Europe is alive with the sound of music of all kinds through the summer, and here theartsdesk brings you listings of this year's attractions, many of which you can still get tickets for and combine culture with splendid cities and landscapes. From avant-garde dance music at Barcelona's Sonar to deepest Wagner in Bayreuth, this is the unmissable clickable guide to a cultivated European trip.

Europe is alive with the sound of music of all kinds through the summer, and here theartsdesk brings you listings of this year's attractions, many of which you can still get tickets for and combine culture with splendid cities and landscapes. From avant-garde dance music at Barcelona's Sonar to deepest Wagner in Bayreuth, this is the unmissable clickable guide to a cultivated European trip.

It's 4.00 in the afternoon and Brighton Festival curator Brian Eno is fast-forwarding us to the future. Perched onstage behind an array of consoles, he tells us we're in for "something special for the end of term". The conceit is that the audience are students in the year 2069, indeed the event programme takes the form of notes for a university course on "Cultural Reconstructions". Rather than a single "lecture", though, there are three, and they will take us through to 11.00 tonight.

A great wall of noise greets the audience as it settles in to the Royal Festival Hall - the sound of some heavy outer planet’s radio frequency, a subtly oscillating drone that recalls NASA’s recordings of radio emissions from Saturn made by the Cassini spacecraft. Lou Reed’s work station for the night is set centre-stage, behind a rack of electronic machinery, a row of guitars awaiting their signal stacked behind him, but for 20 minutes or so there’s just that continuum of noise – in fact the sound of three guitars leant up against a stack of live amps.

“I want to tell you a story. About a story.” Thus spake Laurie Anderson at the beginning of her new show, Delusion, which is running for four nights as part of the Barbican’s Bite season. It was a typically cryptic, teasing prologue from a woman who, for more than 30 years, has created her own unique brand of performance art from a combination of music, poetry, stories, visual effects and electronic sounds.

Sarah Kane’s last play is the stuff of legend. Since its first production some 18 months after her suicide in 1999, it’s become a favourite with black-attired drama students, nostalgic in-yer-face drama buffs and mainstream theatres all over mainland Europe. But it is rarely performed in big spaces in this country – apparently because artistic directors feel it would empty their venues. So this version, directed by Grzegorz Jarzyna of Poland’s TR Warszawa on the Barbican's main stage, is a good chance to see what we’ve been missing. Or is it?

A self-styled “string quartet comprising a guitar, fiddle, mandolin and accordion” - welcome to the topsy–turvy world of Spiro. A world where nothing is quite what it seems. A world where up is down, black is white, and folk is, well, kind of avant-garde.

The radical modern choreographer William Forsythe (b 1950) was celebrated in a week of events in London’s stages this year, marking his transition from mouldbreaking neo-classical ballet to a more collaborative, theatre mode.