MAZE Festival 2026: Book of Returns

Memory, dreams and the art of listening as a creative acts

Looking for a quieter and contemplative refuge amidst ADE? Over two October days at the heart of Amsterdam in Splendor, the MAZE collective presents a contemporary composition festival built around memory and dreams, and around what happens when music is made, performed and heard through remembering. 

Dissolving the hierarchy between the composer, score, performer and listener

MAZE is a collective of six contemporary musicians and composers who question the idea of a fixed form and a stable listening perspective. The collective includes some of the most unique and bold voices in the field, such as Yannis Kyriakides and Anne La Berge. Uniting the collective is their approach – they work with music in which the hierarchy between composer, score, performer and listener dissolves, using an arsenal of adventurous approaches: video scores, interactive scores, text instructions, walking maps, games and self-generating algorithms. Their upcoming festival MAZE focuses on the processes of memories and dreams. Among the programme, you’ll be able to experience several premieres of newly created works, join a workshop and panel talks.

Splendor. Photo credits: Peter Lodder

Saturday 24 October

The festival opens at 18:30 with a work by Yannis Kyriakides’ Fundaments & Variants (2022), presented as an installation. Made with composer and musician Darien Brito, the two-channel work plays back endless variations of its material through algorithms. The piece uses lines from Arnold Schoenberg’s Fundamentals of Musical Composition, each paired with an AI-generated reply. The recordings were created one instrument at a time in the Arnold Schoenbergzaal of the old Royal Conservatory building in The Hague – the last recording made there before the building was destroyed.

Listening itself becomes the score

At 20:00, MAZE performs Book of Returns by the late Peter Ablinger – a piece that inspired the festival’s theme. The work consists of a set of modules from which the performers build a new version each time they perform it: cassette players, projections, field recordings, microphone experiments, live actions and ensemble piece, inviting the performers as well as audience to listen differently each time. 

At 20:30, violinist Silvia Tarozzi and cellist Deborah Walker perform Canti di guerra, di lavoro e d’amore (songs of war, work and love), a contemporary re-interpretation of female folksongs of northern Italy. The work is inspired by their shared childhood – songs of working women, resistance fighters and women in the rice fields, about hard labour, love, protest, war and homesickness. 

 

At 21:00, Jasna Veličković, who has been researching electromagnetic fields as a sound source since 2008, premieres a new work with MAZE, in which traditional instruments meet her tangibly sonic magnets, piezo microphones, and transducers and coils. 

Everyday objects turn into instructions for musicians

The last piece of the night at 21:30 is Christian Marclay’s Shuffle, a piece MAZE debuted with at the Holland Festival over a decade ago. In Shuffle, a deck of cards showing everyday objects – such as t-shirts, curtains, tablecloths, biscuit tins – printed with musical notation. Through laying the cards out, the musicians turn the arrangements of objects into the score. 

Sunday 25 October

What is the quality of sound in your dreams?

Sunday begins at 14:00 in the Zolder with a workshop by Dario Calderone, Deep Listening into dreams. Drawing on Deep Dreaming, a branch of Deep Listening developed by Pauline Oliveros and IONE, it asks: what is the quality of sound in your dreams? Through collective meditations, dream sharing and explorations of the dream body, participants discover how sound entwines everything in dreams.

At 16:30, the KHZ Collective, the analogue electronic ensemble of the Royal Conservatory’s composition faculty, performs new works by Ieva Raubyte, Tobias Alvarez, Lingyuan Yang, and Pedro Latas. A panel follows from 18:30 to 19:30.

Ieva Raubyte – Decalco Study

The evening starts at 20:00 with Dario Calderone’s The Dreamed Sound. The collective piece was created over several weeks jointly with the MAZE musicians, who all shared their dreams, inspired by Deep Listening practices.

At 20:30, Anne La Berge presents Pause Then, which blurs the boundaries between composing and performing. The score is generated live on the performers’ iPads, yet the score is not fixed  – the musicians can change their own scores as well as the scores of others at any moment.

Listening and attention turn into creative acts

Julia Eckhardt, Silvia Tarozzi, Deborah Walker

The festival ends at 21:30 with three pieces by Éliane Radigue, a composer renowned for her subtle, micro-event-based compositions: Occam IV, Occam River II and Occam Delta III. The compositions are part of the Occam Ocean series, a cycle of compositions inspired by the ocean. Radigue’s compositions are performed by the trio Silvia Tarozzi, Deborah Walker and Julia Eckhardt, who are among the first interpreters of Radigue’s acoustic works for over a decade now. Radigue’s delicate compositions are passed on orally and by instructions – it’s music that erases itself over time. 

Radigue’s delicate compositions are passed on orally – it’s music that erases itself over time

MAZE Podcast

Curious to learn more about the festival? The MAZE Podcast continues to release a new podcast each week before the festival. This week it is MAZE composer/performer Anne La Berge. So far you can listen to interviews with Alison Isadora, Claudio Baroni, Jasna Veličković and Dario Calderone. Yannis Kyriakides will be the last in this series (release Saturday the 17th of October).

MAZE Festival Information

MAZE Festival: Book of Returns
24 – 25 October 2026
Splendor, Nieuwe Uilenburgerstraat 116, Amsterdam
Tickets and more information: www.maze.nu
Subbacultcha members have limited access to MAZE festival both days – 24 and 25 October. Rsvp info on our agenda.