The International Festival of Contemporary Art «Two Days and Two Nights of New Music/2D2H» is an annual impresa that appeared on the musical map of Ukraine in 1995. The festival is organized and held by the International public organization «Association of New Music/ANM.
«Two Days and Two Nights of New Music/2D2H» is one of the largest festivals of New Music and performing arts in Ukraine.
The uniqueness of this artistic action lies in the fact that it is modeled on the logic of composer’s thinking and according to the author’s concept it is a 48-hour event where different types of arts are organically combined.
It is a kind of continuous musical performance, during which a grandiose composition-performance with a special atmosphere is created, in which both the audience and the performers take part with delight.
Over the years, several foreign and Ukrainian artists have directly participated in the festival and other symposiums of the ASM. The annual audience of these events numbers thousands of Odessans, guests from other cities of Ukraine and abroad. Little by little, the events in Odessa spread to other regions and countries, contribute to the emergence of new joint international projects, and are reflected in national and international print and electronic media. The best recordings from seven festivals are issued on 3 CDs (one of which is double). In 1999, the festival’s Internet site www.anm.odessa.ua was created.
The festival «Two Days and Two Nights» became one of the treasures of independent Ukraine.
Festival movement is an indicator and a kind of catalyst of intensity and quality of artistic life of any country. Festivals, as world and Ukrainian experience convinces us, are a kind of a cell, defining the directions of art development, forming new ideas, opening new boundless horizons of creative activity. The festival is not only a holiday and pleasure for the public, but also a peculiar mechanism of regulation and correction of aesthetic tastes, views, consolidation of certain ideals. It is a practice-tested innovation, a prioritization of priorities, and a search for off the beaten track ways of art and culture development.
The festival «Two Days and Two Nights of Music» is a festival that does not intend to imitate any other festival.
Its specificity lies in the combination of a new meaning and a new festival form. It is a phenomenon that strikes the imagination, breaks out of the usual rut, it is extraordinary in principles and unique in form. A 48-hour continuous event, two 12-hour days of music that begin at noon on Friday and last until Sunday morning with a break on Saturday from 4am to 4pm. The entire festival is divided into Day One, Night One, Day Two and Night Two. Each musical hour is dedicated to a new performance, which sometimes looks like a regular concert and sometimes like a theatrical action combined with actions and installations of performing, visual, multimedia and synthetic arts. Each musical hour has an open form, being outwardly unrelated performances of two separate soloists who come together in a kind of competition — a duet-duet. Unconventional actions require an unconventional situation in the hall as well. Performers use a specially equipped platform in the center of the room.
Based on the ideal of free development of art, the festival undertakes to promote innovative directions of contemporary music and synthetic diversity of art, without limiting the concepts of New Music and New Art by style, ideological and or other frameworks. Mostly at the festival one hears the works of classical avant-garde and post-modern created in recent years, which represent the diverse currents of both live and electronic, computer and acoustic music. On the other hand, the festival is not a stranger to new or unfamiliar creative forms, such as the traditional art of Armenia, Korea, Mongolia or Alaska. In general, the festival is directed towards the development of new forms of communication between musicians, between musicians and the public, towards the theatricalization of musical art together with all other arts, as well as towards the synthesis of different kinds of art. This general tendency receives special accents in each festival.