Utrecht’s Gaudeamus Festival Spotlights MENA Artists in 2026 Edition

Gaudeamus Festival, the long-standing Dutch gathering celebrated for highlighting avant-garde music and fearless global sounds, has revealed the official lineup for its 81st edition. Set to take place across Utrecht, The Netherlands, from September 9th to 13th, the upcoming festival spans 15 distinct spaces throughout the city, staging over 60 live performances and more than 40 world premieres.

Since its inception, the festival has operated as an essential breeding ground for radical sound design, spatial acoustics, and cross-genre experimentation. For 2026, the programming places a heavy emphasis on creators from the Middle East and North Africa who are radically re-architecting traditional instruments, field recordings, and historical spaces through modern electronic frameworks.

Leading the regional highlights is 'The Dome Sessions', an expansive multi-day installation conceived by Lebanese audiovisual artist Firas El Hallak. The project uses the raw, uncompleted concrete dome of the Oscar Niemeyer-designed Rachid Karami International Fair in Tripoli as its acoustic engine. Designed prior to the onset of the Lebanese Civil War and left unfinished, the cavernous structure generates an unearthly, lingering resonance. The exhibit pairs captured audiovisual sessions from the site with daily live appearances by featured Lebanese artists, including sound designer and modular synthesizer operator Jad Atoui, multi-instrumentalist Anthony Sahyoun, and Lebanese left-field project Ghadr.

Elsewhere on the schedule, Iranian composer and kamancheh virtuoso Soheil Shayesteh joins forces with Norwegian trumpeter Nils Petter Molvær, visual designer Rashin Teimouri, and ensemble Het Muziek for the Dutch premiere of 'Perceptual Dialogues'. Performing on an electrified, custom-built kamancheh linked directly to tailor-made audio software, Shayesteh processes classical Persian microtones into futuristic sonic environments, setting up a spontaneous live exchange with Molvær’s airy trumpet textures.

Saturday night also brings a multi-disciplinary collaborative set led by Vienna-based Iranian composer Rojin Sharafi. Known for her dense, polyrhythmic synthesis, Sharafi expands her acoustic setup alongside French-Ivorian producer Aho Ssan and Iranian vocalist Omid Darvish, stripping back classical Iranian vocal styles and rebuilding them over heavy, industrial soundscapes.

Beyond the main performance stages, Kurdish artist, researcher, and improviser Hardi Kurda takes a seat on this year's international jury for the Gaudeamus Award, the landmark composition prize for artists under 35 established in 1957. Joining Javanese musician Peni Candra Rini and Swiss-American artist Jessie Cox, Kurda brings his background in acoustic research, unconventional notation, and pirate frequency exploration to help select this year's winner from a finalist pool spanning Chile, Hong Kong, Brazil, and Finland.

To explore the complete 2026 schedule and secure festival passes, visit the official Gaudeamus Festival website.