Clarissa Connelly / ONCEIM / Jay Mitta, DJ Travella, Pili Pili Girls

For several years, Clarissa Connelly has composed a series of canons, a musical technique in which a melody is successively imitated by different voices, creating overlapping lines and evolving polyphonic textures. As Connelly notes, both composing and performing canons require togetherness and can strengthen a sense of community among friends. Following performances in Denmark and Paris, Canons receives its Italian premiere at the Biennale Musica 2026, where these works are performed by an eight-part choir, whose gradual layering of melodic lines brings the form’s collective nature into sound.

Onceim, founded in Paris in 2012 by composer and conductor Frédéric Blondy and dedicated to contemporary experimental and electroacoustic music, appears at the Biennale Musica 2026 with two Italian premieres. The programme opens with Ellen Arkbro’s For Orchestra, a composition rooted in her exploration of intervallic harmony in just intonation. Working with long-duration harmonic structures, Arkbro creates an orchestral sound environment in which listening becomes an active process, inviting gradual immersion in the evolving qualities of harmonic sound.

The second part presents Artistic Director Caterina Barbieri’s Non puoi contare l’infinito (2026), commissioned by the Philharmonie de Paris for orchestra, four voices and electronics. Here, Barbieri extends into the orchestral domain the generative and semi-aleatory techniques developed through her work with electronic music and analogue synthesisers. At its core lies a harmonic matrix originally programmed on her analogue ER-101 sequencer, whose combinatorial possibilities are explored through the coexistence of notation and improvisation, gesture and texture, and the shifting relationships between deterministic and open processes. Structured in two acts, the composition explores themes of birth and separation, tracing the passage from unity to difference, from the infinite to the finite.

Jay Mitta, DJ Travella and Pili Pili Girls trace three distinct strands within singeli, the high-BPM electronic dance music that emerged from the youth culture of Dar es Salaam and the Tanzanian coast in the early noughties. Rooted in street parties and a rapidly evolving dance music culture, singeli is characterised by vertiginous rhythms and densely layered beats.
A central force behind Sisso Studios, Jay Mitta has played a key role in shaping the contemporary sound of the genre, bringing its street-born energy to international audiences.
DJ Travella has expanded singeli’s possibilities through a self-taught, futuristic approach to production, pushing its hyper-speed rhythms towards new electronic territories.
Bringing together Anti Vairas, Kadilida, Nana and DJ Zai, Pili Pili Girls channel the collective spirit of Dar es Salaam’s street raves through classic singeli cuts, choreography and participatory performance.