From 10 to 24 October Venice hosts "A Child of Sound", the 70th Music Biennial directed by Caterina Barbieri. Not an invitation to naivety, but to something much more difficult: to free your ear for a few moments from what you already think you know.
by Marialuisa Veneziano
6 October 2026
A child doesn't ask if what he's listening to is tonal.
It does not ask whether it belongs to cultured music, electronics, noise, techno or avant-garde.
If you hear a ticking door, try to make her claw again.
If a pot produces an interesting sound, it affects it again.
If he discovers that his voice changes inside an empty room, he can continue to shout the same syllable until an adult, less interested in acoustics and more to domestic survival, does not intervene.
Before learning what music is, the child Listen to me.
And perhaps this is precisely what, growing, we lose.
We learn names.
The eras.
Forms.
The hierarchy.
We learn that Beethoven is important, that a symphony possesses movements, that after a dominant we expect a toned, that a violin should produce certain sounds and that, if it starts producing others, someone in the room might think that the time has come to worry.
We build skills.
And that's right.
But together with skills we also build expectations.
And one day it can happen that instead of listening to what a music is doing, we begin to listen what we think should do.
It is from this crack that starts the Biennale Musica 2026.
From 10 to 24 October Venice will host the 70th edition of the International Festival of Contemporary Music, directed by Caterina Barbieri. The title is A Child of Sound: 130 artists, over forty appointments, twenty-three new works, eighteen of which in the first absolute, in a program that openly declares to want to cross epochs, geographies and genres without considering its invaluable boundaries.
But the title is more interesting than the numbers.
A child of sound.
What does that mean?
And above all, what should an adult listener do with it?
The adult ear has a problem: he knows too many things
Caterina Barbieri defines music «the childhood of the spirit» and builds the project of the Biennale around the idea of an original listening: open, not judging, still able to marvel at the sound before classifying it. In his curatorial statement he also recalls Stockhausen, which linked experimentation to the childish ability to play with the sound material.
Be careful, though.
We must not transform the child into a mystical creature endowed with a pure hearing that adulthood would inevitably corrupt.
That's not the point.
A child also has expectations, memories, preferences. Growing up, learning a musical grammar means acquiring magnificent instruments: recognizing a modulation, perceiving a structure, following a Bach escape or understanding Wagner's harmonic tension greatly expands the experience of listening.
The problem arises when knowledge stops being a lens and becomes a gate.
When we say:
«This is not music.»
«There is no melody.»
«I don't know where you want to go.»
«It's just noise.»
They are very interesting phrases, because they say much less about the object we are listening to than they say on our system of expectations.
For centuries Western music has educated the ear to recognize certain relationships: tension and resolution, consonance and dissonance, tonal hierarchies, rhythmic periodicity, thematic development.
Then the twentieth century began to do something seemingly irritating.
You asked:
and if the sound could be organized in other ways?
If the stamp becomes as important as height?
If the duration counts more than the melody?
If a noise had a compositional dignity?
If the space we listen to was part of the work?
If the musician doesn't always do something completely established?
If silence was not a break between two events, but an event itself?
Contemporary music did not abolish grammar.
He multiplied the grammars.
And that is perhaps why it sometimes puts us in trouble.
We do not yet know which dictionary to use.
Venice, perfect city to get lost even with ears
There is then something particularly suitable for all this to happen in Venice.
Venice is a city that obliges the eye to continually lose the straight line.
Turn around.
Go away.
You cross a bridge convinced to go on one side and you discover, with great dignity, that you were going elsewhere.
Perhaps even the contemporary ear needs something similar.
To stop, at least for a while, to claim to know the destination in advance.
The Biennale has built its own program not as a succession of "newness" opposed to "tradition", but as a network of genealogies.
And this is one of the most intelligent ideas of the edition.
On 17 October, in St Mark's Basilica, the Tallis Scholars directed by Peter Phillips will go through almost a millennium of singing: Hildegard von Bingen, Gregorio Allegri, Arvo Pärt and a new commission in Kara-Lis Coverdale. Not four epochs placed politely in four different shelves, but different ways of questioning the relationship between voice, spirituality, memory and acoustic space.
Let's think.
Hildegard was born in the 12th century.
Pärt belongs to our time.
Coverdale writes today.
Yet, in St Mark's Basilica, the question can be surprisingly similar:
what happens to the human voice when it tries to overcome the individual who produces it?
This is contemporary.
Not necessarily what was composed yesterday.
But what can still ask a question today.
Bach meets Morricone. And neither one needs to ask permission
One of the most fascinating programs of the Biennale puts in the same space Johann Sebastian Bach, Anton Webern, Ennio Morricone and Sarah Davachi.
The Park of Contemporary Music Ensemble will propose the Ricercar to six voices of theMusical offer in the famous orchestration of Webern, pages of the Passion according to Matthew, the first public execution Music for an end by Morricone — work for choir and orchestra built around a recording of Pier Paolo Pasolini's voice — and Chanters, new commission of Sarah Davachi for orchestra, chamber choir and organ.
Looks like a program built by someone who forgot to respect the store departments.
And that's exactly what makes it interesting.
Because Webern, when orchestrating Bach, does not "modernize" Bach.
It does something much thinner.
It distributes the lines of counterpoint between different stamps, making a structure born from the relationship between the voices also become a structure of colors.
The melody passes from one instrument to another.
The counterpoint becomes almost visible.
Bach remains Bach.
But the orchestration changes the way our ear enters its architecture.
It is a perfect example of what a Biennale dedicated to listening should do: not just tell us what to hear, but show us that a same structure can become new when changing the point from which we observe it.
And next to Bach comes Morricone.
Not that of the cinematographic melodies now entered the collective imagination, but a Morricone less immediately known, linked to compositional research and to the relationship with Pasolini.
Then Sarah Davachi.
His music often works with extended durations, tuning, minimal timbre transformations, psychoacoustic phenomena. This year, the Biennale awarded her the Silver Lion by recognizing a path in which electronics, acoustic instruments, organology and perception coexist.
Here the "sound child" begins to become understandable.
We are not asked to forget Bach to be contemporary.
We are asked to forget, for a moment, the way we're used to listening to him.
Does the noise have the right to citizenship?
The Golden Lion for the Career goes to Keiji Haino, a Japanese composer and performer who for over fifty years has crossed noise, free jazz, rock, improvisation, blues, drone and electronics, refusing a stable stylistic position. The Biennale significantly defines it as a «poet of noise».
Here comes one of the oldest and most entertaining questions of contemporary music:
When does a noise become music?
The simplest answer would be: when a composer decides to use it.
That's not enough.
Noise becomes musical material when it comes into a relationship.
When it lasts.
Intensity.
Position.
Stamp.
Repeat.
Contrast.
Memory.
When what seemed bad is heard as an event.
It's an extraordinary passage.
The world doesn't change.
Change our attention.
This is what happens when we suddenly realize the rhythm of a train, the intermittent frequency of a siren, the sound of a fan, the resonance of an underpass.
The child often does this spontaneously.
The adult immediately asks if all this «Come on.».
Perhaps because the adult spent many years learning that the value of things must be explained possibly within the end of the meeting.
Art has the bad vice of not cooperating.
The sound we can't see
Also KMRU, Kenyan musician among the central figures of field recording research and electronic composition, will lead to the Biennale ♪, project realized with Nick Verstand and Mareike Bode. The work also uses electromagnetic sounds and builds a multisensory environment in which sound, light and olfactory components participate in a single perceptive experience.
It is an excellent example of how much the concept itself of "concert" is becoming insufficient to describe some contemporary practices.
The traditional concert includes something very precise.
Someone produces music.
Someone else, sitting, listening.
The stage indicates where to look.
The audience indicates where to stay.
The beginning and the end are recognizable.
Applauding among the movements of a symphony instead requires a tactical evaluation that still test entire generations of spectators.
In many contemporary experiences this pact changes.
The public walks.
The sound comes from several directions.
A work can depend on the space in which it is realized.
Light enters the composition.
Even the smell can be involved.
It does not mean that the traditional concert has become obsolete.
It means listening is not obliged to always possess the same posture.
The body also listens.
We've known that forever, actually.
Just think about the organ in a cathedral.
A serious note is not only heard.
You feel physically in space.
Maybe some avant-gardes just remind us of something that music already knew much before becoming "contemporaneous".
And then techno comes
And this is where the program becomes even more interesting.
In addition to electroacoustic composition, organ, choral music, noise and improvisation, the Biennale also hosts DJ sets and scenes from global dance: from techno to experiences related to the Portuguese label Príncipe to the Singeli di Dar es Salaam. The same inaugural evening of October 10 will pass from Laraaji to the first solos of Kara-Lis Coverdale and Keiji Haino, to conclude with a DJ set of Livwutang.
Someone might ask:
but still Biennale Contemporary music?
The question is legitimate.
The answer, however, depends on what we mean by contemporary.
If we mean a clearly defined stylistic category — specialized ensemble, complex scores, institutional electroacoustics — then the program actually seems to widen the fence a lot.
But if "contemporaneous" means questioning the forms through which today we organize the sound, the picture changes.
The club culture has developed its own sophisticated concept of duration.
Techno works on microvariation within the repetition.
The ambient music changes the relationship between the first floor and the background.
The drone dilates the perception of time.
The noise brings density and saturation to the foreground.
The electronics allows you to directly compose the stamp, instead of considering it only a property of the instrument.
They're not interchangeable genres.
And you don't need to pretend they are.
But they can live in a festival if what connects them is not a supposed sound similarity, but a common question about how we listen.
This is the biennial bet.
And it is a much more radical bet than a simple contamination.
Hildegard next to a DJ: provocation?
No.
Or at least, not necessarily.
The provocation would be to put them together only to get a curious photograph.
Here the point is another.
We're thinking about Hildegard von Bingen.
A medieval monody is born in a world where the modern distinction between author, interpreter, rite and acoustic space does not work exactly as it works today.
That music lives in a context.
In a community.
In an architecture.
In a conception of time.
A DJ set also lives in a relationship between sound, space, duration, body and community.
The analogies end quickly, and it is good that they end.
But both experiences remind us that music is not necessarily just an object to be observed frontally.
It can be a situation in which to enter.
And this is perhaps one of the most challenging aspects of A Child of Sound: forcing us to question not only what we call music, but the way we believe we should stand in front of her.
«I don't understand contemporary music»
Perhaps it is the most important phrase of all this article.
Because it is often pronounced with some kind of embarrassment.
As if you do not immediately understand a work was a fault of the listener.
Or, on the contrary, as if it were automatically a composer's fault.
We could free both sides of this process.
Do not understand immediately can be a perfectly legitimate experience.
In front of a music that does not possess the grammar to which we are accustomed, the ear seeks reference points.
Where does the sentence begin?
What is the pulse?
What do I remember?
What is important?
It is the same disorientation that we try to enter an unknown city.
At first everything seems to be equivalent.
After a few days we distinguish the streets.
After a few weeks we recognize a square from a detail.
Listening also works through familiarity.
For this reason perhaps we should stop demanding from contemporary music something that we do not ask almost any other complex form of knowledge:
be understood entirely at the first meeting.
No one opens a philosophy treaty, reads three pages and concludes that philosophy failed because it did not provide enough emotion.
No one looks at a game of sport that ignores the rules and claims to immediately understand all the strategy.
With music, instead, we are convinced that emotion should be instantaneous.
Sometimes it is.
And it's wonderful.
Sometimes you have to attend a language.
Allow him to slowly build within us his own cardinal points.
Returning children does not mean becoming ignorant
This is perhaps the greatest risk of the metaphor chosen by the Biennale.
We could think that listening as children means giving up competence.
It's not like that.
The ideal listener is not the one who knows nothing.
He is perhaps the one who succeeds in know very much without obliging what he hears to confirm what he already knows.
It's a very difficult condition.
The musicologist recognizes.
The musician analyzes.
The interpreter anticipates.
But sometimes the rarest experience is to be able to say:
I still don't know what it is.
I'm waiting.
This aspect is a very serious intellectual act.
It means suspending judgment long enough to allow the object to reveal its own logic.
A child can listen to the noise of water without immediately asking what its formal function is.
A composer like Stockhausen can take that same attitude and transform it, through a gigantic technique, into research.
Authentic artistic innocence is not lack of knowledge.
IS the ability not to become prisoners of his knowledge.
Can music heal?
Caterina Barbieri also attributes a cathartic function to the sound, describing music as a possibility of transformation and reconnection, and connects this idea both to childhood and to Hildegard von Bingen.
It's a delicate soil.
Music is not a medicine in the clinical sense of the term.
A symphony does not replace therapy.
A concert does not automatically solve pain.
And it would be unfair to charge the art of a saving task that no work could guarantee.
But there is another form of transformation.
Music can give shape to what was first just confusion.
It can allow a pain to become shareable experience.
You can stop the automatism of the day for a few minutes.
It can change the quality of our attention.
And sometimes this is a lot.
It doesn't eliminate what hurts us.
But it can prevent pain from being completely devoid of language.
Maybe this is the most credible catarsis.
Don't be saved from sound.
Being, for some time, accompanied within it.
A Golden Lion to Noise, a Silver Lion to Slowness
The two main awards seem to tell this philosophy well.
Keiji Haino, Golden Lion, represents the radicality of the gesture, improvisation, the crossing of genres, the sound matter brought to the limit.
Sarah Davachi, Leone d’Argento, works on durability, stamp, almost imperceptible transformations, tuning and resonance.
Two seemingly opposite ways.
Noise and waiting.
The saturation and concentration.
The explosion and slowness.
Yet both ask the same thing to the listener:
presence.
Haino can force us not to escape the power of sound.
Davachi can force us to perceive such a slow transformation that, if we stop paying attention, we no longer know when it happened.
It is interesting that a Biennale dedicated to the "bambino di suono" awards two artists so different.
Because a child does not necessarily seek noise.
It can also be fascinated by something very small.
A vibration.
An echo.
A sound that slowly disappears.
No wonder depends on the volume.
It depends on the ability to notice.
Perhaps the problem is not contemporary music
Then we come to the most uncomfortable question.
What if the problem of contemporary music was not just the difficulty of its languages?
And if it were the speed of our listening?
We live in a system that we get used to deciding quickly.
I like it.
I don't like it.
Jump.
Come on.
Again.
A song must convince us before the thumb reaches the screen.
A video is judged in the first seconds.
Even musical listening has often become a succession of micro-decisions.
Search music can behave very badly in this system.
It can take ten minutes before something happens.
It can make it happen very much without that we immediately know where to look.
It can build its own form through transformations that require memory.
He can even refuse to offer us a climax.
In algorithmic terms, a disaster.
In human terms, perhaps an opportunity.
Because it forces us to exercise a faculty that is likely to become rare:
Stay.
Not because everything that is difficult is necessarily beautiful.
It's not.
There is extraordinary contemporary music and forgetable contemporary music, just as there are nineteenth century sublimation symphonies and others that history had good reasons to attend less.
Opening does not mean abolishing judgment.
It means to postpone it enough to be able to base it on experience instead of prejudice.
And it's a huge difference.
A Child of Sound
Perhaps this is the most beautiful provocation of the Biennale Musica 2026.
Don't ask us to love everything.
It would be impossible and also terribly boring.
Don't ask us to pretend to understand.
Do not turn the avant-garde into a new orthodoxy in which people who do not appreciate enough a forty-minute drone should be expelled from the consession of culturally presentable beings.
Much more simply:
try to listen before you decide.
From 10 to 24 October Venice will put in the same sound landscape Hildegard and techno, Bach and electronics, Morricone and Pasolini, radical improvisation, organs, field recordings, club cultures, renaissance voices, first absolutes and old music of centuries.
Not because everything is the same.
On the contrary.
Because everything is different.
And listening precisely means learning to distinguish without immediately turning the difference into a hierarchy.
Maybe growing musically is not just about accumulating repertoire.
Know more composers.
Recognize more forms.
Have more records.
Knowing finally explaining to friends because that cadence is not exactly what they believe.
Maybe there's a second kind of maturity.
Harder.
What comes when, after learning a lot, we are still able to amaze us.
When we can get into a hall and don't know in advance what we have to try.
When a noise can still turn our heads around.
When a well-maintained note long enough ceases to seem motionless and we begin to hear all the little things that are changing within it.
When in front of an incomprehensible music we do not immediately say:
«It's not for me.»
But:
«Wait. Let me hear again.»
Maybe this is the sound child.
Not someone who doesn't know the world yet.
Someone who, despite knowing him, did not stop giving him the chance to surprise him.
And maybe that's what a Biennale should do.
Don't tell us where the music is going.
Nobody knows.
But put us for a few days in the most fertile condition possible:
in front of something we have not yet learned to call by name.
And have the courage to listen to him before the name comes.
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