The Venice Music Biennale usually focuses on contemporary classical music, and the event has never had a leader like Caterina Barbieri before: She plays minimalist music with synthesizers rather than chamber music, and her gigs generally take place in cavernous postindustrial spaces or at electronic music festivals instead of in orderly concert halls.
Born in Bologna, Italy, and now based in Berlin, Barbieri has just turned 35, which makes her the Music Biennale’s youngest ever artistic director. Her appointment is a step into experimental terrain for a long-established institution.
A sister event to the better-known Art and Architecture Biennales, which run for months in alternating years, the Music Biennale takes place each fall over a couple of weeks. Its focus since it was founded in 1930 has been on contemporary classical music, and its programs have leaned into modernist pieces for orchestral instruments, choirs or classically trained singers.
Under Barbieri’s watch, things won’t be the same. “Bringing my experience, my vision, to such an official level in Italian culture is not to be taken for granted,” Barbieri said. “For me, it’s beautiful to bring change.”
Her appointment to lead the next two editions of the Music Biennale has opened the door for a cohort of edgy musicians. The lineup for this year’s event, which opens Saturday and runs through Oct. 25, includes electroacoustic and minimalist electronic music, but also ancient music, contemporary classical, free jazz, folk and techno — with performances by the multidisciplinary artist Abdullah Miniawy, the D.J. Carl Craig and the drone metal band Sunn O))).
The program also includes works by up-and-coming artists who were mentored by Barbieri and other tutors as part of the Biennale College, an artist residence program.
“She’s doing something really different,” said Luka Aron, a musician from the college who is presenting a work based on church bell recordings. “I think she really put this Biennale on the map for many people, at least in our scene,” he said.
In devising the lineup, Barbieri called on people she has encountered throughout her career, but also explored new directions. “I began from my spark within,” she said, “and tried to give the public a perspective that’s as wide, inclusive and varied as possible. This is my idea of a Biennale.”
The title she has chosen for her first edition, “The Star Within,” tells us a lot about Barbieri’s approach to music. Her hypnotic tracks, which she has released across eight albums and numerous EPs, are founded on repeated and varied patterns that feel like reverberations from some cosmic domain.
“For me, music is a gash leading to the divine; it’s something that connects you to the magic dimension of existence,” she said. Her live performances also tap into something extraterrestrial as she prods keys and knobs on a spaceship-like bank of modular synthesizers, sometimes wearing cyborg-like armor.
“It is kind of otherworldly,” said the Norwegian saxophonist Bendik Giske, a frequent Barbieri collaborator who will premiere his new piece “Into the Blue” at the Music Biennale’s opening night. The two will release a joint album in February called “At Source” on Light Years, the independent label that Barbieri founded in 2021.
“We’re pretty aligned from a perspective of tonality and the emotive aspects of our music,” Giske said. “We meet in the middle — in the question of where the human begins and the machine ends.”
A curiosity about the limits of consciousness goes all the way back to Barbieri’s studies. Though she trained in classical guitar and electroacoustic composition at the Bologna Conservatory, she also wrote an ethnomusicology thesis on the relationship between American minimalist and Hindustani classical music. Much of her work is concerned with entering a trance-like state when listening or performing.
“When a concert goes well, you’re like a medium: You’re not in yourself, you’re elsewhere,” she said. “It’s like music traversed you, and guided your movements.”
The repetitive nature of her pieces can strike listeners as introspective or solitary, but Barbieri said that it was about reaching a state of communion with others. “Music teaches us to look inward and connect with our spiritual side,” she said, “but through that, we also open up to the external world — we connect with our capacity for empathy.”
Collaborations have long formed part of Barbieri’s oeuvre: One of her albums, “Fantas Variations,” consists entirely of versions of her track “Fantas” rethought by other artists. She frequently teams up with the American organist Kali Malone and the Swedish composer Ellen Arkbro, whom she met during a student exchange in Stockholm. The three went to underground gigs in the city and jammed in the university studios, using a Buchla synthesizer that Barbieri later used for her first album, “Vertical,” released in 2014.
“We would just walk around singing patterns all the time. It was so nerdy,” Malone said by phone from Stockholm, where she is still based. The two have since worked together on several projects — including a call-and-response organ piece that was presented in the Italian Pavilion at the Venice Art Biennale in 2024.
“We still have the sort of poetic telepathy that happens between friends that also make art together. It’s about chemistry, how you see the world, what you see that others don’t,” Malone said. “Barbieri was “extremely poetic and intuitive” she added, and could “take something that’s quite musically technical, find extremely romantic undertones in it and draw them out.”
Malone said that the invitation for Barbieri to lead the Music Biennale gave “a platform to another side of contemporary music that is generally excluded from these more institutional places.” There is “another scene that often doesn’t get taken quite as seriously because it’s not as technically virtuosic, or not following the canon of previous Western centuries,” she added. “Giving these artists, these pieces and this music a chance to be platformed under the name of the Venice Biennale is pretty radical.”
Barbieri’s experimental streak extends to shaking up the Biennale’s venues, too. She is not just planning seated concerts inside regular theaters that have been used in previous editions, like the Teatro Piccolo Arsenale or the ornate Teatro Malibran. Her program also includes club-like sets at Forte Marghera, a hulking fortress on Venice’s mainland; a procession of boats outfitted with loudspeakers on the water; and a concert in a deconsecrated church.
Venice’s Arsenale, a complex of former shipyards and armories, is a frequent location for Biennale events, but Barbieri will transform some of its rooms, which have never been open to the public, into casual spaces where audiences can drop in and out, lounge around and have a drink.
Then there is the mysterious “Star Chamber” event: a series of site-specific performances on an uninhabited island in the Venetian lagoon. Barbieri is keeping both the location and lineup secret until the day of the show; the audience will arrive by boat, unaware of what awaits when they disembark.
On a recent visit, Barbieri gave a tour of the wild, overgrown islet with a military fort towering in the middle of thick vegetation. “There will be a surreal element to it, because people won’t know what to expect,” she said. “The idea is to take people on a mystical, musical journey.”
Venice Music Biennale
Oct. 11-25 at various venues around Venice; labiennale.org.