In the 2014/15 season, KTB gave 417 performances and 53 external guest performances (previous year's season: 389/36). The most significant increase in audience numbers was recorded by the music theater: 40,886 spectators were counted here (2013/14: 31,315). The drama department also reported audience growth. According to the press release, audience figures for the Bern Symphony Orchestra and dance remained stable in the reporting period compared to the previous year's season.

The accounts closed with an accounting surplus of around CHF 33,000. Income fell slightly compared to the previous season - from CHF 5.7 million in 2013/14 to around CHF 5.5 million in 2014/15 - a decline that is due in particular to the short duration of performances at the Stadttheater as a result of the renovation. Due to the renovation of the Stadttheater and the upcoming renovation of the Kultur Casino, KTB does not expect normal operations to resume until the 2019/2020 season at the earliest.

Photo: Duke Bluebeard's Castle, Great Hall of the Riding School, 2014/15 season, Claude Eichenberger (Judith), Pavel Shmulevich (Duke Bluebeard)

As part of the total revision of the Economic Development Act and the creation of a law on the promotion of sport, questions regarding the reorganization and repositioning of cantonal cultural promotion are also to be examined. Possible focal points of cultural promotion (professional culture, amateur culture), the interfaces with economic promotion and the responsibilities and selection of the cantonal cultural promotion commission are to be clarified.

The current cultural promotion of the Canton of Graubünden is based on the Law on the Promotion of Culture of September 28, 1997 and the Ordinance to the Law on the Promotion of Culture of January 12, 1998. The Law on the Promotion of Culture and the Ordinance based on it have proven their worth in many areas to date as the basis for cantonal cultural promotion. It is now planned to explicitly include support for professional cultural activities in the objectives of the law. The draft also stipulates that the regions are obliged to provide a comprehensive range of singing and music schools.

The law is to come into force on January 1, 2018 at the latest. The government of the canton of Graubünden is now submitting a draft for consultation. The consultation will last until April 15, 2016 and the documents are available online at www.gr.ch.

Erich Zumstein, who is currently principal of the Schwyz district schools, has worked as a teacher at various levels since 1982, including as a music teacher, and has been in charge of music and elementary school in the cantons of Lucerne and Schwyz for over twenty years.

Erich Zumstein completed comprehensive management training, is a qualified HR specialist and holds an MBA. He has held top management responsibility since 2005. Zumstein has worked as principal of the Schwyz district schools since 2011, where he is responsible for 230 employees and 1,800 pupils.

The current director of the MKZ, Cristina Hospenthal, will retire on August 31, 2016; Erich Zumstein will take up his position on August 1, 2016. Musikschule Konservatorium Zürich is the largest music school in Switzerland with over 22,000 students. Over 600 qualified music teachers work at MKZ. Seven music schools spread their lessons over almost one hundred school buildings within the city of Zurich.

The Artistic Commission of the Zurich Festival is awarding the prize, made possible by the Bär-Kaelin Fund, for the tenth time. Barbara Frey, member of the commission and director of the Schauspielhaus Zurich, characterizes the singer as a "great, sensitive artist" whose music is characterized by a "highly individual mixture of playfulness, concentrated power, wit and melancholy".

The prize recognizes "Sophie Hunger's outstanding achievements in the Zurich music scene and far beyond". The Zurich native, who now lives in Berlin, took her first steps into the music world from here. The Zurich music club Helsinki, one of the first clubs in Zurich to offer live bands every night, was particularly important.

The award ceremony will take place as part of the twentieth Zurich Festival, which will follow in the footsteps of the Dada myth from June 3 to 26, 2016, one hundred years after the Dada movement was founded. At the event at Schauspielhaus Zurich, Sophie Hunger will give a musical and multimedia retrospective of her musical career.

Nothing is impossible - thanks to the postgraduate courses at the Kalaidos University of Music. On 9 January 2016, from 1 pm to 4 pm, the university will be presenting some of its new courses: Music Journalism, Music - Psyche - Body, Composing for Children, Contemporary Improvisation, Music and Research, Conducting and Organizing, Indian Rhythmics, Music and Management.

All interested parties are cordially invited. Lecturers and the rector of the university, Frank-Thomas Mitschke, will be available to answer questions.

Address: Winterthur Conservatory, Tössertobelstrasse 1

www.kalaidos-music.ch
 

The prize is awarded for one or more outstanding Master's theses submitted to Bern University of the Arts (HKB). From 14 candidates whose Master's theses were awarded a grade above 5.5, a jury of representatives from society and the HKB selected five theses for the first time that were shortlisted as worthy of the award.

Finally, the prize was awarded to Yasmine Sarah Kerber, Master of Arts in Conservation-Restoration, for her outstanding thesis on "Perforated music roll papers as sound information carriers of mechanical musical instruments - conservation and restoration".

The work is characterized by a very careful, exemplary execution in terms of content and form, writes the company. The Master's project combines interdisciplinary aspects of interpretation research with the core area of technological indexing and conservation research on the music rolls and their special papers.

The Ober-Gerwern Society is one of the 13 Bernese guilds and societies. It is a society of the Burgergemeinde Bern that emerged from the Gerberzunft.

"Following the marginalization of music training for primary school teachers", the ÖMR writes in a statement that there is now also a threat of serious deterioration in training for kindergarten teachers. According to the ÖMR, it was decided "in an overnight operation" without the involvement of those affected that one instrument would be removed from instrumental training (previously one melody and one accompanying instrument). This means three fewer hours of musical practice. In addition, a further hour of music education is to be dropped.

In the future aptitude test for prospective specialists, it will no longer be necessary to sing a song. Only motifs will have to be sung. The visual arts section will also be shortened.

The ÖMR and the AGMÖ (Arbeitsgemeinschaft Musikerziehung Österreich) are in favor of expanding or at least maintaining the current number of hours devoted to music and are calling for a discussion with those responsible about the value and role of music and art in kindergarten and after-school education.
 

Lydia Opilik grew up in Schwyz and has a broad musical education: in 2007 she graduated from the Lucerne University of Music with a teaching diploma in violin; she then studied at the Zurich University of the Arts (2009 concert diploma in singing) and at the "Conservatorium van Amsterdam", majoring in opera. She recently began studying cultural studies at the University of Lucerne.

This broad backpack should enable her to better understand and realize herself as an artist, musician and mediator. She also works as a teacher and has a busy concert schedule as a singer and violinist. Together with colleagues, she is the initiator of the Kulturschock project in Central Switzerland, which aims to open up classical music to a new, particularly younger audience.

For Lydia Opilik, New York is a great opportunity to develop musically and to be inspired - especially in the area of music education. The New York Philharmonic's Young Peoples Concert is one of the oldest concert series for young audiences. It wants to look over the shoulders of its creators and also use the existing network to work with the best singing teachers and répétiteurs.

Since the beginning of 2000, the Canton of Zug, together with the Canton of Schwyz, has been running a residential studio for artists in New York, in which the Cantons of Uri, Obwalden and Nidwalden are also involved. The grant, which is financed by the lottery fund, includes free use of the studio and a contribution towards living expenses. In addition to Lydia Opilik, the visual artist Patricia Jacomella Bonola (ZG) and the two visual artists Luca Schenardi and Lina Müller (Uri) are currently benefiting from the four-month studio grant.
 

Actually, everything was meant to be quite different: the Lucerne composer and saxophonist Thomas K.J. Mejer had composed his seventy-minute music theater piece for a large (industrial) hall in 1995/96. Macula Matris was conceived. The audience was to move freely between seven stations, at each of which a musician and a dancer were to perform and a spoken text was to be heard. This was not financially feasible. Now, twenty years after its creation, the work has been performed in concert at various locations in Suisse Romande and German-speaking Switzerland - with a detour to Fribourg in Baden. This report is based on the guest performance in Basel's Gare du Nord on December 5, 2015, in which the originally intended spatial effect had to be almost completely dispensed with. Only the speaking voices can be heard from loudspeakers around the audience; the musicians sit next to each other in front of a video screen on which the dancers can be seen.

The title of the piece Macula Matris (birthmark) here does not mean the physical characteristic, but the imprinting of each person by their mother, which the psychoanalyst C. G. Jung, to whom Mejer explicitly refers, described as the "mother complex". Jung distinguishes between different forms of this complex, and Mejer's selection of literary texts follows this Jungian typology. It is about an adult woman who withers away mentally under the total control of her mother, about a homosexual mama's boy, a womanizer, a nymphomaniac; eroticism and sexuality are thus essential themes of the play. This information about the content comes from a subsequent mail from the composer; in the performance, the texts can only be partially understood, they are often whispered or inaudibly formed with the lips. While they would run side by side in the originally intended hall, so that one could at least follow a single one, here they overlap and become a diffuse linguistic noise. They are not printed in the otherwise full-bodied program booklet, nor are they even referenced. This means that the "play about mind, body and soul, about cause and effect, about expression and analysis" announced in the same booklet is largely incomprehensible to the audience. This does not make sense.

The text, musicians and dancers are each aspects of a single figure that is isolated from the others and trapped within itself. This is expressed in the music and in Angelika Ächter's choreography. The score for flute(s), clarinet, bassoon (also contrabassoon), trombone, harp, cello and percussion gives each instrumentalist a narrow repertoire of sound gestures, which they repeat almost manically. In the vastness of a space in which the soundscape changes for the listener with every step, this music fans out again and again. On the podium of the Gare du Nord, the seven solo parts added up to a largely uniform mash of sound at first hearing, almost without highlights and without contrasts that could have created tension. A wild timpani roll, a loud outburst from the contrabassoon, a striking short dialog between harp and xylophone aroused attention here and there. The assignment of the instruments to the texts and the dancers was also difficult to make out. Even the committed playing of the Basel ensemble Phoenix, rehearsed by Jürg Henneberger, did not help. It would definitely have been worth accepting the changed acoustic situation and rewriting the score on this basis.

The choreography, on the other hand, is a successful new version. Like the musicians, Ächter has the dancers repeat striking body movements. The video artist Stefan Bischoff has made her work the basis of an independent work of art consisting of highly aesthetic images. In soft beige and brown tones, reminiscent of old magazine photos, he makes the dancers appear as if from nowhere, has them act side by side, superimposes their movements and slowly fades them out again. He shows the almost naked bodies as objects of desire in accordance with the texts. One man flexes his powerful back muscles, another strokes his face and upper body in self-indulgence, a woman lets her shapely breasts vibrate and plays with her long hair. The four women and three men are clearly assigned to the four female and three male speakers. Bischoff's film is thus the best part of a very ambitious, but half-heartedly unconvincing project.

Trailer for the production: www.maculamatris.com/trailer.html

"Croisé is, dare I say it, a sensibilist on his instrument: someone who loves emotional savoring, who likes to exude sensitive tones," writes Mario Gerteis. He is a singer on four strings. The Munich Mercury says: "The internationally renowned Swiss cellist Christoph Croisé took the audience on a musical journey. With unique sounds and great dexterity, he seemed to be completely absorbed in his instrument."

Christoph Croisé, born in 1993, made his debut at Carnegie Hall in New York at the age of 17. Further appearances have taken him to the Tonhalle Zurich, the Vienna Konzerthaus, the Residenz in Munich, the Capella in St. Petersburg and the Philharmonie in Baku. On August 27 of this year, he made his debut at the Lucerne Festival. On January 1, 2016, 6.00 pm, he will be at the Theater(uri) in Altdorf accompanied by the Collegium Musicum Basel under the direction of Kevin Griffiths.
 

"On December 10/11, 2015, the Dampfzentrale will become the venue for an extraordinary market. Personalities from the world of contemporary and experimental music from Bern, international stars, students and business managers will spend two evenings cavorting among a curious audience from near and far. All 15 program items on these two days have one thing in common: they leave all conventions associated with the usual concert rituals far behind and offer new approaches to the music of our time. The program has been developed in cooperation with Dampfzentrale, HKB, PAKT - das neue musik netzwerk and WIM and is a continuation of the New Music Summit 2014, which already caused a stir in the scene back then.

Not everything for sale, but everything worth listening to
On Thursday (December 10), for example, a school class will be experimenting with the sounds of money and business people will be exploring John Cage, before musicians of high artistic merit join forces in the evening: Nate Wooley from the USA will be teaming up with five local musicians and the duo Butterland from Biel will be hosting a musical bazaar.

Richard Haynes and the Ensemble Proton will kick things off on Friday (December 11) with a composition for cars by Fluxus artist George Brecht, here in an adaptation for bicycles. Berlin border crosser Stefan Roszak will be auctioning off bizarre self-made string instruments together with HKB students. The program also includes a flash mob and Louis Andriessen's "Workers Union", played by musicians from so-called third countries.

Johannes Kreidler, who is famous for his visually powerful, sometimes disturbing action and media art, will also provide food for thought. The crowning finale will be provided by Zimoun as Associated Artist Musik der Dampfzentrale, before DJ Peter Kraut brings the evening to a close.

Regula Stibi, Head of Continuing Education at the BUA, summed up the astonishing development of the postgraduate Masters: "Ten years ago, the term MAS meant as much as a Spanish vacation village." Today, CAS and MAS are common terms and have become almost indispensable for professional advancement.

On November 27, Felix Bamert, head of the degree program, together with senior assistant Christian Schütz, was delighted to welcome a large audience to an anniversary symposium with interesting input presentations and fourteen parallel workshops on a wide range of topics, most of which were led by former students.

Accordionist Bamert has been a lecturer in pedagogy and didactics at the HKB since 2001. In 2003 he became head of the Master of Arts in Music Pedagogy course and from 2004 he was responsible for the conception, development and management of the Master of Advanced Studies in Music Management. Bamert is also a board member of the Swiss Association of Music Schools (VMS).

Practical offer
In his welcoming address, Thomas Beck, Director of HKB, spoke of an "icy wind" on the continuing education market. It is remarkable, he said, that a degree course can survive for so long. For Beck, there are several good reasons for this milestone success: the MAS Music Management is more than just an economic product, it is a well-structured program that is geared towards everyday working life. The high-caliber lecturers and, above all, the cooperation with the Swiss Association of Music Schools are also decisive for the continued attractiveness of the course. The four-semester MAS comprises the four Certificates of Advanced Studies (CAS) Self-Management, Leadership, Concept and Project Design and Internships. The courses have been attended by a total of 151 students over the past ten years. A total of 38 Master's degrees were awarded on the basis of submitted theses and examinations. Three of the four CASs lead to the VMS School Leader Diploma. To date, the BUA has produced 103 trained music school directors.

The institutes of the Lucerne School of Music (Jazz, Classical Music, New Music and Music Education), which are currently spread across four locations in the city of Lucerne, will be united under one roof in future. From 2019, the new building will house all teaching and practice rooms, the library, public concert halls as well as the workplaces of the directorate, administration and research. Construction is expected to begin in fall 2016.

The realization will cost around 70 million francs. It is being financed on the basis of a private investor model - with the Lucerne Pension Fund as the investor and the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts as the user. The new building will not only promote the use of synergies within the university, it will also enable collaboration with partners such as the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra, the city's music school, Lucerne Theater, the Lucerne Festival and the Südpol cultural workshop to be intensified thanks to the close proximity in Lucerne South.

The Orchestre de Chambre de Genève (L'OCG) was founded in 1992. The Dutch conductor Arie van Beek has been its artistic and musical director since September 2013. Following its transformation into a foundation under private law in 2008, several years were devoted to artistic and administrative consolidation. The orchestra's admission to orchester.ch is now a further step towards institutionalization.

Orchester.ch represents the interests of its members "with regard to the fulfillment of their diverse tasks as musical institutions as well as their activities as orchestra promoters and concert organizers". It is committed to "the preservation of professional orchestras as we know them today and their development to ensure a high-quality orchestral culture in Switzerland".

Tania Rinaldi Barkat, Assistant Professor of Neurophysiology at the Department of Biomedicine at the University of Basel since 2015, has received compensation from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) for an ERC Starting Grant. The grant was approved as part of a sub-programme of the European Program for Research & Innovation (Horizon 2020) in 2014, but could not be transferred when Rinaldi Barkat moved from the University of Copenhagen to Basel, as Switzerland had the status of a third country at the relevant time.

In the interests of Switzerland as a center of research, the SNSF is now stepping in and will pay the approximately 1.5 million euros that were originally promised to the researcher by the ERC.

In her research project, the neurophysiologist wants to investigate how the brain goes about understanding different types of sounds. The focus is on the development of the auditory cortex, an area of the brain that is used to process acoustic stimuli. In particular, the aim of the project is to better understand which functions the individual neuronal circuits perform.