From 10 to 20 March 2016, Geneva was transformed into a giant musical playground of sorts: the title of this year's Archipel Festival was ‘Aires de jeux’. Over its 24 editions, the festival has been a showcase for musical creation and has promoted not contemporary music in a broad sense, but rather the music of our time. In a recent interview, the current festival director, Marc Texier, noted that a common misunderstanding is to ‘consider contemporary music as beginning in the post-war period, 70 years ago. That's quite extraordinary! The music of 1945 doesn't have much in common with what is created today. For today's composers, works from 1945 belong to their grandparents or great-grandparent's generations’.

If the boundaries of artistic movements are often blurred, and unhelpfully and inaccurately anchored by labels, the primary objective of this internationally renowned event is clear, and its mission to enhance the music of our time has so far borne fruit. Since its creation in 1992, Archipel has certainly contributed to the promotion of the music of our time in Switzerland, and has become the country's foremost festival dedicated to contemporary forms of expression. Archipel has achieved this not only by inviting the great composers of our time but also by actively supporting the emergence of a young generation of composers through a scheme of commissions. The 2016 season was no exception, featuring prestigious collaborations, premieres by established and emerging composers, installations and performances.

This year's theme was inspired by Marc Texier's desire to provide the people of Geneva, as well as the broader Swiss and international public, with an experimental musical playground, an environment of ‘Childhood, games, experimentation, daydreams, all common elements of creative inspiration, of imagination free of constraints'. This was the starting point of a programming that aims not only to be playful, as it would be easy to reduce such a theme, but especially initiatory and educational. Pulled out of the magician's hat, one could find toy pianos used as Japanese pachinkos answering to imaginary animals built from computer-operated household goods, but also the more familiar but equally rare sonorities of the glass harmonium or unbearably shrill megaphones. Sounds to open one's ears – or one's mind! This musical ‘ping-pong’ was at the heart of the festival's 2016 programme.

This festival-scale playground was also characterised by the diversity of installations, many of which included an important visual element. Such was the case with Bartholomäus Traubeck's wooden ‘vinyl’ records which, from the growth rings of a cross-section of a tree, sinuously drew forth rattling piano sounds to articulate a smooth and trendy aesthetic. Ondrej Adámek's air machine consisted of clusters of surgical gloves that came alive, twitching almost instinctively, and seemed to tickle out the sounds produced by irrigation pipes and electronics, like small volatile air-whistles. And Koko the Clown, a friend of Betty Boop, fascinated with his equally elegant and clumsy attitude, his movements translated into music by jazzmen Jean Bolcato and Guy Villerd.

The event ‘Mécaniques immobiles’ kicked off the game on 10 March. The Orchestre de la Suisse Romande with soloist Renaud Capuçon gave the Swiss premiere of Mar'eh, a violin concerto composed by Matthias Pintscher which illustrated his fascination with the physical qualities of sound. ‘In Mar'eh, the violin is this sound prism. It carries all these images that can irradiate and shine in all directions at once’, he explains.Footnote ¹ Another celebrity, the octogenarian Helmut Lachenmann was present for the successful interpretation of his Concertini, given by the Lemanic Modern Ensemble under the baton of William Blank. Included as part of a series of concerts entitled ‘Spectres concrets’ this work revealed the need of the composer to go beyond the obvious possibilities of disparate instruments' sounds and modes of production to illustrate some highly complex approaches. By ‘spectrum’ we might also understand extent, magnitude, distance, incline, range, swing, reach, variation … a list of synonyms which reveals in itself the rich compositional and interpretative possibilities of this Klang Komposition master. Simon Steen-Andersen's On and off and to and fro (2008), performed by the Nouvel Ensemble Contemporain (NEC) conducted by the promising young chief Elena Schwarz, explores the boundaries between the inaudible and the comfortable, travelling beyond pleasant and controlled sounds.

Torturous sounds became something of a theme: classical references – Mozart, Haydn – juxtaposing a collection of world premieres for the enigmatic and crystalline glass harmonium. Heinz Holliger's Sons d'or pour Aurèle electrified the audience. This work, which was composed in tribute to his friend and flautist Aurèle Nicolet who died in January 2016, is the expression of that loss of a loved one. Performed by the Swiss Chamber Soloists, the compositional frame of this work seems to get tangled up in a disturbing loneliness, emphasised by the contrast between a visceral bass flute and the cold presence of the high-pitched glass harmonium. A passage evokes the opening bars of Mozart's dissonance quartet K465, but freed from its obstinate rhythmic pulse. Incisive, harsh and throbbing, Holliger's ‘golden sounds’ carry us through the complex awkwardness of pain. In the same concert, we heard Genevan composer Xavier Dayer's new score Come Heavy Sleep, based on John Dowland's melody of the same name. The work, full of imagery, relates without excessive pathos a story with oriental tastes: this is the tale of The Thousand and One Sounds. Delicate and determined, the piece revealed the subtle intelligence of its creator.

Surprises sometimes came from associations, analogous or opposing, such as the pairing of soprano Hélène Fauchère and double bass player Uli Fusseneger who performed a section of Beat Furrer's opera Wüstenbuch. Also for these performers, and grouped around the theme of ‘Des rives, des rêves’ (river banks, dreams), were several new works: L'Oracle de Nicosia by Evis Sammoutis (Cyprus), šìr for soprano with tuned glasses and double bass by the Swiss-Italian composer Carlo Ciceri, Femme 100 têtes by Vito Zuraj (Slovenia) and Palabras deshabitadas by Alberto Posadas (Spain).

Sammoutis's work sings of his island's heartbreak and takes an interest in the shades of difference of words but reveals itself to be somewhat diaphanous and often leaning towards caricature. Femme 100 têtes by Zuraj does not deny the past, nor Richard Strauss: inspired by the impossible dialogue between Salome and the head of Saint John the Baptist, the work sets a premonition of the tragedy. The soprano part, highly anchored in lyrical tradition, is disturbed by the double bass sound effects; the dissimilarity of the two instruments prompts an appropriate awkwardness and false seduction. Both šìr and Palabras deshabitadas deal brilliantly with incommunicability. Inspired by Foucault's reading of the Homeric tale of the encounter between Ulysses and the sirens, Ciceri has created a long, sensitive and seductive variation of their call, a monologue-at-a-distance (the instruments becoming one) about the embarrassment of impossible contact and the melancholy of unanswered questions. Similarly, Palabras deshabitadas exploited this determined and intimate lament of ‘two instruments apparently very far from each other, trying to express themselves becoming at times a unity, replay or a shadow’ (in the words of Posadas). These two works were powerfully sensitive and embodied.

To conclude, ‘L'invitation au mauvais voyage’ (Invitation to a bad trip), a scenographic concert, addressed the relationship between the festival's audience and its programme as a whole. Saturation, density … the public emerged exhausted, but not empty, inspired by a climate of experimentation that reflects current concerns and deviations. The impressive collective RepertorioZero interpreted Krummholz and Yagé Howl – both composed in 2014 by Giovanni Verrando and Ricardo Nova respectively – alternating with episodes from Fausto Romitelli's trilogy Professor Bad Trip. The latter, unfolding around a shining chrysalis on stage, bears witness to a fractured mise en abîme, giving the impression of a rather violent inversion of convention that leaves the listener stunned by its density. Imagine a musical Jackson Pollock with liquefied contours, contorted, unpredictable, marked. This piece responds to Henri Michaux's Light through Darkness, which reveals something of its substance: ‘A vast redistribution of sensitivity takes place, making everything bizarre, a continual complex redistribution of sensation. You sense less here, and more there. Here and there where? In dozens of ‘heres’ and dozens of ‘wheres’ that you didn't know, that you didn't recognise’.Footnote ²

We discovered these ten or so ‘heres’, ‘theres’, ‘elsewheres’, and things we didn't know before, at Festival Archipel 2016.