According to a press release, Sonart (Music Professionals Switzerland) is launching a social and professional policy campaign with this position paper: the 7-point program is intended to serve as a guideline and covers various areas of professional and social conditions. Among other things, it deals with social security and career paths: Sonart is calling for better protection for self-employed people in the event of loss of earnings and an improvement in the conditions for starting a career.

Further demands concern the continuation of Covid-19 measures as well as regional and national cultural policy. Sonart is committed to strengthening cultural policy and opposes the reduction of cultural budgets at all levels.

The integration of the Smeca association into Sonart was also decided at the Sonart general meeting. Smeca is the association of film and media composers and has around one hundred members.

Link to the position paper:
https://www.sonart.swiss/files/Verband/Mitgliederversammlung/MV%202022/SONART-Positionspapier_Leben%20von%20der%20Musik%20nach%20der%20Pandemie_MV%202022_final.pdf

At his retirement home above Lake Constance, Hans Zender looks back on his life and gives an insight into his thinking: an educated and versatile artist who, as a conductor and composer, stimulated German musical life for half a century. His work coincided with the golden age of ARD radio, when contemporary music was given broad scope and corresponding production capacities. Zender made particular use of this during his thirteen years as chief conductor of the Saarbrücken Radio Symphony Orchestra (1971-1984). He did this not so much for his own benefit as for that of fellow composers such as Helmut Lachenmann, who speaks at length in this film portrait and attests to Zender's superior art of orchestration among many other things. Zender's creative and post-creative activities stimulated each other. In Gustav Mahler's scores, for example, he knew how to make audible a modernity of sound that is usually drowned out by philharmonic opulence. Although composing was always central to Zender's self-image, for a long time it stood in the shadow of his activities as a conductor. Perhaps not coincidentally, it was only with his arrangement of a classic, Schubert's Winter journeya global success.

The film by Reiner E. Moritz illustrates Zender's work with many concert and rehearsal excerpts, which show a musician who is still a lively and inspiring performer, even at an advanced age. The central theme is formed by Zender's statements from an interview conducted over several days by Max Nyffeler in 2018 with the retiree, who was visibly in poor health. The film has thus become a swan song, not only to a historically unique phase of musical culture, but also to Hans Zender himself, who died on October 23, 2019.

Hans Zender - Thinking with your senses. A film by Reiner E. Moritz. Incl. Debussy's "La Mer", Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Saarbrücken, conducted by Hans Zender, 1975. Arthaus Music DVD, EAN 4058407094388

Antoine Gilliéron - Students as authors of their courses. This is the subject around which the pedagogical day will be organized, which will take place on Friday, October 21, 2022 in Lausanne. To question this idea, about twenty guests from each of the eight higher music schools that make up the landscape of higher education in Swiss music will be present.

Starting from the fundamental humanist postulate stipulating that human beings are the author of their own destiny, music study courses would benefit from being even more centered on the learner, with the aim that the latter can become ever more active. source of his training.

In this way, an accentuated individualization of the curricula makes it possible to reinforce the profound logic of tertiary musical studies, which ultimately aim to ensure that musicians invest society through their artistry and their sensitivity to the value of society.

One of the challenges of the day will be to find a balance between this new vision of education, with its organizational implications, and the traditional forms of curricular structuring.

Beyond the duration of studies, this new way of conceiving the courses in a more flexible manner, while complying with the curricular obligations of the Bachelor-Master system introduced by the reform of the Bologne, has a very positive impact on employment.

It is true that in the context of the major social transformations underway, particularly in the digital age, a majority of the jobs of the future are not yet known and a transversal diffusion of skills to be acquired (instead of creativity, adaptation or social intelligence) to both transform society and respond to its needs seems necessary.

The desired impact is to enhance the employability of students by helping them to complete their studies and giving them the desire and ability to enter the world of the future.

In addition, this conference will explore the links between the Swiss music schools and the people who live in them, by exploring the questions and potential synergies that such reforms could have at all institutional levels.

There is no doubt that the quality of the speakers and participants in this day of exchange and reflection will create the conditions for a positive impact on the future of music students in our country.

Creative artists can submit applications on the website aarau.ch under "Cultural funding". Information on the submission criteria can be found on the city's website. In addition to a project description, creative artists must also submit a budget and a financing plan.

Applications for funding can only be submitted using the online form. The next submission deadlines are October 1, 2022, January 31, 2023 and May 31, 2023.

Even if Camille Saint-Saëns did not want his Carnaval des Animaux wanted to avoid during his lifetime: Today, the "Grande Fantaisie Zoologique" is undoubtedly one of his most frequently performed works and has gained a firm place in family and children's concerts in particular. To mark the 100th anniversary of the composer's death, the South Korean-born concert organist Shin-Young Lee, who works in France, presents a transcription for solo organ that offers a new perspective on the composer's work. Carnaval allowed. The cycle is commercially available in at least two other complete organ arrangements, in addition to numerous arrangements of the Swansincluding the historical transcription by Félix Alexandre Guilmant.

Lee's arrangement (which she also interprets in an atmospheric Youtube recording) is relatively close to Jean Guillou's transcription aesthetic, and is thus oriented towards a highly virtuosic approach (pedal trills, double pedal in movements such as the Aquarium or the Aviary) to confident players. The arranger also assumes (unfortunately without giving any alternatives) a modern instrument with a manual range of 61 keys and a pedal that reaches up to g' (e.g. for the Swan), and the proposed, colorful registrations also suggest a lavishly arranged organ. Without going into the difficult question of the setting in which such arrangements can find their place: With the appropriate playing technique and on a suitable instrument, the Carnaval will not miss its effect in this version!

Camille Saint-Saëns: Le Carnaval des Animaux, organ arrangement by Shin-Young Lee, ED 23492, € 16.00, Schott, Mainz

She calls it Handbook of conservatoriesThe book is edited by Freia Hoffmann, director of the Sophie Drinker Institute in Bremen, who, together with her team, has thankfully compiled the first comprehensive information on the beginning of professional music education in German-speaking countries. Based on 16 selected institutes, the team paints an exciting picture of the early history of conservatories. The result is a three-volume panopticon in which one can both read with interest and find specific information, justifying the term "handbook".

It was certainly not easy to find a common denominator for the presentation of the various developments of these educational institutes. The first task was to collect all available sources: correspondence and inventories from archives, newspaper articles, biographies of the teaching staff and brochures. Printed sources at the end of the third volume, such as various articles, provide an insight About musical conservatories in the New Journal for Music from 1841, parts of the 46-page brochure by Franz Joseph Kunkel The condemnation of conservatories as nurseries for the musical proletariat ... or Luise Adolpha Le Beau's article On the musical education of young women from 1878.

Despite major differences, it has been possible to achieve methodological consistency in the presentation of the individual conservatories. The articles cover aspects of the history, financing and content of the studies, including subsidiary subjects and concert activities in the rooms available at the time. Most institutions had to finance themselves through tuition fees, but also received grants from princes or kings, such as the Stern Conservatory in Berlin.

The statistics on students by gender and by nation are also interesting. There are Swiss students at all conservatories and in all years of study, which clearly demonstrates the lack of Swiss educational institutions at the time. The Leipzig Conservatory, which is so closely associated with Felix Mendelssohn's work and which had an astonishing 46 Swiss students by 1868, was particularly well-known and sought-after.

For the first time, the plight of women in the 19th century, who were not even admitted to university, is also given a scientific face. For Vienna, for example, it is stated that regulations were issued "which significantly restricted access to instrumental departments for women". Exceptions were of course made for female singers, who could not be replaced. Gathering information on the teachers - there were hardly any female teachers - was certainly a Herculean task, but it provides further insights into the nature of the teaching staff.

The only pity is that there is no index of persons, which would have made it possible to cross-reference the institutions and clearly show which well-known names were already involved in educational tasks at the time. On the other hand, it forces the reader to read all three volumes intensively, which is also of great benefit.

Handbook of conservatories: Institutionelle Musikausbildung im deutschsprachigen Raum des 19. Jahrhunderts, ed. by Freia Hoffmann, 3 vol. with a total of 871 p., € 198.00, Laaber, Lilienthal 2021, ISBN 978-3-89007-911-0

"There really are sounds from another world, I have never heard anything like it," wrote fellow composer Fritz Brun about the new work. That was in 1923 - a time when there was a lot going on in terms of modernity, both in Paris and Vienna. The work also seemed bold to the people of Zurich, but Brun did not say "new", but "other world", which was a pretty good description of the situation. Othmar Schoeck was on a threshold. Already with the Venus he had struck a different note, shortly after which he will Penthesilea among the most modern for a short time - and let himself go a little. For he is more peculiar and more personal here, in the intervening Elegya cycle of 24 orchestral songs after Eichendorff and Lenau.

Boldness: The word may come as a surprise in this largely calm and melancholy music, which is hardly hyperchromatic, neither neoclassically brash nor expressionistically exaggerated, but which nevertheless pushes the boundaries. It certainly still belongs to the tonal late Romantic period, yes, but it is not overloaded as in Mahler, Strauss or the teacher Reger, but purified, grandiosely condensed and thus ready for the modern age. The melodies circle within themselves - a sign of melancholy. There is constant talk of farewell. The boldness lies in the deeply sad but light-filled mood and in the highly original musical language, which is particularly evident in the orchestral version. A great deal is achieved here with very little. A phenomenal masterpiece.

The name of one poet, Lenau, will remind some people of Heinz Holliger's latest opera Lunea and he is indeed at the conductor's desk here, leading the Basel Chamber Orchestra and the equally phenomenal Christian Gerhaher in this new recording. The music is played very lovingly and attentively. And the sound is incredibly differentiated. The amazing thing: Schoeck's setting demands a certain, very typical style from the singers. Light, mostly unobtrusive, at times almost spoken, no heavy pathos, but extremely expressive and breaking out in a few places. Gerhaher, who also sang Lenau in Lunea sang, is exactly right.

Othmar Schoeck: Elegy op. 36 for voice and chamber orchestra. Christian Gerhaher, baritone; Basel Chamber Orchestra; conducted by Heinz Holliger. Sony Classical 19439963302

The festival is organized by the Berner Seefestspiele association under the artistic direction of Olivier Darbellay. It takes place in Bern's Obstberg-Ostring-Zentrum Paul Klee district around Lake Egelsee and brings music from classical to jazz to world music in chamber music formations to everyday and unusual places. According to a press release, the Bern Lake Festival aims to be low-threshold and sustainable by bringing the music directly to the audience. Instead of musicians who have traveled far and wide, internationally renowned musicians and young talents who live in Bern and the surrounding area will perform. The venues can be reached by public transport, bike or on foot and are "set up, played and dismantled like ephemeral pop-ups."

As part of the "MAB Campus 2040" renovation and extension project, the Basel Music Academy carried out a selective study contract. The assessment committee, chaired by Pierre de Meuron, selected four teams from 37 applications in an open pre-qualification process. In the end, the assessment committee unanimously recommended Architecture Club's project proposal for further development, both for the structural extension and for the renovation of the existing buildings.

On the one hand, the project includes the urgently needed renovation work on the historically valuable building ensemble. On the other hand, it involves meeting the urgent need for space with regard to today's functional and technical requirements. According to the press release, the addition of a Salle Modulable is essential for today's educational purposes. Only such a Salle Modulable would be able to do justice to the stylistic diversity in current and future musical life, with the increasing inclusion of multimedia and digital technologies and the many interdisciplinary artistic approaches.

More info:
https://www.musik-akademie.ch/de/news/detail/campus-2040-die-musik-akademie-der-zukunft.html

Mirjam Skal was born in 1996 and grew up in Wetzikon. In 2021, she graduated from the "Composition for Film, Theater and Media" course at Zurich University of the Arts. In addition to her studies, she works as a freelance composer for film and media. Mirjam Skal composes soundtracks for animated films, documentaries and music for SRF. Through the Alliance for Women Film Composers, Mirjam Skal received a mentorship with Hollywood composer and Oscar winner Mychael Danna. 2021 she was invited to the Berlinale Talents.

Cédric Joël Ziegler, born in 1996, is a composer, producer, multi-instrumentalist and singer. During his studies in composition and film music at the ZHdK, which he completed in 2019, he worked with various ensembles and gained practical experience in different areas from classical to contemporary composition, from jazz to sound design. As a singer and songwriter, Cédric Ziegler aljas JODOQ moves between electropop and neoclassical music.

The Zollikon Art Prize from the Dr. K. & H. Hintermeister-Gyger Foundation will be awarded in the composition category on a rotational basis in 2022. The prizes are endowed with 5000 francs each. The prize will be awarded for the last time this year. The legacy will be exhausted after the two sponsorship prizes have been awarded.

In 2021, the Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, the Civil Service and Sport (BMKÖS) launched the process of drawing up a federal arts and culture strategy and is now concluding the first phase of the survey and participation of artists, interest groups and civil society. The next steps for the arts and culture strategy will be announced at a dialog forum in early autumn 2022.

In an internal process with the active participation of many music organizations from education, art and business, positions and demands were developed on the following topics: Culture as a national objective, cultural diversity, funding/awards & competitions, amateur music & semi-professional ensembles, social situation of musicians & fair pay, inclusion, music education (schools/music schools), music universities, music education, music industry/securing the location, professionalization, copyright law/copyright contract law, broadcasting, international networking, music exports, development policy.

The photo shows the coordinator of the arts and culture strategy Lorenz Birklbauer (BMKÖS) as well as ÖMR Secretary General Günther Wildner and ÖMR President Harald Huber at the handover of the position paper in Wiener Neustadt.

Position paper of the ÖMR:
https://oemr.at/wp-content/uploads/O%CC%88MR_Kunst-und-Kulturstrategie_Positionspapier_2022.pdf

As a baritone, Christian Hilz is present in the music centers of Europe and America. He specializes in the late baroque, romantic and lied repertoire of the 19th and 20th centuries.

He studied singing and music theater at the Folkwang University in Essen. Further studies in theater and music management at the LMU Munich, further training and artistic consulting work for various festivals broadened his view of musical life.

He is familiar with the Swiss music academy landscape: as a professor of singing and chamber music, he has taught at Bern University of the Arts and the Swiss Opera Studio since 2009. He has also been artistic director of the Austria Baroque Academy since 2015.

Haas succeeds Detlef Heusinger. Haas has been working for the Experimentalstudio since 2001 and has since been regularly involved in the creation and performance of live electronic scores by important contemporary composers.

Joachim Haas would like to set new accents, among other things, by appointing changing Associated Artists, whose involvement should further open up the artistic perspectives of the SWR Experimentalstudio and make them more diverse. Patricia Kopatchinskaja will take on this role for the next two years (2022/2023 and 2023/2024 seasons).

Joachim Haas was born in Stuttgart in 1968. He trained in flute and saxophone and studied electroacoustics, communications and telecommunications engineering at the Technical University in Berlin. After completing his studies, he conducted research at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona as part of an EU scholarship, focusing on sound analysis and synthesis. Joachim Haas was co-founder of FREQ-Laboratories and developed audio and music software for Native Instruments.

Since 2001 he has been working as a sound director and music computer scientist at the SWR Experimentalstudio in Freiburg. He has been significantly involved in the creation and realization of live electronics - in works by Karlheinz Stockhausen, Chaya Czernowin, Mark Andre, José Maria Sánchez-Verdú, Vinko Globokar, Elena Mendoza, among others. He has been deputy artistic director of the SWR Experimentalstudio since 2007.

Haas succeeds Detlef Heusinger. Haas has been working for the Experimentalstudio since 2001 and has since been regularly involved in the creation and performance of live electronic scores by important contemporary composers.

Joachim Haas would like to set new accents, among other things, by appointing changing Associated Artists, whose involvement should further open up the artistic perspectives of the SWR Experimentalstudio and make them more diverse. Patricia Kopatchinskaja will take on this role for the next two years (2022/2023 and 2023/2024 seasons).

Joachim Haas was born in Stuttgart in 1968. He trained in flute and saxophone and studied electroacoustics, communications and telecommunications engineering at the Technical University in Berlin. After completing his studies, he conducted research at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona as part of an EU scholarship, focusing on sound analysis and synthesis. Joachim Haas was co-founder of FREQ-Laboratories and developed audio and music software for Native Instruments.

Since 2001 he has been working as a sound director and music computer scientist at the SWR Experimentalstudio in Freiburg. He has been significantly involved in the creation and realization of live electronics - in works by Karlheinz Stockhausen, Chaya Czernowin, Mark Andre, José Maria Sánchez-Verdú, Vinko Globokar, Elena Mendoza, among others. He has been deputy artistic director of the SWR Experimentalstudio since 2007.

A newly discovered trio by Mendelssohn? Or a quintet by the forgotten Heinrich von Herzogenberg? Anyone who didn't have a program booklet to hand and didn't know the context of the performance might wonder which 19th century composer the two unknown but artistically attractive string pieces could have come from. Composer? No answer. The two works were written by a woman, the Englishwoman Ethel Smyth.

Her String Quintet op. 1 from 1883, like Schubert's famous C major Quintet, uses two cellos instead of the usual two violas. Anna Mikolášek, Nevena Tochev (violins), Meredith Kuliew (viola), Elodie Théry and Lidewij Faber (cellos) used all their interpretative ambition and illuminated the composition from its best side. All five movements of the quintet captivate with a successful combination of comprehensibility and craftsmanship; occasionally a certain redundancy in the melody can be detected.

Ethel Smyth, who studied in Leipzig against her parents' wishes and who became known not only as a composer but also as a women's rights activist, perfectly embodies the message of the newly founded FemaleClassics music festival: In a music genre in which 98 percent of compositions are performed by men, the aim is to draw the public's attention to the neglected music of women. Three chamber concerts in the Kunstraum Walcheturm and the Photobastei in Zurich realized this aim in an inviting way.

Meredith Kuliew is the initiator and artistic director of the festival. After studying viola in Zurich and Lucerne, she now performs in various formations. She is assisted by musicologist Eva Ruckstuhl as co-director. She works in the areas of concert organization and communication, until recently at the Tonhalle Society Zurich. In their professional lives to date, both directors have found that female composers play a negligible role in the programs of most event organizers.

"I had no desire to spend my life playing Brahms' two viola sonatas. With just a few clicks on the internet, I was astonished to find many exciting works by female composers in one go," explains Kuliew, and Ruckstuhl adds: "People always talk about dusting off the classical music scene, but the repertoire always remains the same. Nowadays, feminist programming could also be used as a sales argument." In addition to making female composers visible, the two are also concerned with raising public awareness and, beyond the festival, sending a signal to music institutions.

In addition to the Smyth evening, there was a concert with the juxtaposition of a piano trio by Fanny Hensel and a piano quintet by the African-American composer Florence Beatrice Price. And a contemporary program also combined a well-known composer with an unknown one. In 1988, the now 91-year-old Sofia Gubaidulina wrote a string trio that makes some demands on the audience with its tonal variability and intricate formal progressions. The violinist Nevena Tochev, the violist Meredith Kuliew and the cellist Elodie Théry, who together form the TriOlogie String Trio, were not afraid to show the disturbing sides of the work.

This contemporary program was given a special touch by the world premiere of the string trio Closer to the body by the 30-year-old composer Asia Ahmetjanova. The Latvian lives in Lucerne and studied composition with Dieter Ammann, among others. The "joke" of the piece is that the performers play without bows. The bow hairs are attached to the players' elbows and wrists, turning their arms into bows, so to speak. This results in sounds of a very ethereal, ungrounded character that are not always exactly predictable. The inability to achieve a "perfect" interpretation is precisely the basic idea of the piece, explained the composer in conversation with musicologist Viviane Nora Brodmann, who had previously given an introduction to the evening.

The FemaleClassics festival is to take place again in the future, but the date is still open. For the second edition, it is hoped that it will be less string-heavy, that the concert introductions will be a little more rhetorically refined and that more publicity will attract a larger audience. The interpretative quality of the players and the expressiveness of the programs definitely deserve it. And making female composers visible and audible has only just begun.