Biennale Musica 2026

The powerful metaphor of the listening child reminds us that contemporaneity cannot be reduced to simply belonging to our own time. To be contemporary means to search for what is not yet fully visible in the present, to listen to what has not yet found a voice. From this perspective even anarchy may regain its original meaning, understood as a suspension of the established order, the freedom necessary for an unexpected form to emerge. A Child of Sound, then, is the moment in which the sound is still fresh, the listener has not yet decided what to expect, and the music can finally reveal itself.

Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, President of La Biennale di Venezia

A concert offers us a unique opportunity to pause: to start afresh from silence, to open ourselves to the act of listening and, letting the music captivate us, to reconnect ourselves with others. That first experience of listening, which only innocent ears can have, is revelatory not only in understanding the music of the present, free from the filter of prejudice or the categories that confine the imagination, but also to return to truly living, rather than merely surviving, in the contemporary world.
Perhaps in this revelation there is also the potential for a revolution—a revolution undertaken with the same seriousness and devotion with which children devote themselves to play, breaking the rules to create new ones, just as the artist who transgresses the laws of the known in order to generate innovation.

Caterina Barbieri, Artistic Director of the Music Department

Texts taken from A CHILD OF SOUND, catalogue of the 70th International Festival of Contemporary Music - La Biennale di Venezia 2026