TransTraditionale — Music of the Global Present

The Idea

TransTraditionale is the first edition of a new festival format conceived by the Trickster Orchestra. The starting point is a simple observation: global migration movements have dissolved the old demarcation lines between genres and cultures – a sound is no longer automatically Turkish, Brazilian, or classically Western because the people who make it carry multiple homelands within them. The festival seeks musical positions that do not process this postmigrant reality nostalgically, but actively compose it.

What to Hear

Three days of programming with concerts, curated studio sessions, workshop discussions, and discourse rounds. Sound mosaics between improvisation and composition, in which global instruments and traditions become material for new, interwoven sound languages. The Trickster Orchestra itself – the ensemble that initiated the festival – has been working in precisely this field of tension for years: a Berlin chamber ensemble with musicians whose biographical roots extend from the Mediterranean to the Hindu Kush.

Venue and District

The festival and main venue is the Radialsystem at Holzmarktstraße 33 in Friedrichshain – one of Berlin's most important houses for contemporary music and performance, located in the premises of a former water pumping station directly on the banks of the Spree. District Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, Berlin, State of Berlin.

Funding and Context

The festival is funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media (BKM) and the Berlin Senate Department for Culture. The program is also intended as a programmatic response to the question of how concert halls can engage with the sonic realities of an immigration society in 2026.