According to the Magdeburg Center for Telemann Care and Research, there is probably no other publishing house currently active that gives Telemann's chamber music a similar weight in its publishing spectrum. The number of 220 editions from this area of Telemann's oeuvre alone, including such central works as the so-called Paris and Hamburg quartets, chamber music from the Musique de table and around 100 trio sonatas, is impressive.

For over 40 years, the founder of the publishing house, Bernhard Päuler, has demonstrated "a keen sense for the needs of the early music market". He operates with a clever selection of works and solid editions that impress with their paper quality, binding design and music typesetting and are nevertheless offered at a reasonable price.

The Georg Philipp Telemann Prize has been awarded annually since 1987 by the state capital of Magdeburg for outstanding achievements in the interpretation, cultivation and research of the life and work of Georg Philipp Telemann. It consists of a bronze plaque, a certificate and an endowment of 2500 euros. Previous winners include Ludwig Güttler, Martin Ruhnke, Wolf Hobohm, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, René Jacobs, Bärenreiter-Verlag and Carus-Verlag. Last year, the Belgian oboist Paul Dombrecht received the Georg Philipp Telemann Prize.
 

In the two years of coordination to date, the digitization of old Iranian shellac records from the National Sound Archive of the Music Museum of Iran has begun, writes the KIZ, and now, according to Raimund Vogels, the director of the Hildesheim Centre for World Music, the collections from the second half of the 20th century are to be tackled.

The digital copies are to be made available worldwide. In addition, Iranian scientists are to be trained to such an extent that they will be able to document the current Iranian music scene themselves.

The project came about by chance two years ago. Specialists from Hildesheim were processing audio documents in Egypt. In the process, an Iranian doing his doctorate in Hildesheim remembered the record collection in Tehran. The first step was to clean and digitize 3,000 shellac records dating from 1906 to 1932.

The support is intended to give artists the time they need to work out their ideas, projects or works or to further develop their artistic activity. It is also possible to submit an individually tailored further education idea that includes a special residency or stage that specifically promotes further development.

An additional funding opportunity is a stay in the studio apartment in Rome, which is financed in collaboration with the association Freunde Kulturwohnung Rom. An apartment in the lively San Lorenzo district is available there for three months at a time.

The selection procedure for the work grants and for the Rome Apartment is carried out in two stages. In each category, a three-member jury of experts assesses the project submissions and nominates the applicants for the second stage. In this second stage, all members of the expert jury meet for a plenary session to select a maximum of ten projects from the nominees.

The Office for Culture is accepting applications until March 20, 2015; the final decisions on the awarding of work grants and stays in Rome will be made by the end of June 2015. Detailed information and the application form are available on the website www.kultur.sg.ch (under the heading Cultural Promotion/Contributions).
 

Nicola Gess, born in Bielefeld in 1973, studied German, musicology and flute in Hamburg and Princeton and received her doctorate from HU Berlin and Princeton University in 2004 with a thesis on the "violence of music" in literature and music aesthetics around 1800.

In 2007/08 she was a guest lecturer at the University of Zurich. In 2012, she habilitated at the Free University of Berlin with her habilitation thesis "Primitives Denken. Wilde, Kinder und Wahnsinnige in der literarischen Moderne (Müller, Musil, Benn, Benjamin)". Since fall 2010, she has held an assistant professorship with tenure track for Modern German Literature at the University of Basel.

Under the direction of Swiss conductor Matthias Bamert, the Sinfonie Orchester Biel Solothurn aims to prove that the newly opened Stadttheater Solothurn is also suitable as a concert venue. With pianist Claire Huangci and singer Marie-Claude Chappuis, a Mozart gala concert on February 1 will be the grand finale of the inauguration celebrations.

The semi-opera "King Arthur" by Henry Purcell and John Dryden combines drama, music theater and dance. The large-scale project is directed by TOBS theater director Katharina Rupp and the Italian conductor Marco Zambelli. Almost two dozen solo artists from musical theater, drama and dance, the choir of TOBS (Theater Orchester Biel Solothurn) and the Symphony Orchestra Biel Solothurn will transform the stages in Solothurn and Biel into the Britain of legend and chivalry.

More info: www.tobs.ch

The original plan was to also include music schools in the Culture Act. Due to the clear stance of the local authorities to leave the music schools in the Education Act, this has now been dropped.

The tasks of the local authorities in the area of cultural promotion are now also regulated. This was requested by the municipalities in the consultation process. In addition, the Government Council's implementing provisions on the promotion of culture provided for in the Culture Act were missed. The Government Council has now also adopted these at first reading.

With the Culture Act, the Obwalden cantonal government wants to formally anchor the various cultural areas (cultural promotion, monument preservation and archaeology, protection of cultural assets, libraries) in a single new law. In terms of content, only the promotion of culture is to be reviewed and legislatively adapted to the current situation. The other areas (preservation of monuments/archaeology, protection of cultural assets, libraries) are to be retained unchanged.

The Cultural Promotion Act replaces the 1963 Act on the Payment of Contributions for the Promotion of Cultural Endeavors. It regulates the promotion, communication, creation and maintenance of cultural activities in the Canton of Basel-Landschaft.

According to the canton's press release, the law takes into account "the cultural policy practice of recent years". In promoting creation, it is intended to respect the freedom of creative artists and promote all genres, levels and degrees of effectiveness.

The law also promotes access to regional culture for the people of Basel-Landschaft and ensures that the cantonal cultural institutions and facilities (cantonal library, cantonal museum, cantonal archaeology, Roman city of Augusta Raurica, Basel-Landschaft cantonal publishing house) are anchored in law. It clearly defines the tasks and responsibilities of the cantonal bodies and authorities.

In 2001, the Audit Committee suggested that the 1963 Cultural Contributions Act should be brought into line with existing cultural funding practice in order to ensure the legal certainty of cultural policy action. On November 12, 2009, the District Council referred the resulting draft of a new Culture Act back to the Government Council with the instruction to first draw up a cultural mission statement. Together with the Government Council's Strategy 2012-2022, this forms the conceptual basis for the revision of the draft law.
 

The project creates a valuable starting point for a better understanding of the linguistic nature of cognitive processes in the humanities, writes Leipzig University. In this way, the important role of language in science can also be communicated to society. This is important not least because of the increasing establishment of English as a global means of communication in the sciences, as it offers a starting point for determining the performance of the German general scientific language for the humanities in more detail.

The question of the special language-bound nature of this group of subjects also plays an important role in this new project. It also asks what would be lost if German were to be abandoned in favor of a universal academic language.
 

More info: www.uni-leipzig.de/herder

With his latest two albums at the latest, Franz Hellmüller has earned himself the status of the most important young Swiss jazz guitarist, write the Müchner organizers. Trained at the American School of Modern Music in Paris and the Lucerne School of Music, his teachers include greats such as Dave Liebman, Frank Möbus, John Abercrombie and Kurt Rosenwinkel.

He has attracted attention alongside well-known Swiss jazz musicians such as Nat Su, Norbert Pfammatter, Tobias Preisig, Bänz Öster and Samuel Rohrer. He is now coming to BMW Welt with his virtuoso, internationally sought-after Italian accompanists Stefano Risso on bass and Marco Zanoli on drums.

The matinee series, which forms the basis for the prize, is all about the jazz guitar, with the trio of the Palestinian Michel Sajrawy, FAT - Fabulous Austrian Trio (Austria), Camila Meza Quartet (USA/Chile), the Manu Codjia Trio (France) and the Carl Mörner Ringström Majestic Orchestra (Sweden/Denmark) playing alongside Hellmüller.

More info: www.bmw-welt.com/de/events/jazz_awards_2015.html

In an experiment, a group of isolated Mbenzélé Pygmies in Congo, who had never before had any contact with Western music and culture, and a group of Canadians were each played the music of the Pygmies and Western music. The Canadian test subjects, on the other hand, were completely unfamiliar with Pygmy music.

The test subjects' physiological parameters of skin conductance, heart rate and respiratory rate were measured. At the same time, each test subject was asked to assess the subjective emotional effect the music had on them. In a computer-based diagram, the listeners used a smartphone to indicate whether the piece of music played made them feel positive or negative and whether the music had a calming or arousing/stimulating effect.

While the Pygmies always experienced the music from their culture as positive and arousing, no similarities could be observed in the reactions of Western listeners to this music. In contrast, the music excerpts that had an arousing effect on the Western listeners also led to an increase in the subjective level of arousal among the Pygmies.

The analysis of the data suggests that the subjective emotional impact of music is more culture-specific, i.e. influenced by the cultural significance of the music that people grew up with. Whether a piece of music is subjectively perceived as happy or sad, solemn or romantic is an individual matter, the researchers write. The universality of music seems to relate more to the parameters of arousal and calming, which could be proven on the basis of the measured physiological parameters.

Original article: http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01341
 

Spoerri, who celebrates his 80th birthday this year, is a modest, curious artist who has consciously experienced and skillfully helped shape the turbulent artistic and musical developments of the last 60 years, writes the canton.

He began his career in the 1950s as a saxophonist in various jazz formations. Very early on, he also began to explore the possibilities of synthetic sound production. Spoerri made a name for himself as a composer, producer, sound engineer and director of the Zurich Jazz Festival. As an editor, he has also created standard works on the history of jazz and computer music in Switzerland.

The 62-year-old clown Ueli Bichsel started out as a director in 1980 with the production "Zwischen den Zeilen Theater". In 1981, he founded the theater group "Die Lufthunde" and the association Kultur im Zelt "Zirkus Theater Federlos", with which he toured Europe and Africa for many years.

The Canton of Zurich sponsorship prize is endowed with CHF 40,000. It is awarded to artists who are considered to have special artistic potential. This year's recipient Roland Jurczok regularly performs together with the writer Melinda Nadj Abonji, but can currently also be seen with solo programs at international festivals.

In a recent study by the Music Lab at the Department of Neuropsychology at UZH under the direction of Lutz Jäncke, findings have been made with musicians who can hear perfectly, which, according to first author Stefan Elmer, open up a new perspective on the underlying psychological and neurophysiological processes. It combines two opposing approaches to explaining the phenomenon.

One line of explanation assumes that absolute listeners categorize sounds at a very early stage of sound processing, process sounds in the same way as speech sounds and assign them to specific categories. This theory therefore assumes that sounds are already processed in the primary and secondary auditory cortex of absolute listeners. Another theory postulates that absolute listeners are particularly good at unconsciously assigning sounds to memory information; these assignments are primarily made in the upper frontal brain, in the dorsal frontal cortex.

In his study, Stefan Elmer can now show that the left-sided auditory cortex and the left-sided dorsal frontal cortex are already functionally strongly coupled in the resting state. In absolute listeners, the neurophysiological activities in the frontal and auditory cortex are synchronized, which suggests a close functional coupling. According to Elmer, this coupling favors a particularly efficient exchange of information between the auditory cortex and the dorsal frontal cortex in absolute listeners.

Original article:
Stefan Elmer, Lars Rogenmoser, Jürg Kühnis and Lutz Jäncke: "Bridging the gap between perceptual and cognitive perspectives on absolute pitch". The Journal of Neuroscience, January 6, 2015. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3009-14.2015
 

At the premiere of the movement Migrational from the concerto for orchestra, beatboxer, DJ and percussion by Russian-born composer Gene Pritsker, Indra Tedjasukmana takes to the stage as DJ. The MDR Symphony Orchestra will also be joined by percussionist Philipp Bernhardt. The world premiere, entitled "Beethoven Beat Box", will be coupled with a performance of Beethoven's 8th Symphony, which was also unusual for its time. 

The setting for the concert is the Ice Festival initiated by MDR chief conductor Kristjan Järvi from 15 to 25 January, which - in the words of the organizers - is now undertaking "a major expedition into the musical world of the north for the second time in various locations in Leipzig" after the Northern Lights Festival.

The integral beatbox concert by composer, guitarist, rapper and DJ Gene Pritsker will be performed at the MDR Symphony Orchestra's Midsummer Festival in June 2015 (June 21 to 30, 2015). 

Indra Tedjasukmana, winner of the European Beatboxing Championships, is a lecturer in pop singing at the University of Applied Sciences in Osnabrück. At the same time, he is doing his doctorate at the Münster University of Music on the subject of "A Cappella Pop and Beatbox". His book "Beatbox Complete" was awarded the German Music Edition Prize 2014.

The app, developed by dialect researchers at the Universities of Zurich and Geneva, measures how fast, high or low someone speaks. All users have to do is record a sentence with their smartphone, whereupon the app analyzes the pitch and speed of speech. The voice analysis also shows how people with hearing impairments, such as tinnitus, perceive their own voice.

Based on the data generated with the app, the linguists hope to create a corpus of Swiss German of unprecedented size. For the first time, it will be possible to determine far-reaching population statistics on speaking speed or voice pitch. The data could be used to analyze individual dialect regions, age or gender groups.

"VoiceÄpp" can be downloaded free of charge from the Apple App Store and in the Google Play Store can be obtained. It is the product of a two-year project by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

Like other contributions to the philosophical discussion in this field, the project takes as its starting point the paradigm shift in musical notation in the 19th century, which attempted to fix interpretation ever more precisely. The starting point is writings on the aesthetics of art and music as well as music reviews.

According to the organizers, the aim is to define the ontological status of a musical work on the basis of various case studies in its specific musical practice. This will shed light on "the existence of a more sophisticated standard musical notation, the authoritative role of the score and the perception of a work detached from interpretations and their temporal volatility".

The project, led by philosophy theorist Dale Jacquette and Thomas Gartmann, will result in two conferences with the Zentrum Paul Klee, where the philosophical understanding of the painter and musician Klee will also be discussed, as well as in a dissertation and a habilitation.