According to the France Musique report, Cisse was shot dead on a street in Philadelphia near his home. He was accompanied by a 17-year-old boy with a hand injury. It is apparently not yet clear whether his death is connected to the demonstration. During the time of Cisse's murder, there had been 16 victims of gun violence in Philadelphia.

Cisse was a student in an instrumental program at Philadelphia District School and part of a music and social program called Musicopia String Orchestra. His death has caused great consternation in the city. A fundraiser has been organized to help his family.

Nicholas Carter founded a project orchestra in Sydneyn in 2010, specializing in music, instruments and historical performance practice of the early 19th century. He was Principal Conductor of the South Australian Adelaide Symphony Orchestra and from 2014 to 2016 Kapellmeister and Musical Assistant to Donald Runnicles at the Deutsche Oper Berlin.

At the invitation of Donald Runnicles, he was a permanent guest conductor at the Grand Teton Music Festival in Wyoming from 2010 to 2013. Since 2018, he has conducted the Klagenfurt State Theater and the Carinthian Symphony Orchestra.

They are still an insider tip among Beethoven's works and anything but pleasing: the Variations on the song "I am the tailor cockatoo". It is still unclear when the work was composed - but it was certainly some time, possibly years, before Beethoven first mentioned it in a letter to the publisher Gottfried Härtel on July 19, 1816. Despite the distance in time, the music critic Paul Bekker even saw it as a "Reduced counterpart" to the 1823 completed and driven into the colossal Diabelli Variations op. 120.

Bekker's commentary refers both to the variation sequence itself as well as to the extensive slow introduction and the "appendix" to the last, tenth variation, which Beethoven also described as such. While the theme is gradually dissolved in a fugato and only appears once more as a reminiscence, the introduction is based on the almost paradoxical idea of developing a theme that already exists and is also very popular from individual motifs: Beethoven creates the song on which the following variations are based and which was popular in Vienna at the beginning of the 19th century I am the Scheider Wetz and Wetz quasi new. (The text had already been changed by contemporaries to "Schneider Kakadu".) The melody was originally found in the Singspiel premiered in 1794 The Sisters of Prague by Wenzel Müller (1767-1835). This once very popular Viennese composer also wrote the Singspiel Kaspar, the bassoonist, or: The magic zither (1791), whose libretto, like that of Mozart's Magic flute on Wieland's exotic collection of fairy tales Djinnistan goes back.

The fact that the so-called Cockatoo variations Beethoven's contemporaries had already observed that this is not primarily music for pleasing entertainment. Thus in the General Musical Gazette from 1830: "The old song of the tailor Crispinus, alias: Wetz, Wetz, Wetz, is varied in such a way, with such spirit and bold imagination, as a master can only ever vary. The story is certainly not easy, but it is not meant to be, for it is by no means destined to be a vain dalliance."

Link to the project homepage "52 x Beethoven"

The program is essentially divided into four parts: pandemic-related investments in cultural institutions, maintaining and strengthening cultural infrastructure and emergency aid, promoting alternative, including digital, offerings and pandemic-related additional requirements for cultural institutions and projects regularly funded by the federal government.

Together with the federal government's other aid packages, this results in support for creative professionals and the cultural sector amounting to several billion euros. For example, access to basic income support was extended to safeguard individual living conditions. The 50 billion euro program of the Minister of Economic Affairs for the self-employed has helped thousands of those affected to pay the rent for their cinema, music club, bookshop, studio or gallery. A voucher solution for cultural event organizers also forms a bridge.

Together with the numerous other measures already initiated from the culture budget, more than one billion euros will be used to mitigate the impact of the pandemic on culture. Among other things, 20 million euros have now been made available for a conversion program, 15 million euros for a future cinema program, 15 million euros for investments in national cultural institutions in Germany and 5.4 million euros for the German orchestral landscape.

More info:
https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-de/bundesregierung/staatsministerin-fuer-kultur-und-medien/aktuelles/eine-milliarde-euro-fuer-neustart-kultur-gruetters-hilfspakete-der-regierung-stellen-die-weichen-auf-zukunft–1757804

The SMG is awarding the Handschin Prize 2020 to the musicologist Dr. Laura Decurtins (born 1985), who wrote her doctoral thesis entitled "Chantai rumantsch! Zur musikalischen Selbst(er)findung Romanischbündens" at the University of Zurich and to the musicologist Dr. des. Rafael Rennicke (born 1979 in Rottweil), who wrote his dissertation entitled "Erinnerungspoetik. Berlioz and the reception of Ranz des vaches in the 19th century" at the University of Tübingen.

While Laura Decurtins explored the "musical DNA" of Romansh-speaking Graubünden and offers an impressive musical view of Romansh-speaking Graubünden, Rafael Rennicke succeeds in elevating the previous debate about reflections of the "cow herd" in composed music to a new, interdisciplinary and intercultural level in the best sense of the word.

The selection committee, consisting of members of the SMG board, found it particularly difficult this year to choose from 14 very good dissertations and decided to award two excellent theses with a prize of CHF 3000 each. In addition to his academic work, the prizewinner currently works as a music editor at the cultural radio station SWR 2 in Baden-Baden, while the prizewinner works at the Institute for Cultural Research Graubünden (ikg) and is a freelance academic.

This is the sixth time that the Swiss Music Research Society has awarded the prize named after the Moscow-born Swiss musicologist and organist Jacques Handschin (1886-1955), which is awarded to young researchers every two years. The award ceremony will take place on September 17, 2020 as part of the SMG's 1st Study Day in the main building of the University of Bern.