Bärenreiter-Verlag has been cooperating with the Conductors' Forum of the German Music Council for many years to support young conductors. Particularly successful scholarship holders who have been supported in their musical development by the German Music Council over a period of four years receive the Bärenreiter Urtext Prize, which consists of the scores of the nine Beethoven symphonies in the edition by Jonathan Del Mar.

The award ceremony took place as part of the final concert of the Conductors' Forum with the Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra. The final concert offers the young conductors the opportunity to present themselves in a concert at the end of their sponsorship period.

The Conductors' Forum is the German Music Council's nationwide support program for top young conductors, which promotes young talent through master classes and stands for artistic encounters between the young generation of conductors and nationally and internationally renowned conductors.

Before beginning their compositional work, the students intensively explored the topics of feminism, diversity and specifically the role of women in jazz. Women are still underrepresented in subjects such as jazz and composition, as the "jazzstudie2016" conducted at the University of Hildesheim clearly shows, writes the UdK (Berlin University of the Arts).

The project name "Planet 9" alludes to new discoveries and the expansion of knowledge systems. Just as our solar system has recently been enriched by a planet, there is still much to discover in the jazz scene: "Planet 9" makes a musical statement that aims to sharpen the ear for diversity and overcome structural hurdles.

The CD "Planet 9" is published in the series "jazz_betont", the label of the UdK Berlin. Website: www.udk-berlin.de/universitaet/betont-das-label-der-udk-berlin/katalog/jazz-betont/

The three young musicians will each receive prize money of CHF 10,000 and a scholarship in the form of participation in the Lucerne Festival Academy in
worth a further CHF 10,000. Young artists up to the age of 28 who have Swiss citizenship or have lived in Switzerland for at least five years are eligible to take part in the award.

Alice Belugou was born in Rouen in 1991. She completed her studies in musicology and music education at the Sorbonne Paris, the Hochschule Basel and the Haute École de Musique Lausanne, where she was awarded the special prize for excellent master's concerts in 2015.

Born in 1989, the Swiss-Australian dual citizen Hana Hobiger is currently studying for a Master's degree at the Mozarteum University in Salzburg. She has already performed with the Queensland Chamber Orchestra, the Salzburg Chamber Soloists and the Hofkapelle Munich.

Rahel Kohler was born in Bern in 1988. She completed a Bachelor of Arts in Music Pedagogy with Christian Roellinger at the Bern University of the Arts and completed her degree with a Master of Arts in Music Performance in the class of Marcus Weiss at the Basel Music Academy.

The archive is so important because it provides a balance to the otherwise pro-Bayreuth collections, the library continues. According to the Central Library's press release, an essential part of the archive is the extensive post-Holocaust discourse, which contains a collection of Gottfried Wagner's publications and correspondence with the Jewish world and the associated international media reactions.

The archive also contains materials on the topics of Judaism in the context of Richard Wagner's life, operas and worldview as well as an extensive Wagner reception with a focus on anti-Semitism and Holocaust research, Wagner in Israel, the USA, Europe, Australia, Asia and South Africa.

Gottfried Wagner, great-grandson of Richard Wagner, works internationally as a freelance lecturer, author and multimedia director specializing in 19th and 20th century European culture and politics, Kurt Weill, Aldo Finzi, Richard Wagner and Franz Liszt.

The 11th International Festival for New Music Forum Wallis will take place this year from June 1 to 5 on the long Whitsun weekend at Leuk Castle: With Recherche (Freiburg i.Br.), Taller Sonoro Sevilla, dissonArt Thessaloniki, UMS 'n JIP, Le Pot, the Ensemble für Neue Musik Zürich and the Austrian composer Wolfgang Mitterer, international references are coming together in the medieval town and working together under the title Integration new contextualizations of the new music ensemble. Pascal Viglino presents his latest music theater TilT, the local Tetraflutes premieres by Helena Winkelman, Xavier Dayer and Andreas Zurbriggen, and the Collectif Environnement Sonore CES sound walks to raise awareness of our acoustic environment. With the Ars Electronica Forum Wallis 2017 Selection, a panopticon of international electronic music can also be heard at two concerts. A total of two dozen concerts with over 50 works by composers from over 25 countries are scheduled, and this year the festival will be flanked by an exhibition of contemporary art.
 

International partnerships, IGNM Day
The international program is made possible primarily thanks to the extensive network of the IGNM-VS: the International Society for Contemporary Music ISCM, the European Conference for Promoters of New Music ECPNM, its own festival network ZENET, embassies and international cultural foundations. As usual, the so-called "IGNM Day" will take place on Whit Monday: It provides a platform for the Swiss sections, as well as ISCM, ECPNM and ZENET representatives and local delegates, to meet and exchange ideas informally.
The Forum Valais is one of the largest festivals for new music in Switzerland and takes place annually at Whitsun at Leuk Castle in Valais. It is run by the IGNM-VS, the local section of the International Society for Contemporary Music ISCM, and has co-produced over 300 world premieres since 2006. In 2015, it performed Stockhausen's Helicopter String Quartet together with the Arditti Quartet, André Richard and Air Glaciers over the Alps for the first time.
 

Conflicts, differences, contradictions, friction, anger, war, reconciliation, integration, appropriation - under the motto clash!(?) the Darmstadt Spring Conference of the Institute for New Music and Music Education in Darmstadt (INMM) focused on the tense interaction between cultures and identities, but above all on the clash of basic aesthetic views (not only) in contemporary music.

Samuel Huntington's seminal text The Clash of Civilization (1996) hovered in the air, but the conference motto encompassed much more. For contemporary music has long since ceased to be characterized by the Either-orbut rather of the As well as. In hybrid mixed forms, contrasting genres, formats, media and materials merge into something new, sometimes in opposition to more traditional approaches. The potential for conflict in politics and society, as well as everyday references, can be experienced in a variety of ways in today's music.

Following a dense introductory presentation by Jörn Peter Hiekel, such areas of tension were discussed in four thematic blocks under the headings Hybrid identities, inner clashes, clashes of generations or spatial clashes discussed. In addition to numerous international guests from the fields of musicology, philosophy, art and media theory, the composers Heinrich Goebbels, Sergei Nevsky, Joanna Bailie, Johannes Kreidler, Sandeep Baghwati and Sarah Nemtsov were heard at lectures and concerts.
 

Using works by Giaconto Scelsi and Horaţiu Rădulescu, violist Vincent Royer made it clear in the opening discussion concert how distinctive individual styles have emerged in the offside - under the keywords "spherical sound" or "spectralism". As counter-models, these would have developed in contrast, if not Clash to the serialism that characterized the time.

Sandeep Baghwati found his approach of "multi-headed creativity", analogous to this, only from a distance to European new music, in Canada. "I always wanted to work more with wonderful musicians than to make wonderful music," says Baghwati. In his collaborative works, the clash between the coming together of all participants and the dissolution of composer authorship go hand in hand. In projects such as Sound of Montreal and Matralabin which musicians from different cultural or traditional areas find new forms together, he explained his model of trans-traditional music-making.

"It's not that I quote pop music as something foreign to me, but it all comes together in me," Sarah Nemtsov said. Not Clashbut Fusion The focus for them is on what White eyes erased (2014/15), interpreted by the Ensemble Mosaik. For Nemtsov, roots are more a grown present than a past. With Places-Mekomot she presented a project in her lecture that was dedicated to combining contemporary music with old Jewish songs. It was not easy to subsequently "free herself from the pigeonhole" in the perception of the new music scene. Because there is a fine line between hierarchization and stigmatization.
 

Like quite a few other speakers, Rainer Nonnenmann sees the works of the generation of digital native composers, whose music was another focal point, rather as (fruitful) Mash as (bulky) Clash. The fact that new trends are often given labels by composers, on the other hand, primarily expresses the affiliation to communities of experience and can still lead to exclusion.

Johannes Kreidler then brought Clash In persona, he brought one of the basic ideas of the conference into play, namely to question the culture of discussion in contemporary music. With eloquent side blows, underpinned by clever quotes (Brecht: "Where people earn better, they are friendlier to each other"), he polarized fiercely. What in the debate was action, what was reaction, and whether person and work were one (Mash) or whether they should be considered separately is up to the audience, as Kreidler, who also sees himself as a conceptual artist, often stages decidedly controversial pieces. The fact that, with his piece performed by Ensemble Mosaik the previous evening External work (2009) is just as playful in its fundamental criticism of globalization and thus takes a clear stance on issues of world politics, is definitely to be credited to him.

Martin Scherzinger (New York) also took a pointedly critical stance: On the basis of a research project, he described the consistent omission of the musical practice of non-Western centers in the historiography of music influenced by the Western Occident. Even in the development of today's music software for a supposedly gender-flexible Mash-This tendency is continuing in our society. Algorithms are characterized by a Euro-genetic industrial habitus and do not, for example, capture an elastic rhythmicity of African or Indian character - his conclusion: "White supremacy has now found a new way."
 

Photo: Christoph Rau/INMM, Darmstadt

Heiner Goebbels

"It is indeed the case that I am in Darmstadt for the first time, whether that is coincidence or irony," Heiner Goebbels stated at the beginning of his lecture. The boundaries between genres and institutions, which also contain a potential for conflict, are rarely more obvious, as Goebbels is perceived far more in the theater context than in the music context. His diverse compositional oeuvre combines music, scene, video, text and props into a polyphonic whole and moves between all genres. Goebbels juxtaposes the individual elements in their incompatibility without merging them. Clash in the sense of transparency and coexistence is at the center. Only the viewer, the actual protagonist, creates an individual reading from the polyphony of voices. "The works of art that we produce must withstand all gazes," says Goebbels.

In the concluding concert, powerfully interpreted by members of the Ensemble Modern, the works Surrogates (1994/2015) and Heracles 2 (1991) is as good to the ear as it is to the eye.
 

The theater(uri) is the largest cultural venue in Uri and one of the largest in Central Switzerland. There is the Urner Saal with 412 rising seats, the Altdorfer Saal with a maximum of 139 seats and the foyer with 80 event seats or 550 standing places for breaks and aperitifs.

The operations team has been led by Schattdorf cultural manager Heinz Keller since the beginning. A change in management is due at the end of 2018 due to his retirement. In accordance with the performance agreement, the team ensures a multi-disciplinary cultural operation. This includes the rental business and in-house events in the fields of theater, cabaret, dance, ballet, concerts, musicals, operettas, children's and youth events and exhibitions.

The building dates back to around 1865 and was extended in 1925 to become the Tellspielhaus Altdorf. In 1998, it was taken over by the municipality of Altdorf and underwent extensive renovation. The theater(uri) has been partially renovated since then. In 2016, the district council approved a loan of CHF 878,500 for the second stage of renovation from 2016 to 2019.

Surfaces shift; squares crescendo and diminish, rhythms form in the sequence, and while Hans Richter's short abstract black-and-white film Rhythm 21 it begins to resonate inside you. This pioneering work from 1921, from which the director Robert Wilson probably copied many things for his stage sets, is the overture to the exhibition extended compositions - and it immediately opens up an enormously broad field. The theme is "the network of relationships between visual art and music in the structural interlocking of both forms of expression", as the curators put it. An initial version of this was already on display at Kunstquartier Bethanien in Berlin in 2015; artist Ellen Fellmann has now expanded the beautiful selection of works from the 20th and 21st centuries for Biel. There are objects inspired by musical scores or records: The Swiss artist Silva Reichwein, for example, mounted small canvases on a turntable, had it rotated and thus created precise circular images; in other paintings, she placed rectangles of color in constantly permuted sequences on the surface - similar to the Zurich constructivist Richard Paul Lohse - in other words, serial pictorial music. Samuel Beckett took a different approach in his silent television films Square I-II in which he guided the movements of the figures canon-like and thus rhythmized them. Japanese artist Hiromi Ishii, on the other hand, combines iridescent image surfaces with electronic sounds. One of the most captivating works is the film-sound installation Longing by the Iranian Raha Raissnia. She carried a running camera around with her without looking through the lens, taking blurred images from everyday life, which she edited and now projects. This is accompanied by a noisy, drone-like and occasionally oriental soundtrack, in a seemingly loose connection, but haunting precisely because of this.

Numerous works and installations (others are by Bruce Naumann, Bill Viola, Simeon Sigg, Samuel Emde, Christoph Girardet/Matthias Müller and the curator herself) provide inspiration, especially for musicians, as the starting point is visual art and the desire of artists to consider musical categories. The "extended" in the title therefore refers more to the visual. Almost all attempts by composers to incorporate graphic elements and cross the boundary to the visual are missing: John Cage, Earle Brown, Sylvano Bussotti, Roman Haubenstock-Ramati, Anestis Logothetis, but also all Swiss experimenters such as those of the Ensemble Neue Horizonte Bern. It would have simply gone beyond the scope of the project. The overall concept is rather non-committal; the individual works of art stand on their own and only shed a little light on each other, but the diversity is still well worth experiencing, and some exhibits actually begin to resonate and resonate within you.

The final and a highlight is a musical work that is impressively staged in the room by Canadian Janet Cardiff with respectful restraint: Thomas Tallis' forty-part Spem in aliumone of the most gigantic works in music history. Instead of forty singers, forty loudspeakers are distributed in eight groups of five in a circle. One voice can be heard from each of them, turning this all too rarely performed, difficult music (despite some intonation problems on the part of the Salisbury Cathedral Choir) into a grandiose, sensual spatial experience.

Peter Leu has been teaching music theory at the Lucerne School of Music since 1987. The Board of Trustees writes that with Peter Leu they have "consciously chosen an active and committed musician".

Peter Leu was born in Schaffhausen in 1955. He studied mathematics at the ETH Zurich and taught at the cantonal school in Schaffhausen until 1986. He received his organ teaching diploma from Theodor Käser at the SMPV. Further organ studies followed with André Luy in Lausanne and Monika Henking in Thalwil/Lucerne. He has been a lecturer in music theory at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts since 1987. Peter Leu has been organist at the Stadtkirche St. Johann since 1991 and at Schaffhausen Minster since 1995.

The Day of Music - or the Fête de la musique, as it is known in French-speaking regions - was initiated by former French Minister of Culture Jack Lang and is celebrated every year on June 21. In France, Germany and other European countries, as well as in French-speaking Switzerland, the TdM/FdM has long been an integral part of the annual calendar.

The German Day of Music is an initiative of the entire German music scene under the umbrella of the German Music Council. On the third weekend in June, choirs, orchestras, music and general education schools, opera houses and many other institutions showcase the diversity and quality of musical practice in Germany, the land of music.

More info:
http://www.musikrat.ch/tag-der-musik/infos/
 

The 2016-2020 work program of the National Cultural Dialogue was adopted in April 2016. It contains ten cultural policy topics that will be addressed jointly by the federal government, the cantons, the cities and the municipalities. The priority topics include the promotion of literature, museum policy, monument preservation, cultural participation and the promotion of reading. The aim is to meet common challenges in these areas through increased cooperation and coordination.

Since January 1, 2013, the Federal Office of Culture and Pro Helvetia have been transferring 12% of the financial support (e.g. prizes or work grants) to a cultural practitioner's pension fund or pillar 3a respectively. Half of the 12% is financed by the creative artist and half by the Federal Office of Culture or Pro Helvetia

This year, the six grants will be awarded to artists from the fields of visual arts, literature and music. The grants are intended to "specifically facilitate personal and artistic development".

The 29-year-old singer, pianist, songwriter, arranger and bandleader Raphael Jost was awarded the soloist prize at the European Young Jazz Prize in Burghausen, Germany, in 2012 and won the Swiss Jazz Award three years later. He has already given concerts at the Montreux Jazz Festival, Blue Balls Festival Lucerne, Schaffhausen Jazz Festival, Burghausen Jazz Week, Winterthur Music Festival, Festival Da Jazz in St. Moritz and the Jazz Festival in Ascona, among others.

Christoph Hartmann is a freelance musician in various constellations; he plucks the double bass with the Wyfelder Luusbuebe, composes for various film, theater and children's projects and accompanies readings with electric guitar and loop device. He also works as a guitar teacher and band leader at the music school in Weinfelden.

In addition to Hartmann and Jost, the jury also honored Reto Müller, visual artist, Stein am Rhein; Sebastian Stadler, visual artist, Zurich; Sara Widmer, visual artist, Zurich; Tabea Steiner, literary artist, Zurich.

The demands include "the creation of a digital ecosystem in which online platforms give creators and their partners a fair share of the added value they generate with their diverse content". The rights of creators and their partners must be strengthened, access to the open internet and equal communication opportunities must be guaranteed, digital consumer protection must be transparent and comprehensible for all parties involved and creativity and technology must be considered together.

In addition, the opportunity should be used to "confidently stabilize the achievement of plurality as well as cultural and linguistic diversity in Europe through regulation and also take it seriously as part of the further development of the digital single market".

You can find the full DCA position paper at www.deutsche-content-allianz.de
 

One concern of the majority of the committee was the emphasis on communal autonomy. It would like to refrain from mentioning the municipalities in connection with the canton's cultural policy objectives. The municipalities should be free to define their own cultural policy objectives.

In line with regulations at federal level, the government is proposing that artists and cultural institutions should be obliged to pay contributions into pension funds or other pension schemes. The Commission would like to remove these provisions and rely on the personal responsibility of cultural professionals and organizers.

The Commission proposes a legal provision with a list of cultural locations by name and the possibility for the Cantonal Council to designate further cantonal cultural locations. According to the government's proposal, the Lokremise St.Gallen, Werdenberg Castle, the Tonhalle and the Theater St.Gallen would currently have the status of a cantonal cultural location, as would the Alte Bad Pfäfers in the medium term. The commission also gives this status to the Kunst(Zeug)Haus Rapperswil-Jona.

The government does not intend to increase expenditure with the revised Cultural Promotion Act. It should also continue to be possible to draw subsidies from the lottery fund. The majority of the Commission expressly wants to retain the current priority role of the Lottery Fund.

The Commission would also like to see explicit mention made of the fact that people with disabilities should also be able to participate in cultural events. The government should be instructed with a motion to draw up a partial revision of the existing Cultural Promotion Act, which regulates the support of regional funding organizations, the promotion of Unesco World Heritage Sites and the cantonal cultural locations.

The city council wants to adjust the reduction system for music school fees for the 2017/2018 school year. To this end, it is raising the maximum taxable income limit from CHF 35,000 to CHF 55,000. The City Council is expected to discuss the matter on May 11, 2017.

With the adjustment, there are now four levels of remission instead of the previous two. In future, parents with a taxable income of no more than CHF 25,000 will receive a 50 percent reduction in school fees, while those in the fourth level (CHF 45,100 to 55,000) will receive a 10 percent reduction. This new regulation will increase the costs for the city of Lucerne by an average of around CHF 75,000 to CHF 181,000 per year.

With these regulations, the city of Lucerne is making an important contribution to facilitating access to individual music lessons, according to the official press release. In future, more families will be able to benefit from discounts. This is also in line with the wishes of the voters of the city of Lucerne. In 2012, they approved the federal decree on the promotion of youth music with a 78.46% yes vote, calling for the strengthening of extracurricular music education and the abolition of access barriers.