»Porträtkonzert: Tomoya Yokokawa« | Musik 21 Festival

The Portrait Concert features six works for strings, including four world premieres by composer Tomoya Yokokawa. In response to the festival’s theme, “What Kind of Times Are These?,” Tomoya Yokokawa responds not with an argument, but with sound: with his new string quartet “Voiceness,” a commission from Musik 21 Niedersachsen. In creating this piece, Tomoya Yokokawa explored the question of why music and composing are indispensable to him.

To put it simply: for Tomoya Yokokawa, sound is not merely a sequence of notes, but a state that emerges from an inner voice—a dialogue between one’s innermost self and the invisible. He wants to write music that evokes sounds the world might have forgotten. Like that handwritten manuscript from 2014, which he rediscovered while organizing his bookshelf—and with it, that time. The piece “legno e crini” will be performed for the first time in this concert—twelve years later. All of this will be heard at this year’s Musik 21 Festival.

“What kind of times are these?”—The Musik 21 Festival 2026

Silence or a cry? Act, react—but how? Or look away? Caught between power and powerlessness, between cries and silence, the Musik 21 Festival 2026 unfolds its program and takes up Bertolt Brecht’s question: “What kind of times are these?”—a question that remains as relevant today as ever.

“What kind of times are these?” wrote Bertolt Brecht in 1934 in his poem “To Those Yet to Be Born,” lamenting that a conversation about trees was almost a crime because it implied silence about so many atrocities. In this way, he responded artistically to the silence surrounding the atrocities of his time—which are likely similar to our own: fascism, militarism, the threat of war and annihilation, and, not least, a hegemonic callousness.