The 2004 Sonorities Festival of Contemporary Music takes place in Belfast from Friday 23 April to Saturday 1 May. The Festival programme marks the opening this year of the new Sonic Arts Research Centre at Queen's University Belfast with a high-profile visit from Karlheinz Stockhausen.

Built around two themed weekends with a sequence of events in between and devised by composer Michael Alcorn, the Festival’s first weekend features three concerts of Stoskhausen’s electronic works that traverse a creative span of nearly fifty years from the pioneering Electronic Studies I & II of 1953/54 up to the premiere of the large-scale multichannel piece, Mittwochs-Grusswritten, in the late 1990s.

The second weekend focuses on a celebration of a different kind. Sonic Arts Network, the UK’s main organisation for promoting work at the cutting edge of music and technology, is celebrating its 25th anniversary with a major concert featuring the work of leading UK composers over that period. The weekend also includes a Cut & Splice event (co-promoted by SARC, the BBC and Sonic Arts Network) with international performance artists exploring the concept of ‘grains and clouds’.

Premieres of new work always form a major part of the festival programme, and this year there are more than twenty world premieres (including Sonorities commissions by Cort Lippe, Natasha Barrett, Ludger Brümmer and Denis Smalley) and numerous UK and Irish premieres as well. The Festival also includes workshops and sound installations.

Featured artists include Pedro Carneiro, Dominic Saunders, The Electronic Hammer, l a u t, Darragh Morgan, Wired Ensemble and numerous musicians performing on laptop computers, playing new interfaces, and diffusing music through SARC’s unique sound system. Under the heading of Open Fader... the Festival put out a call to composers to submit pieces appropriate to the new Sonic Laboratory. The idea, like an open mike at a pub or club: ‘come on up and have a go!’, produced a strong response with composers from across the world submitting works.

The Sonic Arts Research Centre has a Sonic Laboratory Concert Hall which is unique in the world. This space will be used for many of the concerts during the Festival and includes arrays of loudspeakers strategically located around, above and below the audience area. Audiences walk out onto a suspended, acoustically transparent floor and experience sound in the centre of a cube. And a warning has been issued that high-heeled shoes will be damaged on this grid floor!

For details of the Irish works to be performed at Sonorities, please visit the Calendar.

The full festival programme may be viewed and downloaded from the Sonorities web site.