What has long been a central theme in the film and games industry is also becoming increasingly interesting for the concert and music theatre sector: Immersive sound concepts. The history of such concepts does not just begin with technical developments such as the Fantasound system from Walt Disney Studios in 1940, Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry, Le Corbusier's Philips Pavilion in 1958, Iannis Xenakis and Karlheinz Stockhausen or wave field synthesis and Dolby Atmos. In fact, spatial sound concepts have been anchored in global music history in a wide variety of forms and formats for centuries.

Over the next few years, the new DTzM series "Immersive Sounds" will be dedicated to current technical/digital developments in art and music as well as architectural/analogue spatial sound concepts in order to explore new potentials for accessibility and creativity and to expand listening habits. At the same time, the fascination and potential of immersive concepts, as well as necessary and problematic distances, will be critically analysed and discussed. In the first edition 2023/24, projects by Alexander Schubert, Analivia Cordeiro, Marcus Schmickler, Brigitta Muntendorf, Brian Eno, Eliane Radigue, Georg Friedrich Haas, Ryoji Ikeda and Chaya Czernowin will be presented in international collaborations with Ars Electronica, IRCAM Paris, Venice Biennale, ZKM Karlsruhe and ZIMMT Leipzig, among others.

The archive of the "Immersive Sounds" series can be found here under the menu item Themes, current projects via this LINK.

As part of the nationwide network and structural support initiated by the Fonds Darstellende Künste, the newly founded "Netzwerk Freies Musiktheater" was a guest at the Dresdner Tage der zeitgenössischen Musik (DTzM) in April 2023. In October 2023, the Artist Lab "Public Opera", also supported by the Fonds Darstellende Künste, as an initiative by Michael von zur Mühlen, Ulrike Hartung and Moritz Lobeck, brougth together various artists and actors from music theatre at HELLERAU to explore the extent to which the artistic formats and aesthetics developed under pandemic conditions have opened up new ways of accessing music theatre and permanently changed the way in which audiences can be addressed. The initial results of this meeting were presented and discussed in the Artist Lab Talk on 14 October 2023 as an audience discussion before the performance of Alexander Schubert's project "Convergence".

Further information on the DTzM topic on New Music Theatre and Public Opera will follow here shortly.

The Dresden composer, conductor and artistic director Udo Zimmermann passed away in October 2021. We deeply regret this loss, as we have lost a man who moved and established so much, not least for HELLERAU and contemporary music in Dresden. An important legacy is the international festival originally founded by Udo Zimmermann in 1987 as the "Dresdner Tage der zeitgenössischen Musik", which presents and discusses current developments in music and contemporary art.
The 30th edition of this festival took place in several parts due to COVID-19: the first period presented numerous new productions and positions mainly online from 11 April to 2 May 2021. After a second part in November 2021 with such diverse and exciting artists as Trond Reinholdtsen, Mariana Sadovska, Golnar Shahyar, Anna Korsun and the Trickster Orchestra, a third and final part followed in February 2022.

With the theme "Pause", this edition of the festival focussed on current artistic, political, social and ecological transformation processes and on the question of what functions contemporary music, artists and ensembles and a festival of this kind can and should take on in the future. With 433X22, John Cage's legendary composition 4'33'' in cooperation with the Staatskapelle Dresden accompanied each of the 22 days of the festival in the first part, as did the installative rave performance "An Invitation to Disappear" by Julian Charrière.

A central focus of the first part of the festival was on new music theatre: new projects and positions by Olga Neuwirth, Óscar Escudero and Belenish Moreno-Gil, Zeitkratzer, Amy Bryce, Chaya Czernowin, John Moran and Josh Spear, among others, were on the programme in cooperation with the Munich Biennale, ZKM Karlsruhe, Semperoper and the Dresden Universities of Music and Fine Arts. In the symposium "Musik Theater Positionen" in collaboration with "Theater der Zeit" and "Positionen", Manos Tsangaris, Susanne Kennedy, Brigitta Muntendorf, Christine Fischer, Iñigo Giner Miranda, Juliana Hodkinson, Lea Letzel and Wen Chin Fu, among others, discussed current topics and positions in music and theatre.

The festival's deliberately regional and historical perspective was reflected in parts of the programme: in cooperation with the Saxon State Library and the Dresden City Archive, among others, valuable visual and audio documents from the former Dresden Centre for Contemporary Music, which was also founded by Udo Zimmermann, will be researched, digitised and thus made accessible over the next few years. The programme also includes numerous local ensembles such as AuditivVokal, Sächsische Staatskapelle, Elbland Philharmonie, Ensemble Avantgarde, Contemporary Insights, El Perro Andaluz and ensemble courage. In the first part of the programme, Frieder Zimmermann presented a new project on Dresden-Prohlis, the place of his childhood. In a podcast, musicologist Jakob Auenmüller discussed various perspectives on the reappraisal of East German art in the post-reunification period. In addition to a focus on experimental music films in the GDR, the programme includes world premieres by Paul-Heinz Dittrich and Helmut Oehring, among others, curated by Gisela Nauck and Jens Schubbe and in cooperation with Deutschlandfunk. In a concluding symposium, curated by Elisa Erkelenz, diversity, categories and justice in (contemporary) music were debated. Guests included Max Czollek, Kübra Gümüşay, Jessie Cox, Margareta Ferek-Petric, Steven Walter, Annekatrin Klepsch, Gregor Hotz, Lena Krause and Katja Lucker. Robert Lippok and Maryvonne Riedelsheimer concluded the first part of the festival with a speculative musical study in HELLERAU in a live stream.