The Music for Future division is where Lucerne Festival gathers all of its projects involving the generation of tomorrow. This entails not only all those who will be performing on concert stages as soloists or in orchestras in the future but also the young audiences who attend to listen to them: children, youths, and families.

Every summer, the Lucerne Festival Academy brings around 100 young musicians, composers, and conductors to Lucerne, where they work with internationally renowned figures to rehearse and perform contemporary scores and modern classics. The newly established Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra (LFCO) comprises members from this network and is the Festival's new orchestra of excellence for contemporary music. Starting in the fall of 2021, Lucerne Festival will also launch its own brief festival devoted exclusively to contemporary music, which is titled Lucerne Festival Forward.

For many years, the Summer Festival has provided a significant platform for projects and orchestras that have a background of social commitment and pursue it in their work, such as the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra and the Music Camp in cooperation with Superar Suisse. Through its “Primadonna” theme in 2016, Lucerne Festival set the international discussion about the role of women in the conducting profession in motion, and, in collaboration with the German organization “Zuflucht Kultur,” it also presented a semi-staged performance of Mozart’s Idomeneo that featured refugees from a wide variety of nations.

Together with the myclimate Foundation, we will be developing a profile of the Festival's ecological footprint by the spring of 2022, which will provide the basis for a long-term climate protection strategy for the Festival. In addition to Musicians for Future, this summer Lucerne Festival is supporting the Zurich Forest Project. For every person who attends the concerts on 11 and 24 August featuring the Swiss Youth Symphony Orchestra and the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, Zurich will dedicate a new tree in the Doce River Valley in Brazil, a former biodiversity hotspot.

The activities involving Musicians for Future address issues of the environment, diversity, and education. Through panel discussions during the Summer Festival and digital content, as well as a website of their own, Musicians for Future creates awareness about the topic of sustainability and encourages discussions.