It has not been an easy path to this fifty-third edition of the ORF musikprotokoll festival. Our wish is to counter the past months’ uncertainty in planning with a “planned variety.” Besides numerous live concerts, this year’s festival offers sound installations, audio walks, music drama, and projects conceived for the internet and the radio station Österreich 1.

Sound can serve as a metaphor for omnipresence. Physiologically, we are not able to close our ears. Sound always surrounds us, but we only perceive it selectively. Our brain decides what is processed and what is blocked out. In this edition of the festival, we are presenting various approaches to detecting and working with Hidden Sounds.

Music enables us to access the reality of such sounds, which the human senses can only perceive in a rudimentary way, if at all, and which are frequently only technically measurable or even imaginary. It explores this reality, transforms it, gives rise to new worlds of sound, and leaves them behind again in a next step.

The audio and sound explorations of Hidden Sounds are performed and interpreted by the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra (RSO), first-rate ensembles for contemporary music, and musicians from SHAPE, the EU festival network for innovative music and audiovisual art.

>> Explore the program 2020

musikprotokoll 2020
Hidden Sounds
on stage – on air – online
7. – 11.10.2020, Graz