New Music Festivals as Agorai––Their Formation and Impact after 1980 on Warsaw Autumn, Festival d'Automne, and Wien Modern

The project’s thesis, that new music festivals strongly influenced the development of new music and related public cultural practices in the past decades, shall be proven by this survey, which closely reflects the complex structure and content of the festivals’ settings. Its starting point is the increased public interest in new music from about 2000, which can be traced back to impulses from the 1980s. After some decades of occupying a defensive niche-status, the radius of this music scene’s impact expanded, as can be observed in the open and active forums of European Avantgarde-music festivals, which, beginning in the 1980s, led to the establishment of numerous additional new music festivals and ensembles. The spectrum of the project’s approaches ranges from exploratory documentary archival work (database) through the sociology of music (quantitative polls, qualitative interviews, and participatory observations) and historiographic approaches including cross sections, biographical access to specific agents, and music analysis of representative “works”, to the analysis of activities in music mediation/education and management.