Miso Music Portugal

The ISCM World New Music Days, one of the largest and the most unique annual music festivals in the world, has never occurred in Portugal despite being a century-old organisation and initiative. Considering our country’s current, prosperous, and evolving contemporary music landscape, for us, Miso Music Portugal, the Portuguese Section of the International Society for Contemporary Music since 1999, Spring 2025 is the ideal moment for hosting the ISCM World New Music Days.

For almost 40 years, Miso Music Portugal and dozens of other Portuguese music and art institutions and organisations have contributed to this present exceptional moment for classical and contemporary music in Portugal, which some have already declared as the “Second Renaissance of Portuguese Music”.

Miso Music Portugal’s continuous activity and tireless work in promoting, disseminating, and publishing new music creations will reach its 40th anniversary in 2025, the very year when we will host the Portuguese edition of the ISCM World New Music Days festival.

Over the years, we have developed a wide and varied activity regarding music research, education, creation, production, and programming, including the Música Viva Festival, established in 1992, which each year invites and hosts national and international composers and performers, being a platform for different talents to converge, collaborate, and create. In 2025, the Música Viva and the ISCM World New Music Festival will thus join forces, making Portugal the host of an iconic global new music event.

In addition to the new music context, we aim to give the ISCM World New Music Days 2025 in Portugal an environmental dimension, emphasised through the subtitle “Thirst for Change”, evoking the significant dilemma that our  “blue planet” is facing – growth or life? Water is a crucial element in this equation, especially in Portugal, where its lack and evaporation increasingly threaten the population. How can humanity tackle this pressing issue?

The ISCM World New Music Days festival, with its rich history and global reach, can encourage this reflection, and the WNMD 2025 in Portugal is the perfect opportunity to dedicate space and time to the water issue and agenda. Music is not just sound and silence. It reflects the pulse of the societies, carrying our deepest concerns, fears, and aspirations. The climate crisis needs more than mere political changes or technological solutions. It requires a universal emotional understanding – a call to collective consciousness. Here, artistic and music creation can make a difference.

Organising the ISCM World New Music Days in 2025 in Portugal means celebrating contemporary music and highlighting our interconnected and mutual concerns that need global and urgent attention.

The festival will occur in the Spring of 2025, from May 29th to June 7th, between Portugal’s main cities – Lisbon and Porto. The WNMD 2025 programme, respecting the representative balance of nationality, ethnicity, gender, and age, will encompass approximately 120 works performed at around 20 concerts. In addition to the global and heterogeneous new music showcase composed of the pieces selected within the Call for Works by an international jury, our programming strategy is based on presenting the diversity and quality of the music created here and now in Portugal alongside various millennial music compositions from the 20th and 21stcenturies and including works by various ISCM Honorary Members.

The performers of all the works included in the WNMD 2025 programme will be some of the most renowned and talented Portuguese musicians – soloists, groups, ensembles, and orchestras – whose excellence and enthusiasm to be involved in the WNMD 2025 project have inspired the construction of our Call for Works.

Here, it is also vital to mention our diverse partners, whose presence, participation, and involvement make the realisation of the WNMD 2025 in Portugal possible, such as (in alphabetical order) Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Camerata Alma Mater, Casa da Música, Centro Cultural de Belém, Youth Choir of the University of Lisbon, Concrète [LAB] Ensemble, Ensemble MPMP, Jerónimos Monastery, Matosinhos String Quartet, MAAT Museum, Money Museum, Lisbon Metropolitan Orchestra, Portuguese Chamber Orchestra, and Sond’Ar-te Electric Ensemble.

In addition to the new music concerts, performances, and installations, and the ISCM General Assembly, the WNMD 2025 will include various accompanying events and initiatives. To give the ISCM World New Music Dyas 2025 festival in Portugal the above-mentioned environmental dimension, we will organise a unique international seminar and debate dedicated to the “Water Agenda” presented by various art, geology, physics, sociology, anthropology, and philosophy experts.

Miso Music Portugal’s aspiration to host this iconic event, the ISCM World New Music Days 2025, aims at showcasing the quality of Portuguese musicians and the vitality of today’s global new music scene, but also turning art and music into a means for rising global awareness, inspiration, and change.

Art is a beacon that lights up unexplored paths, fosters yet unrealized dreams, and can inspire collective willpower to change. It stirs the cauldron of imagination and enables societies to envision solutions beyond apparent limitations.

By standing at the intersection of art and environmental policy, the ISCM World New Music Days 2025 festival in Portugal is an opportunity to celebrate music and harness its power to shape a future where the planet and its inhabitants can coexist harmoniously. The ISCM WNMD 2025 in Portugal will undoubtedly be collective evidence of art as a means of thought with the potential to stimulate change.

A Miso Music Portugal / Música Viva Festival prodcution

Miso Music Portugal

ISCM – International Society for Contemporary Music