The natural personal quality of music, or the nature of this personal quality, is elusive and almost impossible to grasp precisely – and of course not only because its most important components, sound and time, cannot be held in one’s hands
One of the most vibrant contemporary music events returns to Budapest for the thirteenth time. Between 9 January and 8 February 2026, the Transparent Sound New Music Festival once again reshapes the boundaries of concert experiences. Under the title Singular // Plural, the 2026 edition presents performances by international and Hungarian artists, interactive programs, and interdisciplinary events, focusing on the diversity of artistic worlds.
A meditative musical labyrinth unfolds as Chopin’s iconic piano preludes are interwoven with Ramon Lazkano’s 19 fragmentary, “corroded” ensemble preludes, creating an intimate dialogue between past and present, and between French and Hungarian musicians at the Transparent Sound New Music Festival’s opening concert.
The UMZE Chamber Ensemble’s concert offers a rare glimpse into Péter Eötvös’s lesser-known early experimental works from the 1970s, shaped by his time with Stockhausen and fusing electronics with instrumental music, revealing the young composer’s workshop and a sound world that still feels strikingly powerful today.
The Transparent Sound New Music Festival concert presents three boundary-pushing string works by 90-year-old Helmut Lachenmann—Toccatina, Pression, and Streichtrio—performed by members of the Korossy Quartet, with an interactive talk by composer Márton Illés exploring their radical techniques and sound worlds shaped by “pressure,” contact, and material transformation.
Csaba Hajnóczy’s acoustic-ecology-focused, field-recording-based audiovisual project is presented alongside fixed-media works by Bálint János Kiss and Bori Sinkó, culminating in the Hajnóczy–Darázs Terep Project, which explores the musical and improvisational potential of environmental soundscapes.
The documentary "Flux Us Now!" explores the radical Fluxus movement of the 1960s, showing how it erased the boundaries between art and everyday life, and what political and social stakes were involved in bringing art into the streets and closer to the audience.
The Fragments project brings together four performers and contemporary composers, continuing the Orpheus series with works inspired by Attila József’s poems and András Szőllősy’s chamber piece, culminating in an open-form, site-specific concert at the Godot Institute of Contemporary Art that integrates improvisation, live electronics, dance, and audience interaction.
This program, featuring works by Márton Illés, Gérard Grisey, and Péter Tornyai, including a new piece written for Paul Beckett, aims to highlight the richness and diversity of contemporary viola music.
Fifty-five years after Péter Eötvös’s 1968 cult radio play Mese—built from motifs of a hundred Hungarian folk tales and Molnár Piroska’s voice transformed through electronic manipulation—MOME Media Design BA students created five new visual versions for the House of Music’s Sound Dome.
At a joint event by Budapesti Moziestek and the Transparent Sound New Music Festival, audiences will see András Monory Mész’s cult film Meteo in newly restored picture and sound, followed by a discussion with the film’s composers János Másik and Tibor Szemző, moderated by film critic László Kolozsi and composer Marcell Dargay.
Lucas Fels presents a program of landmark contemporary cello works—spanning new complexity, Buddhist-inspired spectral thinking, serialism, and noise/timbre explorations—alongside a Schubert-referencing fixed-media piece and two world premieres, including Dániel Péter Biró’s microtonal work informed by Jewish numerology.
A rarely screened 1989 film by the late Judit Elek, Tutajosok, scored by Péter Eötvös using motifs by György Kurtág and portraying the infamous 1892–93 Tiszaeszlár trial, will be shown by the Átlátszó Hang Filmklub, linking the event to the Eötvös evening at the House of Music Hungary and to the 2026 centenary celebrations of György Kurtág.
A rare musical evening at the Transparent Sound New Music Festival pairs composer-performer István Márta with American composer-trumpeter Jalalu-Kalvert Nelson and the Modern Art Orchestra, preceded by a bilingual Hungarian–English pre-concert talk.
Dsilton’s music is an energetic microtonal journey in 31-tone tuning, combining complex grooves, interlocking cycles by Georg Vogel and David Dornig, serial compositions and processed field recordings, performed on newly built 31-tone Clavitone keyboards, an eight-string 31-fret guitar and drum set.
This interactive family performance, inspired by NASA’s Voyager Golden Record, invites the audience in the House of Music to become co-creators of music while playfully exploring what sounds from today’s Hungary we would send into space and what it means to be human in the universe.
Memoriam is an interdisciplinary performance by Scenatet that fuses contemporary and house dance, new music, and theatrical staging to explore cultural, bodily, and personal memory, inviting the audience into a ritual-like community where past, present, and an uncertain future resonate together.
