Bernhard Günther: The Great Learning

Bernhard Günther is a cultural manager, curator, musicologist and the artistic director of Wien Modern, one of the world's largest contemporary music festivals held in Vienna since 1988. As a passionate visitor and organizer of concerts across diverse genres and formats, and as an occasional musician, he has been intensively engaged with new music and its context for over 25 years. In this episode, Bernhard and Severin discuss how Wien Modern evolved from its 1980s origins as a response to Vienna's nostalgic classical music scene into a deliberately confusing, friction-generating platform that challenges narrow definitions of what contemporary music can be. Günther explores the festival's 2025 theme "The Great Learning," which responds to Vienna's 37% population growth and increasing diversity by actively addressing questions of representation, discrimination, and who gets heard in classical music spaces. He discusses the tension between data-driven curation and human taste, why festivals must resist becoming "elite things," the dangers of AI in understanding discrimination, and why bringing people together to physically experience music—even when it provokes disagreement—matters more than ever in an age when social media promised connection but delivered polarization instead.