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Sacrum Profanum 2023

Concept

When we listen to what other people have to say about the music that we present at the Sacrum Profanum Festival, we often hear the words “it’s hard to describe, we didn’t expect it” – and that means that we’re doing our job really well. Our search shows a willingness to go beyond what is available and well-known, beyond what can be described with a set of known concepts and tools. But at the same time, in a wider dimension, we are looking for what would allow us to understand the essence of reality. Sacrum Profanum is an opportunity to look into the future: the more courage we have, the further we can look.

We “profane” the classics, tradition and conservatism. We “sacralise” experiments, avant-garde and curiosity.

By building bridges between independent and academic music, we lead to their meeting. We awaken the hunger for new music, new artists, and we expand the category of aesthetic pleasure.

These days, in the multiplying world of musical permutations and blurring genre boundaries, overproduction of text and an excess of stimuli, it is difficult to define unequivocally who is on the side of the broadly understood “sacrum” and who represents the domain of the “profanum.” One thing is certain – in the end, behind each piece of new music there is only an artist who faces multiple challenges and takes up a fight with the world. And indeed, the music we present at the Sacrum Profanum Festival is the result of countless cultural interactions, clashes, conflicts and rebellion. Sometimes it is a confrontation with the absolute – whether we recognise it as the divine, the cold beauty of mathematics (serialism) or the infinity of the worlds of physics (spectralism), and sometimes with the everyday life and the surrounding reality, which provide countless themes and inspirations. The value is added by the analysis of the feminine and masculine, childish and “grown-up”, as well as the musical elements – in the traditional, existing, recognised and often entrenched sense, as well as the “non-musical” sonically emancipated element. It is precisely the confrontation of the old with the new, obvious with the unobvious, safe with the unknown – often full of unbridled energy or even brutal – where a new quality is created, not only in music and not only in art.

It is no coincidence, then, that every successive edition of the Sacrum Profanum Festival brings several world premieres and becomes the stages for exceptional original accomplishments, events that use innovative means of expression combining various art disciplines. They are what makes us open to new worlds of experiences and expand the limits of our own perception. That is why the listener/participant of the festival is no longer just a passive observer. Encouraged, urged, and sometimes even forced to actively participate in this contemporary sound mystery, they are the ones who decide where lies the boundary between the sacred and the profane and where will they find a place for themselves on this spectrum.