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. Since the first edition in 2023/24, projects by Alexander Schubert, Analivia Cordeiro, Marcus Schmickler, Brigitta Muntendorf, Brian Eno, Eliane Radigue, Georg Friedrich Haas, Ryoji Ikeda, Chaya Czernowin, Pierre Boulez and Rebecca Saunders, among others, have been presented in international collaborations with Ars Electronica, IRCAM Paris, Venice Biennale, ZKM Karlsruhe and ZIMMT Leipzig.

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", a detailed project report has been published in Die deutsche Bühne (No. 1, 2024).

Information about the Project

Information about the Netzwerk Freies Musiktheater

Studie "Das freie Musiktheater in Deutschland" (2024)

Here you will find links to the digital archive of the international festival ‘DTzM - Dresdner Tage der zeitgenössischen Musik’, founded and directed by Udo Zimmermann in 1987. The data is continuously updated and processed in the musiconn.performance system, which was developed by the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (BSB) in co-operation with the Sächsische Landesbibliothek - Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden (SLUB) as a specialist information service for musicology. In addition to services for the specialist community, the service also includes the expansion of the academic information infrastructure and the supra-regional provision of information and literature for top-level musicological research.