The doyens of the avant-garde music world had a ball at the 1970 Osaka Expo. Karlheinz Stockhausen gave daily performances in a spherical concert hall at the West German pavilion. His Norwegian contemporary, Arne Nordheim, created a durational piece for the Scandinavian pavilion that could have played for over 100 years without repeating. (Alas, the expo only ran for six months.)
The Japanese Steel and Iron Federation’s pavilion featured an auditorium called the Space Theatre, where visitors could hear pieces by Toru Takemitsu, Yuji Takahashi and Greek French composer Iannis Xenakis played back through more than 1,000 speakers. Takemitsu, also the pavilion’s artistic director, spoke of creating “a new kind of concert hall from which an entirely new music might emerge for the modern age.”
Some of that utopian spirit was in evidence during Unsound Osaka, the first Japan edition of a long-running festival of adventurous music held each autumn in Krakow, Poland. Although it was held independently of the 2025 Osaka Expo, the event — which took place from Sept. 5 to 7 — tapped into some of the cultural energy that’s coursing through the city at the moment. (More importantly, it also managed to secure funding from the Polish Investment and Trade Agency, the organization overseeing the Poland pavilion at the Expo.)
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