Founded in 1967 in East Berlin, the International Festival of Contemporary Music was organised until 1989 by the union of composers and musicologists and the Ministry of Culture of the GDR as a biennale in February.
Several important composers premiered works at the festival, including Friedrich Goldmann, Johannes Kalitzke, Georg Katzer, Siegfried Matthus and Ruth Zechlin.
Alongside new music in its current developments as well as in works of historical significance, there was a new "presentation of experimental, conceptual, interdisciplinary and also media-artistic positions."
[3] The program ranges from established positions of new music such as John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Wolfgang Rihm or Sofia Gubaidulina to younger composers such as Beat Furrer and Enno Poppe and visual artists such as Rebecca Horn and musicians from the field of electronic music such as Aphex Twin, Ryoji Ikeda and Stefan Goldmann.
[5] In autumn 2014, the Austrian musicologist and curator Berno Odo Polzer succeeded Matthias Osterwold as artistic director of the festival.