Sèrie Rietveld 02, Jaume Rocamora (Tortosa, 1946)
For a long time, I wanted to organize something related to the music I love in Reus, the city where I work and live for more than 20 years. Taking advantage of the experience of my friend and sound adventures buddy, composer Joan Bagés i Rubí, we started this challenging project called CONTEMPORANEUS.
First steps
CONTEMPORANEUS is just the Latin translation of “contemporary”. It is very appropriate because it also contains the name of the city that will host this festival. Isn’t it?
Reus (Catalunya, Spain) is a very dynamic city with a wide range of cultural and leisure activities. However, we felt it needed a space to showcase the classical music written nowadays. For this reason, from the Contemporaneus Cultural Association, we proposed to the City of Reus Cultural Department the organization of a contemporary music festival.
First, we threw a Contemporary Music Day, on Saturday 28 October 2023. Read this post I wrote about it, then. Local and regional musicians performed at the different concerts. There were a total of 4 world premieres by national (one of them born in Reus) and international (from Ukraine, United States and Japan) composers. Furthermore, we held a talk with some regional composers in order to they will give us their own artistic and personal outlook on new music.
The success and public participation of this day encouraged us to change the festival format we are presenting this year.
Watch the video-teaser for this edition.
The festival
We liked the idea to celebrate the CONTEMPORANEUS 2024 in two different seasons, in summer (18, 19 and 20 of July) and autumn (22 and 23 of November). On one hand, we avoid packing activities in a few dates and we can give more visibility to the festival throughout the year. On the other hand, it provides us more flexibility to schedule concerts with the artists. It is maybe more work, but it is more distributed.
It has been not easy to extend the number of concerts from two (in 2023) to six (in 2024). Anyway, we loved to invite artists with a long career and interesting projects. Artificial Intelligence, electronics, visual arts, 21st Century repertoire, etc will give the audience some idea of how varied is contemporary music.
In this link to the festival website, you will find detailed information about artists, concerts, dates, ticketing, etc.
With this festival, we want to bring the musical culture of the 20th and 21st centuries closer to the public. We want to create a place to show the nowadays musical values (the use of new technologies, research music, interaction with other artistic disciplines, etc.) and promote artistic and human relationships through music and contemporary thought.
I would love to announce a new edition of CONTEMPORANEUS every year for a long time! Let’s see what happens.
Joan Martí-Frasquier
Barcelona/Reus, July 2024
