The current work of musicians in all areas of music is eligible for the call for entries in the field of music. The contributions from this call for entries are used for publication and the associated costs for promotion and distribution. The total amount available is CHF 60,000.

The contributions from the call for proposals in the area of theater/dance totaling CHF 120,000 can be awarded to productions by professional theater and dance professionals that will be performed for the first time in 2017.

The deadline for submitting dossiers for participation in the selective funding is September 30, 2016. A four-member jury of experts will be appointed to assess the submitted works. The competition results and awarded contributions will be announced at the public handover ceremony for the work contributions on 11 November 2016 at the Braui cultural center in Hochdorf.

From 2017, the canton plans to issue calls for proposals every six months, at the end of January and the end of June. Production grants will be awarded in the music and theater dance categories, and work grants in the liberal and applied arts categories. The new funding instrument is based on the planning report on cultural funding in the canton of Lucerne adopted by the Cantonal Council in 2014.

More info: www.kultur.lu.ch

A total of 24 applicants submitted dossiers for the grants. The Board of Trustees awarded 7 grants. The aim of the grants from the Canton and City of Schaffhausen is to provide substantial support for the most convincing applications. The Board of Trustees decides independently on the amount of support; the minimum amount is CHF 15,000.

• The musician Joana Aderi (*1977) receives a grant of CHF 17,500 to realize a music project in exchange with Kenya.
• The writer Ursula Fricker receives a grant of CHF 17,500 to complete a new novel manuscript.
• The musician Jörg Odermatt (*1962) receives a grant of CHF 15,000 to produce a studio album with his band Papst & Abstinenzler.
• The artist Rebekka Gnädinger (*1982) receives a grant of CHF 15,000 to support her artistic work as Artist in Residence in St. Louis, Senegal.
• The director and screenwriter Felix Tissi (*1955) receives a grant of CHF 15,000 to realize a screenplay for a planned film.
• The artist duo Rubén Fructuoso (*1987) and Beat Wipf (*1982) will receive a grant of CHF 15,000 to realize a project that addresses the topicality of religious mania in the form of an installation.
• The artist duo Ralf Schlatter (*1971) and Anna-Katharina Rickert (*1973) alias schön & gut will receive a grant of CHF 15,000 to develop a new program.
• The two studio scholarships (6 months in Berlin) go to the artist Judith Kakon (*1988) and the artist Andreas Dal Cero (*1964).

The canton and city of Schaffhausen have been awarding grants to creative artists in Schaffhausen for 15 years. The total amount available for awarding is 110,000 francs.

The applications are assessed and judged by an independent panel of experts. This year, in addition to the representatives of the authorities Cristina Baumgartner-Spahn, Jens Lampater, Marion Preuss and Roland E. Hofer, the experts were Beatrice Stoll (Chair, Literature), Moritz Müllenbach (Music), Caroline Minjolle (Dance and Theater) and Alexandra Blättler (Art).

Strengthened by an international network of artistic and institutional contacts, Laurence Marchand has creatively directed a musical and choreographic program with numerous co-productions in Paris, writes the Verbier Festival.

Previously, as administrator of the international artist agency IMG Artists, she developed productions for the Mariinsky Theater/Valery Gergiev, the Monteverdi Orchestra/John Eliot Gardiner, the choreographer Sylvie Guillem and numerous symphonic ensembles around the world.

Laurence Marchand will take up her post at the Verbier Festival in fall 2016, replacing Kim Gaynor, who was Administrative Director of the Festival for more than eleven years. Kim Gaynor will take over as General Manager of Vancouver Opera, the second largest opera house in Canada, in September.

The booklet on the origins and history of Central Swiss country music, which was printed in an edition of 900 copies, was completely sold out within three weeks, according to a statement from the canton. A second edition has now been published and is available again with immediate effect. 

Instrumental folk music has always played an important role in the canton of Schwyz, especially in the inner part of the canton. Numerous musicians known throughout Switzerland come from this region. In addition to well-known names such as Kasi Geisser, Piitschä-Wysel, Toni Bürgler and others, numerous other musicians have played for dancing and entertainment in the Schwyz villages from Küssnacht to Goldau, in the Schwyz valley basin, Muotathal, Illgau, Gersau, but also in the mountain region of Sattel and Rothenthurm over the last 100 years or so, whose names are known only to a few today. The new 204-page booklet is dedicated to all these well-known and unknown folk musicians.

Available is the Schwyz magazine from the Cantonal Cultural Commission Schwyz at a price of CHF 25 plus postage and packaging. Available during office hours on 041 819 20 88 or by e-mail kulturfoerderung.afk@sz.ch.

Photo above (from left): Franz Föhn senior, Franz Schmidig junior, Franz Schmidig senior and Franz Föhn junior.

On May 21 and 22, academics from all over the world met at the Zentrum Paul Klee to discuss topics such as the identity conditions of a musical work, the perfect performance and the connections between Boulezʼ and Paul Kleeʼs oeuvre. The interdisciplinary exchange was characterized by an informal atmosphere.

After a short address by Dale Jacquette (University of Bern), a member of the organizing team, the symposium began with a presentation by the American philosopher Peter Kivy (Rutgers University). He has devoted his studies mainly to aesthetics and the philosophy of music. With his book The Corded Shell: Reflections on Musical Representation he laid the foundation for the revival of the philosophy of music in 1980, although he is no longer convinced by his frequently cited work. In his lecture, he discussed why music had fallen out of the field of vision of philosophy at the beginning of the 20th century On the recent remarriage of Music to Philosophy. The dominance of absolute music in the late 19th century meant that philosophy focused on a definition of music as formally organized sound structures and did not devote itself to the content of music, the mediated. Kivy, however, dared to attempt to build a bridge from music to emotions again, triggering a whole wave of texts dedicated to music from a philosophical perspective.

Marcello Ruta and Annabel Colas (both University of Bern) then presented questions on the ontology of music. Ruta argued that the hermeneutic approach could also encompass performative aspects of musical works. PhD student Colas explained the (im)possibility of the perfect performance. The early afternoon was taken up by Thomas Gartmann (Bern University of the Arts) and Alessandro Arbo (University of Strasbourg). Gartmann spoke about what can be found in the score of a work and what one looks for in vain. Arbo discussed what exactly we mean when we say we recognize something as a specific work.

Clover and interdisciplinarity
Paul Klee was the subject of discussion for the first time in Jim Dickinson's (Bath Spa University) lecture. Dickinson analyzed one of Klee's most frequently set works, Tweeting machine (1922). He showed a possible translation of this image into music using Birtwistle's composition Carmen Arcadiae Mechanicae Perpetuum (1977). The musicians Paulo de Assis (Orpheus Institute Ghent) and Albert Frantz (Vienna) rounded off the day from a practical perspective.

The presentations on the second day largely revolved around the namesake of the venue. Paul Klee not only incorporated many philosophical approaches into his sketches and paintings, but was also an amateur violinist. He therefore attracts the interest of art lovers as well as musicians, musicologists and philosophers. This makes him an ideal subject for interdisciplinary research, as promoted in this symposium. Pierre Boulez also had a very special relationship with Paul Klee's work, as Ulrich Mosch (University of Geneva) pointed out in his presentation.

Christian Berger (University of Freiburg) and Walter Kreyszig (University of Saskatchewan) focused on the links between Johann Sebastian Bach and Klee. Klee repeatedly tried to depict the abstract visually and so Bach's compositions with their highly structured nature also became starting points for his works. 

This was followed in the afternoon by a guided tour of the Zentrum Paul Klee with curator Michael Baumgartner. He then gave a presentation explaining the central role of nature in Klee's works. Further analyses were presented by Linn Buchert (Friedrich Schiller University Jena); her dissertation deals with the role of the breathing metaphor in visual art.

Composition students from Bern University of the Arts and the Vertigo Ensemble enriched the symposium with a concluding concert. They performed pieces inspired by Boulezʼ Structures I, a work that Boulez originally wanted to call An der Grenze des Fruchtlandes in 1951, in reference to Kleeʼs painting Monument an der Grenze des Fruchtlandes. The participants were able to experience directly how the impressions from the two-day symposium influence perception when listening to these premieres.

According to the official announcement by the public broadcaster, the music topics of "Parlando" will be integrated into the programs "Kontext" and "Passagen" from July 4, 2016. "Jazz aktuell" and "Musik der Welt" will be merged into the new format "Jazz & World aktuell". In-depth topics of these two music genres will also be covered in "Kontext" and "Passage" in future.

The afternoon program on SRF2 Kultur from Monday to Friday will in future be devoted entirely to classical music, the station writes. The "Klassiktelefon" and "Concerto" will be followed by a light classical program until 4 pm. The "Klangfenster" will continue to be broadcast on Saturdays and now Sundays, while the weekday broadcasts will be discontinued.

The evening will become even more music-heavy after the 10 p.m. news: the previous genres from early music to jazz will remain, but the proportion of music will be increased. The concert broadcasts will remain unchanged. The flagship programs "Diskothek", "Jazz Collection" and "Musik unserer Zeit" are excluded from the changes.

As the broadcaster quotes its program director Barbara Gysi, it is "striving for a clearer program structure with these changes". The adjusted program structure also makes it possible to "broadcast the most popular programs as repeats."

From Bach to Bach. This is a brief description of the history of the 325-year-old Meiningen court orchestra. It was Johann Ludwig Bach, a distant relative of the great J. S., who, followed by other members of the widely ramified family, transformed the royal seat of Saxony-Meiningen into an important musical center with the court orchestra in the first third of the 18th century. For six years now, a completely different Bach, namely a Swiss Bach, has been at the helm of Meiningen's musical culture as General Music Director: Philippe Bach, who studied horn and conducting in Bern, Geneva, Zurich and Manchester, took over one of the most historic German orchestras in 2010.

Proud history
Meiningen is a quiet and pretty small town in southern Thuringia between the Rhön and the Thuringian Forest, which has been spared to some extent from the hardships of recent German history. However, Meiningen is also a unique cultural center. First of all, there is the court orchestra, a symphony orchestra with a good sixty members, whose meteoric rise before and around 1900 is associated with names such as Franz Liszt, Johannes Brahms, Hans von Bülow, Richard Strauss and Max Reger or that of the violinist Alexander Ritter and the clarinettist Richard Mühlfeld. It was the Meiningen court orchestra that shaped the Bayreuth Festival Orchestra for years, not only because of its proximity but also because of its outstanding qualities. There is the Meiningen Theater, where - also at the end of the 19th century and probably for the first time in history - an early form of director's theater and a consistently naturalistic directorial and visual concept was developed, which made history under the heading "Meiningen Principles". For years, the Meininger Theater toured Europe on the newly built railroad lines, always carrying the detailed and voluminous stage sets by Coburg theater painter Max Brückner in up to 20 railroad carriages. No wonder the people of Meiningen still revere Duke Georg II like a city father. From 1866, the so-called "Theatre Duke" had not only supported the orchestra and theater for more than half a century, he had also directed and sketched stage props and, not least, stood up to the Wilhelmine Empire as a socially liberal-minded politician.
Today, there are also the Kammerspiele, which focuses on experimental plays, the puppet theater or the cabaret and dance houses ... Meiningen is an extraordinary city of art and, with its 20,000 inhabitants, only half the size of Thun or Aarau.

Every year, students at Bern University of the Arts (HKB) who are completing their Master of Arts in Specialized Music Performance Classical Music perform at the soloist concert at the Kultur Casino Bern. Following the concert, the Eduard Tschumi Prize is awarded to the soloist with the best overall score of the entire three-part Master's examination. On June 17, the prize, worth CHF 12,000, went to trombonist Michael Buchanan.

The English trombonist Michael Buchanan, a student of Ian Bousfield, has already gained experience as an orchestral musician with numerous orchestras, including the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, the Vienna State Opera, the Philharmonia Orchestra London and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Michael Buchanan was awarded first prize and the audience prize at the 64th ARD International Music Competition in 2015. In the 2015/16 and 16/17 seasons, he performed as a soloist with the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra of the SWR, the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin and the Orkiestra Aukso in Poland.

Angélique Boudeville (voice), Lucas Perez Bruno (oboe), Laura Schmid (recorder) and Dmitry Serebrennikov (violin) have also successfully completed their Master's degree in Specialized Music Performance Classical Music
The soloist concerts were accompanied by the Bern Symphony Orchestra under the direction of conductor Ekkehard Klemm.
 

Many musicians are among the freelance artists. According to the German Orchestra Association (DOV), increasing digitalization alone has meant that parts of their income from the management of ancillary copyrights have so far been lost without replacement. Under these circumstances, their social security is more important than ever. This also applies with regard to avoiding poverty in old age.

More than 180,000 freelance artists are compulsorily insured under the German artists' social insurance scheme (which has no direct equivalent in Switzerland), including more than 51,000 in the music sector. This means that, despite being self-employed, they enjoy the protection of statutory health, long-term care and pension insurance.

Like other compulsorily insured employees, insured persons pay half of their contributions. The other half is paid by the federal government (20 percent) and companies that award contracts to freelance artists and publicists (30 percent). The artists' social security contribution is levied as a levy. The levy rate is set annually for the following calendar year. The assessment basis is the fees paid in the previous year.

The mayor presented the award during a Dada poetry slam evening at the Schauspielhaus Zurich. With the awarding of the Medal of Honor of the City of Zurich, the city and canton, represented by Government Councillor Jacqueline Fehr, thanked the two for their many years of significant commitment to the cultural city of Zurich: Elmar Weingarten was artistic director of the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich from 2007 to 2014 and has been managing director and artistic director of the Zurich Festival since 2011. Peter F. Weibel has been President of the Zurich Festival Foundation since 2003.

With the current edition of the festival, Elmar Weingarten and Peter F. Weibel are ending their work for the festival, which is jointly supported by Zurich's cultural institutions and whose development they have shaped over the years. The 2016 Zurich Festival, entitled "Dada - Between Madness and Nonsense", will run until June 26.
 

A pedestrian zone in the center of Munich. Two passers-by are bending attentively over a garbage can. Is there something to watch, hear or smell? Others walk past carelessly, others join them, while the first ones move away without exchanging words.

The video documentation as an integral part of the piece Staring at the Bin ("Anmülleimer anstarren", composition and concept Meriel Price) is symptomatic of a concept of music theater that Munich Biennale (May 28 to June 9, 2016) under the new directorship of composer duo Daniel Ott and Manos Tsangaris. The focus is on integrating the city and everyday life as well as opening up to interaction, strange occurrences and altered sound perception. According to the two artistic directors, "threshold crossers" are to be attracted and the Biennale opened up with performative sound interventions in the urban space, the consolidation of the festival and a doubling of the number of world premieres to 15 in 13 days. By including individual new venues away from the major venues, the team of artistic directors deliberately deviated from the programs of their predecessors Hans-Werner Henze and Peter Ruzicka.

Ott and Tsangaris seem to complement each other perfectly, as Daniel Ott, a Swiss national anchored in his adopted home of Berlin, brings with him many years of experience as director of the Rümlingen Festival for New Music, which specializes in musical dialogue with the environment (see interview in the Swiss Music Newspaper 6/2016, p. 6 ff.). Since his first music theater miniatures in the 1970s, Tsangaris, who teaches in Dresden, has devoted himself to radical statements on world references, new parameters of theatrical actions, the search for sounds and encounters with the audience.

The radical break with Munich tradition is nevertheless surprising and testifies to a genuine passion for the cause. The choice of the biennial title OmU - Original with subtitlesThe "film", which in the cinema is the decisive indicator for an unadulterated screening, is deliberately based on cinematic processes. He evokes numerous possibilities of how an original can be related to its transposition or realization, but also fragmentation, alienation or documentation. At the same time, he alludes to the "OmÜ" variant - original with surtitles - of common practice in opera.

Symposium with Swiss accents
What does the term "original" mean and what do new formats and strategies look like in today's music theater? Is the term "music theater" still appropriate at all and what relationship could this music theater have to other fields of contemporary art?

With a view to productions of the Biennale, but also on the basis of fundamental and further-reaching considerations, a dense symposium conceived by Jörn Peter Hiekel (Dresden/Zurich) and David Roesner (Munich) under the title OmU - Echo spaces and search movements in today's music theater to the discourse. The fact that Switzerland is evidently a fertile breeding ground for the musical-theatrical treatment of templates of all kinds was particularly evident at this event.

The two artistic directors playfully introduced the themes of originality, authorship and hierarchies, before subtitling and encouraging each other with "keep talking" and "keep playing" on instruments in a flowing transition between word and sound - Ott on the piano prepared with blind rivets and Tsangaris on the forest devil and flummi ball.
Roman Brotbeck (Bern/Basel) showed a way of dealing with the original by setting Robert Walser's texts to music. Only in the last twenty years has Walser often been set to music, especially in théâtre musical, which Brotbeck justified with an interest in biographical topoi. He exemplified the relationship between the style of Walser's texts and the methods of théâtre musical with works by Mischa Käser, Georges Aperghis, Helmut Oehring, Johannes Harneit, Ruedi Häusermann and Heinz Holliger.

David Roesner (Munich) presented Christoph Marthaler's The Unanswered Question (Basel 1997) as a key work for dealing with models. It uses Charles Ivesʼ epochal piece of the same name (1908), which addresses fundamental questions of music. Ruedi Häusermann's music theater A multitude of quiet whistles (Zurich 2011), which led to a staged concert in the box after a musicalized walk through the workshops of Zurich's Schiffbau, was read by Leo Dick (Bern) as a "composed memory work" (see Dick's article of the same name in: Transitions: New music theater - vocal art - staged musicStuttgarter Musikwissenschaftliche Schriften 4, edited by Andreas Meyer and Christina Richter-Ibáñez, Mainz 2016).
 

Photo: Munich Biennale, Franz Kimmel

Phone Call to Hades

The Cantonal Department of Culture has developed a concept for a new orchestra funding policy, which came into force with the decision of the Grand Council on December 16, 2015. It now provides for multi-year program funding for professional Basel orchestras and larger instrumental ensembles as well as structural funding. CHF 5,576,000 is available for this purpose for the years 2016 to 2019. The year 2016 will be used as a bridging year and the existing state contributions totaling CHF 1,094,000 will be extended by one year.

For the 2017-2019 funding period, the following orchestras and instrumental ensembles will receive a multi-year grant totaling CHF 4,035,000 from the Orchestra programme funding:

• Basel Chamber Orchestra: 520,000 francs p.a. (total amount 1,560,000 francs)
• Basel Sinfonietta: CHF 360,000 p.a. (total amount CHF 1,080,000)
• La Cetra Baroque Orchestra: 290,000 francs p.a. (total amount 870,000 francs)
• Ensemble Phoenix: 150,000 francs p.a. (total amount 450,000 francs)
• Camerata Variabile: 25,000 francs impulse funding p.a. (total amount 75,000 francs)

The jury consisted of Valerio Benz (SRF2 Kultur), Michael Breugst (WDR 3), Christine Lemke-Matwey (DIE ZEIT), Roman Brotbeck, Björn Gottstein (Artistic Director of the Donaueschinger Musiktage), Regula Rapp (Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst Stuttgart) and Alexander Steinbeis (Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin), as well as ex officio representatives of the authorities Caroline Specht and Philippe Bischof.
 

Matthias Willi/SRF

Theresa Beyer

Theresa Beyer was born in Leipzig in 1986, now lives in Bern and has been working as a music and culture journalist for Swiss radio SRF 2 Kultur since 2014. The trained musicologist also works for the Bern-based Network for Local and Global Sounds and Media Culture, Norient, and is a freelance music author and curator.

The jury - consisting of Lydia Jeschke (SWR / D), Christine Lemke-Matwey (DIE ZEIT / D), Elisabeth Schwind (Südkurier / D), Stefan Fricke (Hessischer Rundfunk / D) and Peter Hagmann (Neue Zürcher Zeitung / CH / jury chair) - was particularly impressed by the contributions Theresa Beyer created for the program "Musik unserer Zeit" on SRF 2 at its meeting on June 8, 2016.

According to the reviewer, Angela Fiore's work expands our knowledge of the role of music in cultural practices in Naples at the time of absolutism.

The prizewinner is a violinist and musicologist. She completed her violin studies in Cremona (Civica Scuola di Musica). She studied musicology at the University of Pavia (Cremona) and worked on a research project for the Pergolesi Spontini Foundation (Jesi). Her research focuses on Baroque ecclesiastical music in Naples.

The Jacques Handschin Prize, awarded for the fourth time, is named after the Moscow-born Swiss musicologist and organist Jacques Handschin (1886-1955). It is awarded every two years. This year, a total of ten recent doctoral graduates from Basel, Bern, Fribourg, Geneva, Lucerne, Zurich and Leicester (UK) have applied for the prize.

The newly developed fingerboard material is made from recycled paper, spruce and natural resins. According to the WHZ press release, the project, which was awarded a prize by the Chemnitz Chamber of Crafts, represents "a substantial contribution to the ecological qualification of traditional instrument making".

Rare tropical woods, especially ebony, are to be replaced by using modern substitute materials. Important varieties of ebony are currently no longer allowed to be traded without a certificate. Exports to the USA in particular are subject to very strict rules. Another aspect of the research work was the question of compensation options for natural fluctuations in the material properties of woods.