Did you know that more people sing in a choir in the Scandinavian countries than in any other country in the world? From Scandinavia to the Baltic States, choral singing is a real folk movement. Choral compositions from Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland have long since ceased to be an insider tip for German choirs. How did this unique Scandinavian choral tradition come about? Professional musical life in the 17th and 18th centuries was centered around the courts in Stockholm and Copenhagen. For centuries, the Scandinavian countries were "import nations" when it came to music. They were heavily influenced by the German musical tradition in the 18th and 19th centuries.

At the beginning of the 19th century, the ideas of Romanticism found their way to the north via Copenhagen. German musicians were instrumental in collecting and arranging Scandinavian folk music. The first editions of Swedish, Danish and Norwegian folk tunes appeared around 1814. Their minor-key characteristics were ideally suited to the search for the mystical, for closeness to nature, to which the German Romantics had dedicated themselves.

As the male choir movement flourished, the German choral repertoire became known in Scandinavia. At the same time, the Scandinavian singing festivals established a Nordic choral tradition. In the second half of the 19th century, the need for political and cultural independence led to greater autonomy.

Under the title I Himmelen (In the Kingdom of Heaven), Edition Peters has published three extensive volumes with sacred compositions, songs for Advent and Christmas as well as secular and folk song movements, for mixed choir, for 1-2 high voices and for 3-4 high voices. The names of the best-known Scandinavian composers such as Grieg, Alfvén and Sibelius also appear. In addition to the original language, German texts are also included. Most of the movements are sung a cappella; obligatory accompaniments for all three editions are summarized in a booklet.

I Himmelen, 70 Scandinavian choral pieces for mixed choir, edited by Hans Wülfing, EP 11410, € 24.95, Edition Peters, Leipzig et al. 2014

id., 10 Scandinavian choral pieces for 1-2 high voices, EP 11414, € 12.95

id., 20 Scandinavian choral pieces for 3-4 high voices, EP 11412, € 14.95

Piano and organ accompaniments to: I Himmelen, EP 11410a, € 14.95

This wonderful booklet with works by the clown Grock (Charles Adrien Wettach), newly arranged for accordion solo and duo by Andreas Hermeyer and Thomas Svechla, also contains an exciting short biography of the famous artist, written by his great-nephew Raymond Naef. This part of the booklet is embellished with impressive photos and posters, which further emphasize the convincing vividness.
The text section also consists of an interesting essay by Thomas Eickhoff on Grock's relationship to the accordion and his work as a composer.

The "practical" part contains 14 inspiring and tonally very appealing compositions by Grock. Seven of these pieces have been supplemented with a 2nd voice and can therefore be enjoyed in duo formation, the second voice is inserted. The arrangements are harmonically very interesting and leave plenty of room for personal interpretation (no dynamic or articulation indications). I consider this booklet to be very successful (I am happy to overlook the one or other printing error) and recommend it to all those who like to immerse themselves in these dreamy, lively to exuberant melodies and are not afraid of technical challenges, especially for the left hand (standard bass).

Grock, Accordion works by the famous clown, edited by Thomas Eickhoff, MH 15122, € 18.99, Matthias-Hohner-Verlag (Schott), Mainz 2014

The genre of spirituals and gospels is influenced by various modern styles such as jazz, blues, pop and rock. Bernd Frank has published a compilation of gospels and spirituals for Schott-Verlag which are suitable for singing lessons with beginners and amateur singers, but also for working with school or church musicians who are perhaps preparing for an entrance examination and want to look beyond the classical repertoire.

I would rate the level of difficulty of this edition as easy to medium. However, the songs are also suitable for performance situations, e.g. as a solo addition to a gospel choir program, in music school performance exercises or as an enrichment of the traditional church music repertoire.

During the development process, the collection was supplemented with ideas in a workshop by school music students from the Mainz University of Music and examined for its practical suitability.

The edition offers a variety of performance options thanks to interesting piano accompaniments: improvisational "fill-ins" can be incorporated into both the piano and vocal parts. Many songs lend themselves to being sung as a duo or as a "call & response" in two voices.

Several verses can be freely improvised over the underlying "changes". Specific vocal techniques of gospel music, such as looping the notes, require stylistic variety and flexibility. Gospel songs are rhythmic songs that also allow beginners to immediately develop and train their sense of "groove".

The collection is published in two editions, for high voice and for medium or low voice, the latter being really low and the higher not really high. The volumes contain 33 songs each, and the title list includes well-known songs such as Amazing grace, Sometimes I feel like a motherless child also less common things like Calvary or Chilly water.

Spirituals & Gospels im Unterricht, 33 Songs for voice and piano, edited by Bernd Frank; edition for high voice, ED 21712; edition for medium or low voice, ED 21713; € 19.50 each, Schott, Mainz

Duo playing by pupils and teachers is an essential element in music lessons. The interaction in playing music together helps to recognize and solve elementary intonation and technical problems more easily. The following collections are stylistically very different. They can be used from around the second year of lessons.

Elmar Preusser has his Duo treasure chest in a more traditional manner. The original compositions and arrangements impress with their broad stylistic spectrum from the Renaissance to modern times and their consistently systematic technical structure from the 1st to the 4th position.

Pop hits for cello contains evergreens from the movie and hits from pop music. In addition to the 2nd cello part, a CD with funky accompaniments is included in a complete version and a play-along version. The technical level of booklet 1 is still exclusively in the 1st position with a tight fingering. It makes sense that most of the song texts are printed in the score.

With the Groovestrich School the Californian cellist Susanne Paul offers an original introduction to the world of Latin American music. 15 short duo pieces demonstrate the "groove stroke", a type of stroke used in samba, bossa nova, salsa, jazz, rock or bluegrass. The pieces are rather easy for the left hand to master. However, the special bowing technique requires an advanced level of left and right hand coordination in order to bring out the rhythmic finesse. All 15 pieces can be listened to in a sound cloud on the website www.groovecello.de. This collection is also highly recommended for teachers!

Duo treasure chest, edited by Elmar Preusser, ED 21386, € 14.00, Schott, Mainz

Pop For Cello 1, edited by Michael Zlanabitnig, ED 21134, with CD, € 18.50, Schott, Mainz

Susanne Paul, Die Groovestrich-Schule, PON 1012, € 19.95, Ponticello-Edition, Mainz

It's funny about the soundtrack. People who are asked about the music directly after seeing a movie usually don't know what they've heard. On the other hand, and now imagine for a moment Play me the song of death some sounds immediately bring images to mind that you have seen years, sometimes decades before. The profound ambivalence of film music is also evident in other areas: Sounds should neither be too cheap or kitschy to accompany images, nor too independent. Thomas Meyer reports in the almost 400-page book of Anthology of Swiss film music 1923-2012 of Arthur Honegger's music for the films Rapt (1934), The demon of the Himalayas (1935) and Farinet (1938). Meyer's conclusion is sobering for the music lover: "Perhaps Honegger's music was simply too original for Swiss film. Originality is a difficult quality. It leads to an aesthetic problem that is always noticeable in these three films: the music is above the picture - and not in the picture. It carries the viewer's attention away, creates distance, opens up the view to an intelligent contemplation, it makes the viewer shudder, but it does not invite him to identify with the characters and it does not allow him to enter into their feelings." (S. 89)

Honegger's unsuccessful dips into the bag of tricks of the high art of composition were certainly not the only contributions to Swiss film music. On three CDs and a DVD, the anthology, which was made possible by the Fondation Suisa, documents a rich selection of diverse directions. There are Honegger's fellow composers, for example Bruno Spoerri, who is featured six times on the DVD. To La Maggiaan experimental film made in 1970 by Kurt Aeschbacher, which shows various shots of water, Spoerri contributed electronic music that acoustically doubles dripping noises, but also reflects energetic states of water such as flowing or stagnation. Mathias Spohr, editor of the comprehensive anthology, emphasizes the diversity, the "polyphonic choir" of Swiss film music. The breadth and particular development is indeed remarkable, ranging from the instrumental music of the early 1920s to the first electric sound generators (Ondes Martenot, Trautonium) and modern sound designs. The cultural and historical background, which Bruno Spoerri describes vividly and impressively, proves to be particularly fruitful. This includes the advent of the sound film, which made many Swiss musicians unemployed. And it also includes insights into Zurich cinema in the 1920s and 1930s. Some of the commercials for Orange or Migros are somewhat questionable, with neither convincing content nor music. But well, these are minor details. The anthology, which has been thoroughly edited, is of great value not only to the rare species of film music researchers.

Mathias Spohr, Anthology of Swiss Film Music 1923-2012, box with three audio CDs, a DVD and a book (396 p.), edited by Mathias Spohr, in German, French, Italian and English, hardcover, Fr. 69.00, Chronos Verlag, Zurich 2015, ISBN 978-3-0340-1265-2

The Sonata in D minor op. 40 by Dmitri Shostakovich and the 1st Sonata (1978) by Alfred Schnittke are separated by little more than four decades. However, the aesthetic positions and formal differences could not be greater. While Shostakovich's sonata reflects a high degree of classicism, Schnittke's experimental contribution to the genre testifies to a far greater freedom based on cultural policy. There are no surprises with Shostakovich, but all the more so with Schnittke. The Presto, framed by the refined, baroque-like Largo outer movements, presents itself as a demonic scherzo with a perpetuum-mobile character of stirring expressiveness.

Even in the intervening Sonata op. 119 by Sergei Prokofiev, written in 1949, the cellist Mattia Zappa's enchantingly beautiful cantabile is striking. On closer listening, however, it becomes apparent that he takes the phrasing to the extreme by stringing one slur after the other and thus developing an almost endless, unstructured melodic line. The pianist Massimiliano Mainolfi, who is equally challenged as a soloist, displays more profile and rhythmic acuity. In Schnittke's Presto, he achieves the feat of playing ffff e martellatissimo without creating metallic harshness.

These three works form a triad that has been cemented in many recordings. They stand out from an iceberg of playable sonatas for cello and piano from the Soviet era, such as those by Alexander and Boris Tchaikovsky, Alexandrov, Bogdanov-Beresovsky, Brumberg, Eiges, Feldman, Finkelstein, Goedike, Golubev, Yevseyev, Kirkor, Kossenko, Kochurov, Myaskovsky, Nikolayev, Roslavets, Sharonov ... The majority of these sonatas were dedicated to either Mstislav Rostropovich or Daniel Schafran and are waiting to be rediscovered.

Max E. Keller's works for tape are of course political music, radical music at that. Clearly insistent speaking voices in Sicher sein refer to Swiss banks that were already maximizing their profits in the mid-1970s while unemployment was rapidly increasing. The hymns, written in 1979, include an authentic account of a Chilean who was tortured. The cruelty is countered by phrases that could have come from a tourist brochure, while the self-confident anthems of various countries play in the background. The Marsellaise comes to the fore, equality and brotherhood - at the same time there is talk of electric shocks, kicks, pools of blood and people bleeding to death.

Such a direct reflection of the world is and always has been an aesthetic problem. What is the point of contemplating durations, pitch organization or compositional quality when torture, death and oppression are deliberately reported in a realistic manner? These are certainly questions that Arnold Schönberg's A survivor from Warsaw concern. With these four audio pieces, the question arises again. Unfortunately, there is also the realization that many things have hardly improved since the 70s, from which all the works originate - with the difference that only a few still criticize it the way Keller did 40 years ago.

Max E. Keller: Four political compositions for tape, Tochnit Aleph TA 134

The aim of the project, which is being carried out for the sixth time, is cultural exchange in the language that the whole world understands - music. In view of the many conflicts, this year's tour aims to set an example for peace. The concert will therefore feature a performance of the work The Armed Man - A Mass For Peace for choir and orchestra by Karl Jenkins. The program is complemented by music from all over the world. The musical director is the Dresden conductor Max Röber.

According to the organizers, the young musical talents come from the poorest quarters of the world. At the end of September, around 30 young adults from Jesuit social and educational projects from four continents came together in Nuremberg, where they prepared for the European tour. From Switzerland, a virtuoso violinist from Gossau and a young singer from the cantonal school in Sursee took part.

The Nations Orchestra will be making a short stop in Switzerland on its tour from October 16 to 24. The concert on October 21 at 7.30 pm in the Stadtkirche St. Georg in Sursee will also be attended by the President of the Swiss Confederation, Simonetta Sommaruga. The concert will be repeated on October 22 at 7 pm in the Herz Jesu Wiedikon parish. A CD will be available from December.

Further information:

www.jesuiten-weltweit.ch/weltweite-klaenge-2015 html

Konrad Wolf was a political filmmaker, according to the citation. For him, it was not only important what films showed, but also what they achieved. For this reason, the prize "in its intellectual dimension should go to a film artist who never allowed his autobiographical stubbornness and political independence to be driven out of him".

The prize money will go to the opera village in Burkina Faso, specifically "to support the project there to help young people to adopt the cinematic as a means of expression". The prize was accepted by Aino Laberenz, Managing Director of Operndorf Afrika.

The Operndorf Afrika project was launched by Schlingensief in Burkina Faso at the beginning of 2010 as a place for international encounters. The government of Burkina Faso has made 20 hectares of land near the capital Ouagadougou available for this purpose. The village, designed by Burkinabe architect Francis Kéréhat, borders on a sculpture park that has been in existence for over 25 years.

Maki Wiederkehr deserves the prize as special recognition of her outstanding achievements on the piano, writes the foundation. It should help the young artist to further refine her highly developed playing and realize new plans.

Maki Wiederkehr studied with Hiroko Matsumoto in Nagoya (Japan), then in Switzerland with Taeko Szedlak at the Musikschule Konservatorium Bern, at the Kantonsschule Solothurn with Adalbert Roetschi and at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK).

She completed her studies in the soloist class at the ZHdK (from 2003) in winter 2008/2009 with a concert and teaching diploma under Homero Francesch. From 2010 to 2014 she taught piano at the Basel Music Academy. She now works at the Musikschule Konservatorium Zürich. She is also the pianist of the piano trio Rafale, which has won several international awards.

Every two years since 2003, the Kurt and Barbara Alten Swiss Cultural Foundation has awarded sponsorship and recognition prizes to artists with a close connection to the canton of Solothurn.

"Since its foundation, the Donaueschingen Music Days have been dominated by male composers, the proportion of women is negligible," the German Press Agency quotes Gottstein, who took over from the late Armin Köhler. There are now concrete plans to give the popular new music festival a more feminine touch.

In the current edition of the festival - which takes place from October 16 to 18 and is already sold out - Olga Neuwirth is the only composer represented. She has analyzed the sound spaces of St. Mark's Basilica in Venice in the electronic studio and transformed them musically.

From October 16 to 18, the Donaueschingen Music Days 2015 will shed light on the relationship between new music and classical tradition with 18 world premieres and four sound installations.

A duo of double basses, starting in the depths and gradually spreading out over the course of the evening across a number of sound and noise registers, as two such excellent improvisers as Daniel Studer and Peter K Frey are capable of. The first sprinkles of a dreamlike, half-sleepy text by the poet Kurt Aebli are soon added via the loudspeakers - and soon noises too. From where? Is it important to know? The program booklet tells us: from a Zurich streetcar workshop. Would we have found out? What does this place of idle urban traffic and maintenance tell us? Are we moving somnambulistically through an imaginary city? Later, the first individual images will appear on the monitor, images of a landscape, an urban environment.

Finally, a cut: the singer Jeannine Hirzel appears, she plays no role, she sits down, sings the first meaningless sounds, then recites texts in a chanting voice, they are the ones we have already heard, which now occasionally sound back antiphonally from the loudspeakers. The individual images come together to form a film of stops - a film with a blurred, somewhat dreamlike patina. It comes from Super 8 recordings made by the architect Ernst Studer when he was developing utopian cities with wax figures at the ETH from 1975 to 1977.

Music, text, sound, song and film come together, and the music-theatrical piece that Peter Schweiger has staged slowly grows out of this. In the halls of the brain cityThe title is based on a passage by Aebli: "I was obsessed with the idea of words moving through the halls of my brain city a stream of strange people I let them have their lives their ugly shape rather groupings of letters and syllables that my hearing gave me that my eyes gave me that my heart my soul my body strictly took" ...
Grouping letters, syllables and words - and giving them meaning through the senses and the soul - is a simple way of paraphrasing what happened in this piece. For only perception soon created connections from the multimedia constellations. Pareidolically, it formed grammars and structures, established relationships and at the same time asked itself self-reflexively: Are there any relationships at all in the heterogeneity of these events? Is it not also about the self-perception of the perceiver? As in Aebli's text - and on stage. Suddenly we see the singer's face on the screen - via the camera. Later, we observe the two bassists as they play. This is how the piece looks at itself. Well, why this self-reflection, which always has a moment of embarrassment in it? Hasn't such magnifying and doubling self-reflection become blind? A nice accessory from the age of reflexivity - perhaps a little too much and unnecessary. But it was probably part of this "attempt to make the constantly reflected desire for perfection and its momentary failure or success tangible in the visually powerful design of a city of the future". According to the program text.

Was that it? The formulated intention was not clear enough to me personally. Overall, however, the half-awake tranquillity of the constellation was impressive, the intended "unsmooth" intensity, a great seriousness. The result was a coherent piece, even if it was hardly fulminant or lively; indeed, one might ask oneself whether it wasn't a little satisfied with its confused, cerebral coherence. In any case, it didn't jump up, didn't do any somersaults, certainly not mortali - maybe it didn't have to, maybe it didn't want to ...

If it wasn't blatant, it was perhaps groundbreaking. The key to this is provided by the inconspicuous subtitle: "Eine Spielanordnung". The "arrangement" indicates that something is pre-arranged here - as is not usually the case with freely improvised music. It is, however, in the sense of an arrangement to enable a dramaturgy and still give room for free interpretation. This doesn't seem to be particularly new, but it is central when it comes to incorporating vocals and lyrics: Because this is still not a matter of course in this genre, but a challenge that presupposes a linear fixation. Some earlier projects, such as those of the improv trio Karl ein Karl, of which Peter K Frey is also a member, have already led in this direction. With the music-theatrical arrangement and the free improvisation or their interplay, something peculiar emerges, a constellation that I would almost describe as essayistic music theater making.

Endo Anaconda, alias Andreas Flückiger, founded Stiller Has together with Balts Nill, alias Ueli Balsiger, in 1989. The musician with Austrian roots has close ties to the canton of Bern and is a figurehead of Bernese rock music. The ninth studio album by Stiller Has was released in 2013: "Böses Alter".

The composer and performer Lilian Beidler first attracted attention with large-scale acoustic environments, to which she now also contributes her body and voice as a performer.

In his accordion playing, Mario Batkovic mixes traditional Balkan songs with contemporary jazz and rock music and echoes influences ranging from Tom Waits and Astor Piazzolla to Johann Sebastian Bach.

As drummer for the post-punk band "Grauzone" around 1980, Marco Repetto captured the zeitgeist of the time and honed proto-techno tracks such as "Film 2". At the end of the 1980s, he became one of the most important protagonists of the emerging Swiss techno scene.

Pianist Gilles Grimaître will be awarded the "Coup de cœur 2015" prize for young talent in the amount of CHF 3,000.
 

 The Orpheum Foundation, which celebrated its 25th anniversary in September, praises itself as a "successful sponsorship model": "For young musicians, this not only means artistic encounters at the highest level, but often also a career boost," continues the foreword to the cultural magazine Du, which published a special edition. The anniversary was celebrated at a high artistic level with four major symphony concerts in the Tonhalle Zurich, a rather unusual manifestation of sponsorship worth millions.

On February 21, 1990, the Orpheum Foundation for the promotion of young soloists was founded in Zurich by Hans Heinrich Coninx, who was for many years president of the publishing house Tamedia AG. For some time now, the Orpheum Music Festival has been held every two years, and there have been a total of twelve events of this kind. The members of the 17-member board of trustees nominate young talents for inclusion in the Orpheum sponsorship program, who can perform with a renowned orchestra and conductor in the Tonhalle Zurich.

There are therefore no unknowns to be found in the Orpheum concerts. One example this year is the 22-year-old cellist Kian Soltani, who was accepted to the Basel Music Academy by Ivan Monighetti at the age of twelve and has since studied with Sol Gabetta and David Geringas. In addition to his Orpheum concert on September 6 with the Tonhalle Orchestra under Neville Marriner, he played at the Schubertiade in Hohenems and at the Kissinger Sommer, performed with Anne-Sophie Mutter's Virtuosi and interpreted Beethoven's Triple Concerto with Daniel Barenboim's West-Eastern Orchestra. So why Orpheum when soloists are already so well established in the concert world? Howard Griffiths, Artistic Director of Orpheum Young Soloists on Stage - as the event is now called - for 15 years, says of the current situation: "The competition is extreme and only artists with a very special character and the highest instrumental ability have a lasting career."

Orpheum is therefore not about conventional talent promotion, but about further career support. The list of soloists from the last 25 years includes such illustrious names as Renaud Capuçon, Alice Sarah Ott, Martin Grubinger and Baiba Skride. However, they have all only performed once at Orpheum, which inevitably raises the question of sustainability. Griffiths explains: "We use our network to place the musicians we sponsor with other orchestras and promoters, including other concerts in Germany, Russia, Switzerland and Austria. I myself regularly invite soloists to play with the Brandenburg State Orchestra, where I am principal conductor."

To mark the anniversary, they came up with something special and presented "two generations of Orpheum soloists", to put it somewhat exaggeratedly: The 40-year-old violinist Nikolaj Znaider, who joined Orpheum in 1996 and is now an established musician, played Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante in E flat major KV 364 together with the 25-year-old violist Kyoungmin Park. It was a successful performance on 4 September in the Tonhalle Zurich, in which the confident playing of the established violist harmonized well with the sonorous sound of the up-and-coming violist. In the middle register and when changing registers, the violist still had some minor difficulties, but these were covered up by the beautiful sound of the Vienna Symphony Orchestra. Philippe Jordan was on the podium and demonstrated his class as chief conductor of the Vienna Symphony Orchestra at the end with a brilliant interpretation of Beethoven's Symphony No. 7. The name "Jordan" has a resounding tradition at Orpheum, as Philippe's father, Armin Jordan, was one of the conductors from the very beginning.

Since then, much has changed in the music business, as Howard Griffiths pointedly describes: "There are many more highly qualified musicians, both technically and musically, especially from Asia, but also from Russia, Europe and the USA. The number of competitions and festivals has also increased. However, young soloists in particular are now faced with enormous challenges due to the financial restrictions that many orchestras and cultural institutions are struggling with. There is a danger that many talented artists are not given enough opportunities to build a sustainable career." Orpheum wants to make a contribution, which now includes a cooperation with the CD label Sony, which will release recordings by the Orpheum soloists.

In Freiburg, a teaching and research center for music with a strong focus on musical practice and the subjects of musicology, music theory, music pedagogy and music physiology is being established. In Karlsruhe, the focus is on music journalism and music informatics. The Institute for Music Journalism, which offers multimedia training, and the Institute for Music Informatics have joined forces in this regional center.

A large conducting center is being built in Mannheim, covering choral conducting, orchestra/symphonic music, opera, avant-garde, conducting (amateur) wind orchestras and conducting jazz ensembles. Stuttgart is home to the "Campus Gegenwart" with a cross-disciplinary combination of the various artistic disciplines in art, research and education. New music (with electronic music/computer music, vocal art, new music theater), composition, jazz/pop, performing arts, speech art, musicology/music theory are brought together. The Academy of Fine Arts and the Academy of Media Arts, creative artists and the independent scene are also included.

In Trossingen, the focus is on the areas of music - design - performance. This takes into account the generation of digital natives, who often have a different musical socialization than the traditional clientele of a music university. Cooperation with Furtwangen University of Applied Sciences is a key component of this regional center.

The establishment of the regional centers is intended to be permanent. In order to finance them, a pool of positions has been created for which the state is providing five W3 professorships and a further five mid-level positions (E13) for five years. The universities of music each contribute two W3 positions to this pool.