New Music Dublin 2026:
A Programme of Irish and International Contemporary Music

New Music Dublin returns from 15–19 April 2026, presenting a wide-ranging programme of Irish and International contemporary music performances at the National Concert Hall, Project Arts Centre and Windmill QTR. 

As Ireland’s leading contemporary music festival, every spring since 2013 New Music Dublin has played a key role in growing the global profile of Irish new music. The 2026 edition celebrates this with a particular international focus alongside an established commitment to Irish composers, ensembles and performers. Across five days of events, artists from Canada, Germany, Belgium, UK, USA and Japan perform both international new music and also music from across the island of Ireland. 

Festival Director John Harris comments:
“New Music Dublin has always presented the best of Irish new music to an international audience - and the best of international work to an Irish audience. This year’s programme in particular celebrates this by bringing together outstanding artists from Ireland, Europe and North America, all working across a wide range of approaches from orchestral works to exploratory experimental performances. What has always connected everyone in the festival is a shared curiosity about sound, about listening, and about how and why music is being made now.”

Among the international highlights, German collective Ensemble Musikfabrik appears twice at New Music Dublin 2026. It Breathes offers audiences insight into the ensemble’s exploratory, process-led working methods, focusing on collaboration, sound production and experimentation. This is followed by No Salt, a full evening concert presenting Irish premieres of works by Georges Aperghis, Jessie Marino and Ailís Ní Ríain, exploring breath, resonance and radical transformations of sound.

This year’s festival welcomes two ensembles from Belgium. Nadar Ensemble presents What’s Next?, a concert developed through an international summer school collaboration connecting emerging composers with live performance, video and electronics. Het Collectief presents a programme centred on Morton Feldman’s Why Patterns (1978). For piano, flute and percussion, Feldman’s work will be performed alongside responsive works by Jean-Luc Fafchamps and David Fennessy.

Renowned Canadian collective, Soundstreams, make their New Music Dublin debut with I Want to Tell You Everything, the name of a work by Canadian composer Thierry Tidrow that will be performed in its European premiere. Fresh from its April 9th world premiere in Toronto, it’s a riveting new work that pushes vocal storytelling into fresh emotional and sonic territory and sits alongside fellow Canadian composers, Claude Vivier, Nicole Lizée and Ana Sokolović in this programme. 

A strong literary thread runs throughout the 2026 programme. The RTÉ Concert Orchestra will give the world premiere of Kevin O’Connell’s Paradiso, a listening to Dante’s third cantica, for soprano, baritone, chorus and orchestra. Gerald Barry’s Salome revisits Oscar Wilde’s drama in an Irish premiere performance by National Symphony Orchestra Ireland under conductor Jérôme Kuhn and with a list of stellar vocal soloists. Gare St Lazare Ireland presents The Last Tape, a work-in-progress performance of a new hybrid adaptation of Marcel Mihalovici’s chamber opera in one act, with a libretto by Samuel Beckett, based on his play Krapp’s Last Tape. On the Diatribe stage at Project Arts Centre, Lucia Joyce, a new opera by saxophonist / composer Patrick Zimmerli, explores the life and legacy of James Joyce’s daughter. 

New Music Dublin 2026 will also hear the premiere of Jane O’Leary’s Fanfare: From 2RN to RTÉ – Celebrating 100 Years, a work composed in celebration of RTÉ 100, marking a century since the state’s first public radio transmission.

Donnacha Dennehy’s 2026 Grammy award-winning work, Land Of Winter, will be performed by Crash Ensemble, which features live three times at this year’s festival, including a double bill with experimental duo Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh and Seán Mac Erlaine. Children in the Universe, a hybrid symphonic film by Sam Perkin and Laura Sheeran also features Crash Ensemble, in the form of an audio-visual installation at the National Concert Hall.

Belfast’s contemporary music specialists, Hard Rain SoloistEnsemble makes a welcome return to New Music Dublin with an exploratory multimedia tribute to Anthony Braxton’s Ghost Trance Music, which draws on material from approximately 150 individual works. Graphic scores by Ioana Petcu-Colan and Sarah Watts will also be performed. 

Irish vocal ensembles are also a typically salient feature of this year’s New Music Dublin festival. Under conductor David Young, Chamber Choir Ireland will perform Come To The Edge at the Windmill QTR venue in Dublin 4, with music by Jennifer Walshe and the winning piece from the inaugural Colin Mawby Composition Prize. Festival favourites, NCH Cór na nÓg, under music director Mary Amond O'Brien, joins forces with The Elders and Floating World Productions in what promises to be an inspiring concert of music. The LOVE THE EARTH programme, inspired by an intergenerational project undertaken by NCH Cór na nÓg entitled A Conference of Birds, aims to awaken and reawaken a much-needed awareness of the sacredness of the living earth.

A significant strand of the 2026 programme takes place at Project Arts Centre, where Diatribe Records curates a series of evening double bills across the festival. These performances bring together experimental music, improvisation and cross-genre practice, featuring artists including Garth Knox, Zoë Conway, Sky Rivers, Patrick Zimmerli, Satoshi Takeishi, Shelta and Insufficient Funs. Presented in an intimate late-evening setting, the Diatribe concerts form a distinctive parallel programme within the festival.

New Music Dublin remains committed to accessibility and participation, with discounted multi-event ticket packages, student and unwaged concessions, arts worker rates and free public events as part of the Festival Hub.

New Music Dublin 2026 runs from 15–19 April at the National Concert Hall and venues across Dublin.

Full programme details and tickets are available here

Media contact:
Kerry FitzGerald
marketing@newmusicdublin.ie
087 417 9807