A Festival in Motion: From First Encounters to Field Notes

When a group of arts and culture professionals came together to launch FreeForm Tradition Festival in 2024, we were coming from different perspectives.

For some of us, it started with a love of music and the diversity of local musical traditions. For others, it was the desire to build a festival that is nomadic at its core: not tied to one fixed idea of tradition, one format, or one place. We wanted to create a space for discovery and participation, where encounters with this music could happen outside of conventional settings. And for most of us, it came from a certain disturbance with the divided world around us, and with the ways the music industry still frames and separates musical practices.

Freeform Tradition brings together artists and groups who engage with cultural heritage from different regions of the world: continuing, questioning, and reinventing musical traditions, and presenting them in unconventional contexts. At first glance, some of these traditions, genres, and artistic approaches may appear distant from one another. But once they are placed in a context and conversation, the connections begin to surface.

In 2025, our first pilot events in Berlin brought together musicians from Finland, Moldova, Ukraine, Germany, and Vietnam. These first encounters showed us that the idea resonates strongly with artists, performing arts professionals, and communities around us. It also encouraged us to take the next step.

Why does this matter now?

Because musical traditions are not static objects from the past. They are living practices, shaped by memory, locality, transmission, ritual, and adaptation. At the same time, old market-driven categories and labels still influence how music is seen, valued, and made visible. We believe there is a need for spaces where music is not only presented, but also contextualized, and where artists can meet across traditions, disciplines, and geographies without being flattened into simplifying categories. 

This is where our Preview event, Field Notes, comes in.

Field Notes will be a research and connection phase on the way to the main festival edition in 2027. Through dialogical concert formats, we want to create a space for artists to exchange working methods, explore new formats, strengthen partnerships, and build the Freeform Tradition community further.

Soon, we will announce a campaign to support the Preview edition and help bring together an exciting group of artists to perform not next to each other, but in conversation with each other. We are looking for the support of music lovers, culturally active people, and everyone who believes that musical heritage can be alive, moving, and urgently relevant today.

Stay tuned!