Biennale Musica 2025

The theme of The Star Within is inspired by the sentence taken from the writings of Clarice Lispector that stands as an epigraph to the entire programme, yet immediately evokes other inner stars.
Music is unique among the arts in as much as it is the only art form that can lay claim to travel through time with the light, immaterial – and imaginal – apparatus of sound.
Guest artists at the 69th International Festival of Contemporary Music include not only Meredith Monk and Laurie Spiegel, but also Johann Sebastian Bach, more alive than the living.
Within the theme of cosmic music there are echoes of sidereal space, contemporary asceticism, the connection with science, nature, philosophy and the boundless wanderings of the spirit. Barbieri recounts how she conceived this title and the cascade of complex and luminous proposals in her programme while observing the dawn in the sky over Venice, in that moment just before sunrise when the last star sings to announce the coming of day.

Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, President of La Biennale di Venezia

Music is the star within. It is the desire for great things, for vastness. Spark of new worlds, it opens us to infinity. A vibration that permeates the cosmos and pierces us through with ecstasy, from molecule to planetary motion, sound escapes the boundaries of the ego and opens us up to the encounter with the Other—the unknown. In this resonance there is deep listening, which is itself the primary root of empathy. In sound, the interconnectedness animating all living things is laid bare.
The 69th International Festival of Contemporary Music of La Biennale di Venezia, titled The Star Within, sets out to explore the theme of cosmic music.
Music as a metaphor for the cosmos, that mirrors and manifests nature in its becoming, making perceptible its processes of creation and metamorphosis.
Music as a living organism, as an autopoietic form able to self-evolve and develop its own laws.
Music that teaches us how to be in the present moment: past and future collapsing into the now. In a state of deep listening, we feel interconnected and in continuous transformation: an intimate, inner resonance with the universe.

Caterina Barbieri, Artistic Director of the Music Department

Texts taken from THE STAR WITHIN, catalogue of the 69th International Festival of Contemporary Music - La Biennale di Venezia 2025