Going deeper into the music with the Ultima Oslo Contemporary Music Festival. The team behind one of the biggest contemporary music festivals in Northern Europe open up the diverse and fascinating world of modern music and experimental sound with innovative sonic portraits with composers and performers. Ultima Festival happens every year in September: see ultima.no for details.
How is music made – and under what conditions? Which rituals, tools, and spaces do artists return to when composing, performing, producing or improvising? With whom do they collaborate, and what shapes their sound?
Listen-Up is a live “audiozine” that brings together artists from across genres to explore how music takes form today. The event is inspired by When Music Takes Shape (https://www.kulturdirektoratet.no/web/guest/vis-publikasjon/-/nar-musikken-tek-form), an Arts Council Norway research programme and publication that gathers scientific and artistic reflections on music-making processes and working conditions in contemporary Norway.
18 Sept 2025
Listening as an ethical practice with David Harrington
‘Musicians are trained to listen, and the best of us try to communicate what we hear, both from the world around us and from inside ourselves.’ David Harrington is a violinist and the founding member of Kronos Quartet.
In this episode, Rob Young meets Harrington to talk about Kronos’ long-standing commitment to contemporary music, listening as an ethical practice, and the quartet’s constant search for new sounds and new collaborators. The conversation centres on Elja (https://www.ultima.no/en/festival-2025-elja), a new work created with Norwegian composers Benedicte Maurseth and Kristine Tjøgersen, inspired by the vast mountain plateau of Hardangervidda.
Harrington reflects on playing newly developed Hardanger instruments, on learning from tradition while opening it to new sonic worlds, and on why music, in unstable times, can still bring people together and help us listen more closely to the world around us.
Produced by Ultima Oslo Contemporary Music Festival
Written and presented by Rob Young
Edited by Solveig Sørbø
Theme music by Kristine Tjøgersen
Visit us on ultima.no (https://www.ultima.no/).
14 Sept 2025
Resisting efficiency, productivity and clear-cut answers
‘The explanation is actually the process — the courageto stay in movement and not know where you are going.’
In this episode, Rob Young meets Ewa Jacobsson and herlong-term collaborator Hilde Marie Holsen to talk about Labyrinthic Explanation of Knowledge (https://www.ultima.no/en/festival-2025-labyrinthic-explanation-of-knowledge), a large-scale installation and concert work presented at Ultima 2025. They discuss how their collaboration grew out of shared listening, material exploration and a mutual interest in sound as something physical, spatial and alive.
Together, they reflect on working with found objects, sound circuits and live trumpet, on the idea of the labyrinth as a place of uncertainty and discovery, and on forms of knowledge that resist efficiency, productivity and clear-cut answers — but remain deeply necessary today.
Produced by Ultima Oslo Contemporary Music Festival
Written and presented by Rob Young
Edited by Solveig Sørbø
Theme music by Kristine Tjøgersen
Visit us on ultima.no (https://ultima.no/).
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