2026 sessions info

About

Participants attending the 2026 Cortona Sessions will enjoy twelve days of intensive exploration of contemporary music, collaboration, and what it takes to make a career as a 21st-century musician. Below are all of the details about the 2025 Sessions. Applications are available on individual program pages. Applications are due by February 1, 2026.

  • Plant-Based: Growing Connections and Breaking Boundaries

    In 2026, the Cortona Sessions takes its cue from the natural world, where thriving and resilient ecosystems are built from interdependence and diversity. Plant-Based: Growing Connections and Breaking Boundaries celebrates the art of cultivation: planting the seeds of collaboration, nurturing growth through experimentation, and harvesting the creative fruits of our collective labor.

    Set against the quiet simplicity and lush surroundings of Ede, the Sessions draw inspiration from the landscape itself. The fields and forests that frame our work remind us that creativity, like nature, requires patience, balance, and attentive care. Here, growth is both literal and metaphorical: new ideas take root in shared “soil”, nourished and tended by curiosity and collaboration.

    Throughout the Sessions, fellows and faculty will explore the full life cycle of artistic creation:

    • Planting: generating new ideas through cross-disciplinary partnerships with local Dutch organizations and artists

    • Incubating: allowing new projects to take root across performance, education, and community spaces

    • Composting: breaking down outdated or exclusionary practices in the field

    • Pollinating: sharing our work and ideas beyond traditional boundaries

    • Weeding: identifying and removing harmful norms in new music to cultivate empathy, sustainability, and creative freedom

    In this spirit, the Sessions will feature repertoire and professional development that mirror these organic processes, highlighting works by composers who blur boundaries between genres, cultures, and artistic mediums. From Louis Andriessen and Pamela Z to Tonia Ko and Allison Loggins-Hull, the 2026 Sessions will feature voices that challenge conventions and remind us that growth, like art, is never linear.

    Through performances, community collaborations, and conversations around curation and context (“Right plant, right place”), we’ll explore how artistic practice can itself be an act of ecological imagination, tending to the soil from which future work will grow.

    – Anthony R Green and Michael Compitello, Artistic Co-Directors of the 2026 Cortona Sessions for New Music

  • 19 July – 1 August, 2026

    Akoesticum
    Ede, Netherlands

  • The beautiful Akoesticum facilities in the city of Ede, Netherlands

    https://akoesticum.org/

  • The 2026 Cortona Sessions
    19 July – 1 August, 2026

    • December 29, 2025: Cortona Prize deadline

    • January 25, 2025: Cortona Prize Winner announced

    • February 1, 2026: Sessions Applications close

    • March 1, 2026: Application decisions announced

    • April 1, 2026: Deposit payment/confirmation deadline

    • May 1, 2026: Second payment due

    • June 1, 2026: Payment due in full

    • June 15, 2026: Composition submissions due

  • Applications are due December 29, 2025.

    Learn more about The Cortona Prize.

  • For information on costs, lodging, travel, and more, click here.

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