Rethinking Relevance: Breaking the Classical Frame

Classical music is at a crossroads. Around the world, artists and institutions are reimagining what relevance means in a time of social fragmentation, climate anxiety, and digital transformation. How can classical music still matter — and to whom? What does it mean to perform, teach, or listen in ways that connect rather than exclude?

This two-day symposium is not just an academic gathering, but a meeting ground for those who want to shake up inherited traditions and recompose the role of classical music in society. During two days of keynotes, performances, workshops, and radical listening sessions, we will explore how music can build bridges, challenge hierarchies, and create spaces of belonging.

The symposium builds on eight years of research by the Maastricht Centre for the Innovation of Classical Music (MCICM) — a collaboration between the classical symphony orchestra Philzuid, Conservatorium Zuyd University of Applied Sciences, and Maastricht University. Combining artistic and academic inquiry, the MCICM investigates how performance, education, and audience participation can be renewed in artistically and socially relevant ways. This edition focuses on communities and connections: how can classical music empower, include, and create spaces of shared meaning through collaboration and co-creation.

Rethinking Relevance is a call to action — to make classical music porous, participatory, and alive. To imagine a future where music doesn’t belong to a few, but to the many who shape and share it. We call upon musicians, makers, researchers, and educators to join a collective rethink of classical music’s future — not as a tradition to preserve, but as a living practice to reinvent. Together, we’ll ask uncomfortable questions, share radical experiments, and imagine musical communities that resonate with the world as it is — and as it could be.

We would like to invite you to share your projects, performances or research through short pitches and poster presentations. Abstracts (max. 200 words) should be submitted to mcicm-fasos@maastrichtuniversity.nl by 1 February 2026.

More information about the programme will be available soon on: www.mcicm.nl