Time of Music 2025 offered its visitors musical time capsules with sounds, images and lights – in silence, darkness, sunlight, space and many sounding spaces. The concerts and discussion events attracted a total audience of nearly one thousand people.
Music took festival crowd to the sounds of animals, underwater and far into space
The opening concert featured the Yarn/Wire ensemble with two pianos and dozens of different percussion instruments, and Simon Løffler’s unique and performative work Animalia Cycle, which interpreted a soundscape inspired by animal movements. Finnish Saxtronauts sent the festival crowd on a journey through time and dimensions in their two concerts, where in the latter the quartet accompanied the audience into the venue, exploring the environment with instruments made of hoses.
People and tables levitated, there was a storm in the stage and clouds were drawn as Juliet Fraser and Mark Knoop performed impossible operatic plans. Our music listening habits were challenged in a concert by the Polish band Kompopolex and in Matthew Shlomowitz’s work Lecture about Listening to Music. In the festival closing concert Mirka Viitala performed Frederic Rzewski’s monumental The People United Will Never Be Defeated!, with great emotion.
A total of 21 students from eleven different countries participated in the two courses of the Summer Academy. In the Olde Skool course composers and pianists delved into collaboration, and the course’s two concerts featured premieres of the participating composers as well as the performers’ own repertoire. The second course, the Laboratory of Not-knowing, stretched the meaning of the word “concert”, as course participants moved the audience from one space and emotion to another – in the dark, in silence and underwater. Journalist Jari Hoffrén describes this unique experience brilliantly in his festival report.
Reflection on the future of contemporary music
During the week, we gathered for workshops to consider the role and place of contemporary music in today’s and future Finland. The discussion sparked a lot of ideas, for example, about what kind of music performance situation surprises people today; or how contemporary music could be made more accessible to young people; and how artificial intelligence is changing artistic creative processes. The workshops provided plenty of ideas for the City of Viitasaari’s project, The Music of Our Time, which aims to develop contemporary music and activities that promote it in Finland and internationally.
What thoughts and feelings did the festival evoke in you – tell us!
Loved it, thrilled by it or just plain confused at the festival? What would you like to experience at Time of Music in the future? Share your thoughts with us by answering a short feedback survey – your input helps us make the festival even better!
Time of Music would like to warmly thank this year’s festival audience, artists, course participants, partners, supporters and staff. You can get back into the festival atmosphere by listening to the concerts of Yarn/Wire and Saxtronauts recorded by Yle and by checking out the pictures on our social media channels. We will also be releasing an After Movie soon.
Welcome to Time of Music again from June 30th to July 5th 2026!
