Hamburger Klangwerktage

Kampnagel as Festival Home

Kampnagel is Germany's largest independent theatre and one of Europe's most important production houses for contemporary performing arts. In the former crane factories at Jarrestraße 20 in the Hamburg-Nord district (Winterhude neighborhood), the venue has been developing a program of theatre, dance, performance, concerts, and interdisciplinary art since the 1980s. The Klangwerktage are among the reliable annual program pillars.

Festival for New Music and Sound Art

The festival is explicitly dedicated to New Music and Sound Art. The program includes composed and improvised music, instrumental and electronic works, audiovisual performances, world premieres, and first performances. Promenade concerts (concerts in multiple rooms where the audience moves between sets) are a Hamburg tradition that is particularly cultivated here in density.

festivalCAMPUS – Music & Electronics

Running parallel to the concert program is the festivalCAMPUS: a symposium with lectures, tutorials, and seminars on the topic of "Music & Electronics." Renowned speakers such as Asmus Tietchens (Hamburg electronic music pioneer, representative of industrial sound art) and Prof. Dr. Sabine Breitsameter (Hochschule Darmstadt) lead sessions on topics like software synthesis, modeling, composition with electronic means, and audiovisual techniques. As an HfMT format, the festivalCAMPUS is also open to students.

HfMT Hamburg as Artistic Organizer

The Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg (HfMT) is Hamburg's music education institution and the organizer of the festival. The HfMT composition class and the Institute for Artistic Research curate the program in cooperation with Kampnagel. This results in the festival's explicitly academic-experimental character – not a mass-audience format, but a concert-dramaturgically well-thought-out series for an engaged audience.

A Solitary Event in the State of Hamburg

The festival is a unique event in Hamburg's classical and new music calendar. While the Bachfest, Internationales Musikfest Hamburg, and Lessingtage cater to the classical profile, klub katarakt covers experimental electronics. The Klangwerktage lie in between: academically influenced New Music with an electronic edge, clearly oriented towards artistic ambition rather than tourist audiences within the Kampnagel setting. In the Hamburg-Nord district (Winterhude / Barmbek-Süd neighborhoods), the festival, along with klub katarakt and Klangfest, forms the most important Kampnagel sound art events of the year.