Distance and proximity: using these terms to introduce musikprotokoll, a festival that has always promoted the new and yet unheard, might reasonably give the impression that the program addresses the near and the far in an aesthetic sense. While that is true to a certain extent in this year’s festival, we also mean this geographically. Over the past fifty-two years, the range of artists whose works have been heard during musikprotokoll has always represented an internationally diverse group. But even more so in 2019, when geographic distance and proximity form the narrative arch of the program.