenos Aires. The ensemble focuses on exploring sound in real time. Their live improvisations combine various approaches to electroacoustic music, including acousmatics and musique concrète.
At FUTURE NOW Musical Diaries, the four-piece laptop ensemble from Buenos Aires presents an electroacoustic improvisation in four acts. To achieve this, they use synthesizers, sampling techniques, virtual instruments as well as self-programmed sounds and algorithms. The ensemble creates dense sonic spaces in which electronic, recorded and seemingly familiar sounds are constantly remixed. What do we hear when we cannot see how a sound is created? And how does our hearing change when the origin of a sound can no longer be clearly determined? The ensemble takes precisely this uncertainty as the starting point for a concert that sets perception, expectation and sonic imagination in motion. The four musicians improvise together, working with sounds in the moment, giving each performance a genuinely new timbre.
Four musical biographies meet and, within the FUTURE NOW ensemble &ñịoن, form a shared space of listening and creation. From friction and convergence emerges a composition that does not resolve difference, but renders it productive.
Hearing, embracing and celebrating differences: four musical traditions, four biographies in a first-time musical encounter. The FUTURE NOW Ensemble &ñịoن explores what happens when different musical upbringings challenge and contradict one another. Through a collaborative creative process involving misunderstandings, unexpected common ground and the gentle unlearning of habits, a composition emerges which will be performed for the first time at FUTURE NOW Musical Diaries.
The ensemble consists of Berlin-based musicians working across disciplines. The Argentinian composer and sound artist Joaquín Macedo is dedicated to experimental music and collaboration with performers. For Laris / Lara Bäucker, the search for a connection with the audience is at the heart of their musical practice – through voice, performance and composition. As a composer, sound engineer and video artist, Vinh Tran, a Berliner with Vietnamese roots, works across an analogue-digital continuum. He modifies guitars with acoustic distortion devices, plays algorithmically derived patterns on the piano or uses the laptop as an instrument. Hatem Hamdy, born and raised in Cairo, combines Arab and Western traditions, drawing equally on his perspectives as an engineer and composer.
The result of this multifaceted encounter? No one is here representing a particular culture. Instead, music emerges from a shared process: not four individuals working side-by-side, but a shared collaboration that allows everyone to shine.
Ticket information for the FUTURE NOW concerts
For the five concerts as part of ‘FUTURE NOW - Musical Diaries’, you have the option of buying tickets for the individual concerts or a festival pass for three concerts of your choice, or for all five concerts.
Price categories* for the Festival within the Festival FUTURE NOW Musical Diaries
Single concert ticket: 18 €
Festival pass for a selection of three concerts: 45 €
Festival pass for all six concerts: 70 €
*All tickets plus 10% advance booking fee, except when purchased at the box office.
Discounts
Children under 3 years of age are admitted free of charge and must sit on the lap of an accompanying adult.
A 30% discount on all price categories (excluding the advance booking fee) is available to the following groups upon presentation of valid proof at the entrance:
• Children aged 3 and over and school pupils
• Students
• Trainees / apprentices
• Participants in the Federal Volunteer Service (BFD, FSJ, FÖJ)
• Holders of social discount cards (e.g. Berlin-Ticket S)