Although the Mass in B minor The autograph score by Johann Sebastian Bach is one of his most frequently performed works, yet it is full of riddles and tricky questions. Poor paper quality and aggressive ink make the autograph almost illegible in many places today. In addition, the original manuscript was extensively altered after Bach's death by his son Carl Philipp Emanuel. He clarified unclear details, but also made unauthorized changes at several stages.

With the autograph score of this mass, the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin is preserving a unique legacy of music history. Together with the digital edition project Edirom, Carus and the Staatsbibliothek are publishing the first volume of the new series Edition Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin presents a new edition of Bach's opus ultimum.

In addition to the scholarly edited musical text, the central sources are made digitally accessible as high-resolution color scans together with the Critical Report in a linked presentation. Linked bar by bar, sources and new engravings can be viewed in parallel or specific bars and passages can be selected. Comments and annotations can be assigned to source measures and parallel passages can be compared with each other.

DVD screenshot

Passages such as bars 97-99 in "Et resurrexit", which are virtually indecipherable due to subsequent alterations and ink erosion both in the autograph score (left) and in the facsimile edition of 1924 (right), are easier to decipher when compared with Hering's copy (below right).

Johann Sebastian Bach, Mass in B minor, BWV 232, with all relevant sources (autograph score, Dresden parts, Insel facsimile edition, copy of the score by J. F. Hering and from the estate of J. P. Kirnberger, Carus-Neustich with critical report) on DVD, edited by Ulrich Leisinger; score (linen with source DVD), € 31.232/01. Kirnberger, Carus-Neustich with critical report) on DVD, edited by Ulrich Leisinger; score (cloth) with source DVD, CV 31.232/01, € 139.00 (from 1.1.2015 € 199.00); score (paperback), CV 31.232,
€ 75.00; piano reduction, CV 31.232/03, € 12.50; orchestral material on request; Carus, Stuttgart 2014

As part of the "Parlons culture !" debate, five working groups have examined various issues in greater depth. They proposed measures to improve the promotion of culture and the conditions for cultural activities for the attention of the Directorate of Education, Culture and Sport.

The working groups want Biel to position itself as a national cultural center. The cultural spaces and cultural players should be upgraded. Creativity, particularly in the field of contemporary art, should be promoted in collaboration with partners.

Among many other things, it is also noted that Biel lacks a practical, modular hall with a capacity of around 1500 people and that the representation functions towards the outside (politics and population) and towards the inside (cultural scene) must be strengthened. The necessary resources should be provided for this. 

The comprehensive results from the working groups can be found on www.biel-bienne.ch
 

While these results have so far been published in printed music volumes, traditional editions are now to be expanded into globally linked digital knowledge archives as part of a new competence center. Different versions and variants, sound recordings, image and film material as well as a wide range of documents on the history of creation and transmission can also be integrated.

In such digital editions, it is possible to jump directly to the desired measure, and unified versions can be compared on screens. Scholars can discuss online and record differences in a standardized language that can be implemented by the computer. Changes that a composer has made to notes, accents or transitions can be heard directly at the click of a mouse.

Such editions give practicing musicians easier access to the sources and allow them to compare their interpretation bar by bar with traditional versions. Entries in the sheet music can thus be automatically converted by the computer for different orchestral parts.

The center has 1.7 million euros available for three years for research, development and the promotion of young talent. The German Federal Ministry of Education is funding the competence center as one of only three new centers for digital cultural studies in Germany.

The dance company DA MOTUS! was founded in 1987 by Brigitte Meuwly and Antonio Bühler. It cultivates an instinctive and sensory approach to dance and combines improvisation with composition. The choreographic work, always developed together with the dancers, strives for an expressive physicality and presence.

DA MOTUS! has received a multi-year grant from the Canton of Fribourg since 2003. It is also supported by Pro Helvetia and the Loterie Romande, the Commission Romande de Diffusion des Spectacles (CORODIS) and the municipality of Givisiez.

The Fribourg Culture Prize was established in 1987 and is awarded every two years by the State Council. In 2012, it went to the writer Jean-François Haas. The date for the official presentation of this prize to the dance company DA MOTUS! will be set later.

The ordinal number "first" says it all: the Cultural Summit is to become a regular, probably annual event at which people from politics, the arts, business, cultural management and the authorities who are interested in culture and experienced in cultural policy discuss our country's cultural policy. The kick-off event at the Bern Kunsthalle was held under the patronage of Federal Councillor Alain Berset and was sponsored by SRG SSR, Pro Helvetia and Loterie Romande. Those present were welcomed by the co-presidents of the Parliamentary Group for Culture, National Councillors Jean-François Steiert and Kurt Fluri. The latter explained that, shortly before the consultation period for the 2016-2019 cultural dispatch expired, it was not a question of laying down the measures proposed therein. However, the term "national cultural policy" had raised eyebrows in various quarters, as cultural promotion in Switzerland is primarily a cantonal and communal task.

Political culture is also cultural policy
During the transition to Federal Councillor Alain Berset's speech, the moderator Eric Facon mistakenly referred to "culture politique" (political culture) instead of "politique culturelle" (cultural policy), a slip of the tongue that Federal Councillor Berset picked up on and suggested that the two presumably went together. This assumption was substantiated in his speech.

A cultural summit - he was probably thinking more of a fundamental reflection on culture than this event in felt-lined rooms - was as dangerous as mountaineering. Stumbling blocks could appear, crevasses could open up. The Minister of Culture quoted Alphonse Daudet's novel character Tartarin de Tarascon, who was afraid of the crevasses on his trip to Switzerland, whereupon he was reassured that the crevasses were padded with soft snow and a hotel porter was just waiting in the depths to take your luggage. "Not only Tartarin and many foreign observers are amazed at our country and our abysses, which are often not abysses at all. We ourselves are sometimes a little confused about the diversity of Switzerland or its contradictions, which is also a facet of diversity." In this diversity, but also in view of the drifting apart of scenes and groups, a consensus on the importance of culture and multilingualism is important.

When it comes to multilingualism, cultural policy and political culture are particularly closely linked. Learning another national language also has a cultural dimension and opens up access to the culture of others. In view of the move away from early French in some cantons and the preference for English, Berset emphasized: "If we no longer take the language issue seriously, we are weakening Switzerland from within." Does national cultural policy need to intervene here because the political culture of implementing jointly negotiated educational goals is being lost? The promotion of student exchanges across language borders and literary translations are certainly important components of the new cultural message. (In addition to foreign language teaching, the still outstanding implementation of the new constitutional article on music education, particularly in the area of school music, should also be considered).

"If compromises are abruptly terminated, politics becomes unpredictable. Switzerland loses one of its greatest strengths," continued Berset. Federalism only works if each canton also assumes its responsibility towards Switzerland as a whole. Cultural identity only arises from knowledge of one's own and the other. A coherent national cultural policy could not consist of wanting to create a national culture, but rather a joint effort to support cultural diversity. Without diverse cultural identities, we inevitably fall into the somewhat simple-minded attitude of defending one identity.

In the concluding panel discussion, moderator Roger de Weck, Director General of SRG SSR, had a difficult time identifying burning issues and areas of friction. The participants, Federal Councillor Berset, Brigitte Häberli, Member of the Council of States and Vice-President of the Science, Education and Culture Committee of the Council of States (WBK-S), Karin Niederberger, President of the Swiss Yodelling Association, Pedro Lenz, author and Walter Kielholz, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Swiss Re, are probably simply active in too many different areas.

Pedro Lenz, who gives around 200 readings a year and knows community libraries and clubs from Lake Constance to Lake Geneva, said that these small-scale structures are incredibly strong and well anchored. Fortunately! National cultural policy needs them. Crevasses only open up when they no longer see themselves as part of a whole.

Cudlipp was most recently engaged as Artistic Director of the Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo. The American-born conductor has also worked for the Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra, the Zurich Opera House, the Zurich Chamber Orchestra, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra.

The La Cetra Barockorchester Basel was founded in 1999 and has been under the artistic direction of Andrea Marcon since 2009. The orchestra is made up of internationally renowned musicians who are familiar with traditional performance practice. The repertoire ranges from classical baroque music to classical works - from Bach and Monteverdi to Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven.

A "long process of collegial cooperation" between AfS and VDS, which was supported by increasingly intensive collaboration at both state and national level, led to the first joint national congress on music education in Weimar in 2012 and has now culminated in the merger.

The new association will "organize music education competitions, award prizes and issue publications" and promote qualified training and further education for music teachers. The strengthening of the subject of music and its teachers, its public visibility and contact with education policy in the federal states, at federal level and with neighboring European countries should "succeed even better than before with a powerful, professionally positioned and member-strong association".
 

Schlossmediale Werdenberg, the festival for early music, new music and audiovisual art, will take place for the fourth time at Whitsun 2015. Next year's theme is "Marginal phenomena". According to the call for applications, the festival is looking for artists for the three five-week residency scholarships from April 20 to May 31, 2015 who are "inspired by the castle, the surroundings and the festival's theme". Candidates must have a degree in sound art/sound studies, audiovisual art/experimental instrument making or visual art/installations/sculpture/land art.

The scholarship holders receive free accommodation, an expense allowance, a materials allowance and a salary. They undertake to live in Werdenberg for the specified period of time. Applications can be submitted by post until October 15, 2015.

Further information: www.schlossmediale.ch
 

This year, the City of Uster's art prize will be awarded for the first time in accordance with stricter regulations. With the prize, the city recognizes "outstanding achievements in the field of art". The award ceremony will take place on November 15 as part of the "drum-pam!" festival at Kulturhaus Central. After the ceremony, Lucas Niggli will perform with Pierre Favre in the duo "The Poetry of Drums".

Lucas Niggli was born in Cameroon in 1968, where his parents worked in development cooperation. After moving to Switzerland, he grew up in the Zurich Oberland. The drummer and percussionist has been making music in the new territory of improvised and composed music for almost thirty years.
 

The Russian composer and lawyer Evgeny Gunst (1877-1950) played an important role in Russian musical life before the Russian Revolution, for example as a confidant of Alexander Scriabin. He emigrated to France in 1920 and died impoverished in Paris in 1950. His widow then transferred his estate to Basel, where, as the university reports, it was discovered in spring 2010 in the archive cellar of the musicology department. The letters, documents, photos, autographs, prints and sketches were on display from June 8 to 26, 2011 in the special exhibition "Findings of a Life" at the Museum Kleines Klingental. The Institute of Musicology at the University of Basel published the accompanying volume Finds of a life - The composer Evgenij Gunst as well as, supervised by David Rossel, all of the composer's choral works. In May 2014, the CD Piano works - Wanderer between the worlds (Susanne Lang, piano, Oehms) and a detailed study is also planned for this year.

Photo: zVg

Evgenij Gunst (1877-1950)

From September 10 to October 5, the exhibition will be on display at Russia's largest music museum, the State Glinka Museum in Moscow. As the University of Basel writes, this means that "an important chapter of Russian cultural history is finding its way back to its homeland". The exhibition and accompanying book have been translated into Russian. On the one hand, the exhibition is intended to promote musicological discussion between Moscow and Basel and to make the forgotten artist accessible to a specialist audience and the interested public.
Following the vernissage, Jean-Jacques Dünki, Susanne Lang (piano), Ekaterina Kitschigina (soprano) and Andrei Kaplanov (baritone) will perform selected works from the Glinka estate in the concert hall of the Glinka Museum - some of them as Russian premieres.

At the academic center of the conference are two main symposia on key research areas of the Greifswald Institute for Church Music and Musicology. The Musica Baltica symposium, under the direction of Martin Loeser, is dedicated to the musical culture of the Baltic region with its profound structural changes during the so-called Sattelzeit in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

The second focus will be on the first half of the 20th century and the question of how the life and work of Richard Strauss can be located here. This symposium will be chaired by Walter Werbeck. In addition, there will be extensive symposia and presentations by numerous specialist groups as well as the Virtual Library (ViFa) Music and the Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM).

A presentation from Switzerland was given by Andreas Baumgartner (Basel, Dem Kitsch auf der Spur: Schubert's Ave Maria). He studied musicology, modern German literature and philosophy in Giessen and Freiburg im Breisgau. During his studies, he was an assistant to the Handwörterbuch der musikalischen Terminologie and a tutor for paleography. After graduating in 2010, he began a doctorate on the subject of music and kitsch at the Basel Musicology Seminar in 2011. He has been an assistant for modern music history there since August 2013.

More info:
www.phil.uni-greifswald.de/bereich2/musik/jahrestagung-der-gfm-2014.html

With a unanimous faculty decision, the University of Bern has decided to continue the Graduate School of the Arts as a joint doctoral program with the Bern University of the Arts. The new director will be Thomas Gartmann, who takes over from Roman Brotbeck after three years.

Nine new doctoral students were accepted this spring. They include dance, photography, visual arts and design as well as the following music projects:

• Soundscapes of cultural preservation. An artistic hearing exploration of the Paul Bowles Collection of Moroccan traditional music (Gilles Aubry)
• Experiment and improvisation - creative processes in musique concrète, musique électronique and the experimental electronic avant-garde (Gaudenz Badrutt)
• The practice of interpretation with Joseph Joachim (Johannes Gebauer)
• Othmar Schoeck, Hermann Burte and their Eichendorff adaptation Dürande Castle as a contribution to Nazi Germany's music theater (Simeon Thompson).

Website of the Graduate School of the Arts: www.gsa.unibe.ch

The program enables the realization of 19 binational projects from all artistic disciplines, which will be shown to the public in Switzerland and Lombardy between September 2014 and April 2015. The thematic range extends from the "LeggiLO LeggiTI" project, which is dedicated to the culture of reading aloud, to "XiViX Op. 1515 pour mannequins & ensemble", which combines music and fashion design to create new soundscapes, to "Vedi alla voce", which creates multimedia installations based on historical audio material on Italian migration to Valais.

With "Transmedia", a series of events between Zurich and Milan explores new audiovisual experiments. Insight into the "Arte ri-programmata" project, which reinterprets works by the Milanese collective "Gruppo T" from the 1960s,

The cultural exchange program is an initiative of Pro Helvetia in partnership with the cantons of Ticino and Valais, the city of Zurich and the Ernst Göhner Foundation and is under the patronage of the Lombardy region and the city of Milan. It comprises 19 binational projects that have been jointly developed by Swiss and Lombard cultural practitioners and event organizers. Until April 2015, around one hundred cultural events in all artistic disciplines will take place in both countries.

More info: www.viavai-cultura.net

See also article by Lara Bergliaffa in the Swiss Music Newspaper 6/2014:
Italian: "Viavai", bricolle colme di cultura
German: "Viavai", a smuggler's rucksack full to the brim with culture
 

The total number of visitors to publicly funded German theaters and orchestras, private theaters and festivals fell slightly from around 32.1 million to around 31.9 million on site and around 2.9 million at guest performances (previous year: 3.08 million). The theaters offered more musical performances and were therefore able to increase visitor numbers in this area. There were also more concerts and theatre-related events than in the previous year, but fewer opera and puppet theater performances.

Public subsidies for municipal, state and regional theaters rose from 2.25 to 2.3 billion euros in the 2012/2013 season. This time, the theatres were unable to increase their own income; at 497 million euros, they reached the level of the 2010/2011 season (2011/2012: just over 500 million euros).

The number of permanent theater employees - temporary and permanent - fell slightly from 39,187 to 39,086. 43,899 people (previous year: 43,969) are permanently employed in the theaters and orchestras, including the musicians of the independent cultural orchestras and radio orchestras. The number of non-permanent employees rose from 23,415 to 24,913. These figures do not include staff in private theaters and festival companies. As has been the case for many years, personnel expenditure at publicly funded theaters accounts for around 73 percent of total expenditure. 

The theater statistics document the most important economic data of theaters and orchestras in Germany. A total of 142 state theaters, municipal theaters and regional theatres as well as 130 orchestras (including theater orchestras), 221 private theaters and 75 festivals are presented with their income and expenditure, personnel data, attendance figures and events.

Anyone who first thinks of the diagnostic possibilities of radioactive rays when they hear the name Julius Röntgen is not entirely wrong. The German-Dutch pianist and composer (*1855 in Leipzig, †1932 in Utrecht) was distantly related to the physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen (1845-1923). Julius Röntgen's youngest son Joachim worked as concertmaster of the Winterthur Municipal Theater from 1928 and was first violinist in the Lucerne Festival Orchestra under Toscanini in 1938/39.

As a composer, Julius Röntgen emerged from the conservative Leipzig School, was associated with Brahms, but also absorbed influences from Grieg, Reger and Debussy. He wrote 21 symphonies, 14 concertos, two operas as well as songs and chamber music. His compositions have recently been rediscovered. Symphonies 3, 8, 15 and 18 as well as the violin, cello and piano concertos are already available on nine CDs (all on cpo).

And now the Offenburg String Trio has recorded Röntgen's late string trios. Cellist Martin Merker, who has also been active as a cellist with the Camerata Bern for many years, writes in his informative booklet text: "Julius Röntgen composed the string trios exclusively for playing music with his sons in the family circle, with the composer himself taking on the viola part."

The following were recorded Trios Nos. 13 to 16 from the years 1925-1930 are stylistically out of their time, are far removed from dissonant or even atonal harmony, but never seem boring or even hackneyed. They are all compositions of a high technical and artistic standard. Röntgen also had newer compositional techniques at his disposal, as his last works show, in which he experimented with atonality, bitonality and jazz influences. However, they are not used in the string trios.

The Trio No. 13 in A major (1925) sounds a little like Schubert, Mendelssohn and Brahms - albeit without direct stylistic reminiscences. In the Trio No. 14 in C minor (1928), Röntgen's own tone becomes clearer, a delicate and original exploration of the unexplored harmonic and structural possibilities of late Romantic music. The Trio No. 15 C sharp minor (1929) was composed on a five-week road trip, which also took Röntgen and his family through Switzerland. The "Finale automobilistico: Allegro energico" incorporates incidents in Reichenbach and Meiringen. The Trio No. 16 in C sharp minor (1930) crowns his work for this instrumentation in its depth of expression and stylistic homogeneity.

The Offenburg String Trio has recorded these works in an emotionally moving as well as tonally and technically sophisticated way, demonstrating that an encounter with Röntgen's music can still be an experience today.