New music plays a key role in the preparation of the global FLUXUS network. The term “new music” was coined in 1919 by Paul Bekker, an art critic and later Kassel opera director. Since then, this term has been applied to various phenomena in European music, particularly in the first half of the 20th century.
Composers such as Debussy, Mahler, Schönberg, Schwitters with his March Music and the futurist Russolo with his "Intonarumori" - the noise generators - are known from the classical avant-garde environment. Their revolutionary understanding of music is based on sound events that go beyond classical scales, harmonies and compositional principles.
The Fluxus movement has implemented this understanding in various genres since its founding in 1962 on the occasion of the Wiesbaden Festival of Newest Music. The museum FLUXUS+ in Potsdam presents artistic positions from its collection that have their origins in new music of the 1950s and 1960s.
The strategy of the cross-genre compositions of the Fluxus movement integrates theater, performance and acoustic elements and maintains an intensive relationship to the object as a score, instrument, storage medium and form of documentation. In addition, over a hundred pieces of new and cutting-edge music are available to the audience at various listening stations.
Among the artists presented at museum FLUXUS+ are Arman, Mary Bauermeister, Philipp Corner, Joe Jones, Milan Knižak, Alison Knowles, Die Maulwerker, Nam June Paik, Benjamin Patterson, Gerhard Rühm, Takako Saito, Wolf Vostell and many other.