At various stations in public spaces, Bithell uses interactive sound sculptures to record people's dreams, wishes and desires. They form the basis for a composition, which in turn is performed in a series of performances.

"The Place of Whispers" is part of the SOUNDZZ.Z.ZZZ...Z competition organized by the Lucerne Museum of Art and the Lucerne Festival. Following the call for artists sent out at the end of 2013, around 60 applications were received by January 2014. After assessment by a jury of experts, Bithell (*1976) was chosen as the winner. His project impressed the jury "with its unique blend of music, performance and intervention in public space".

Inspired by the theme of "psyche", Bithell's artistic interest for the project with the poetic title lies in the relationship between conscious and unconscious sounds, perceptions and experiences. David Bithell is developing five interactive sound sculptures and a website in order to collect wishes that are otherwise often kept secret.

In the city of Lucerne, Bithell wanders from place to place with his sculptures. At the same time, you can discover his secrets on the website www.placeofwhispers.com reveal. Bithell uses the material collected over several weeks for five performances. The whispers of the people who take part in the project, who whisper into the sculptures and tell their dreams, are composed into a new soundscape.

David Bithell relies on the support of a whispering choir to perform his compositions. Interested parties can register at info@kunstmuseumluzern.ch register for this.

More info: www.placeofwhispers.com

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) currently under negotiation aims to dismantle customs and regulatory barriers between the USA and the EU in order to stimulate the economies of both partners. Areas of life outside the economy could also be subject to the principles of free global trade.

However, the Goethe-Institut members are convinced that there are other important forms of publicity besides the market. Culture is a public good that deserves and needs public support. The value of artistic productions does not depend on the laws of the free market. The General Assembly of the Goethe-Institut is therefore of the opinion that culture, education and media must be consistently excluded from the TTIP negotiating mandate.

The negotiations between the European Commission and the USA on TTIP are currently being conducted in secret behind closed doors. This is not conducive to strengthening a shared responsibility for Europe. Rather, it gives rise to the suspicion that the independence of culture is at risk. So far, despite public criticism, this suspicion has not been dispelled by the Commission.

The General Assembly of the Goethe-Institut expects the new EU Commission to make its conduct of the negotiations and their current status transparent, to involve the member states and to keep the public fully informed. The Goethe-Institut will maintain close contact with the TTIP Advisory Council set up at the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy.

According to a statement from the university, the Z Club is a discourse, performance and music festival at the ZHdK that is dedicated to the topics of money, space and post-industrialization night after night for a whole week.

The Z Club opens when the sun goes down in Venice: every night from 9 pm, a program unfolds that offers a cross-section of the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) for seven evenings.

On 29 July, a concert performance will highlight the nexus of heavy metal, death metal and post-industrialization. July 30 and 31, on the other hand, are entirely dedicated to new music and its relationship to industry: conceived and technically realized by the Institute for Computer Music and Sound Technology, a broad spectrum of works between analogue tape music and generative art, between audiovisual art and performance will be heard, in which various aspects of 'materiality' are thematized.

Based on the canonical work La Fabbrica Illuminata by the Venetian composer Luigi Nono interpreted by soprano Sarah Maria Sun, a path will be taken up to the present day. Works by Iannis Xenakis, Horacio Vaggione, Billy Roisz and current works by ICST members and students will be performed, culminating in a live audiovisual performance with Michael Egger, Thomas Peter and special guest Jorge Sánchez-Chiong.
 

According to the canton's latest school statistics, 71,526 children and young people attend elementary school in Aargau. They have a total of 826 instrumental teachers at their disposal, who share 112 full-time equivalents. This means that, on average, one teacher has a 14% workload. In contrast, the 234 speech therapy and dyslexia specialists have an average 50% workload (116 full-time equivalents).

A breakdown by gender reveals a relatively balanced picture: 454 male instrumental teachers compared to 372 female instrumental teachers. However, the men occupy significantly more full-time equivalents (72) than the women (40). This means that, on average, they have a higher workload.

General elementary school teachers (6705 in 2013) occupy 4470 full-time equivalents, i.e. an average 66% workload. The gender ratio is clearly skewed in favor of women: 1796 male teachers compared to 4909 female teachers.

According to the German Stage Association, Germany has 83 publicly financed opera houses, 130 orchestras, 200 privately run theaters and 70 opera festivals. Austria has 67 theaters and Switzerland 30, while France and the UK have just a dozen publicly financed opera houses.

According to statistics from Operbase, 7230 opera performances were staged in Germany last year, a third of the entire world production. The USA counted 1730 performances, Russia 1441, France 1288. Austria is in sixth place with 1252 performances, Switzerland in ninth place with 795.

If the number of performances is measured in relation to the size of the population, Switzerland is in second place with 102.1 performances per million inhabitants. The figure is only higher in Austria (149.8). Germany is in fourth place with 88.14 and Estonia in third place with 95.5.
 

From September 29 to October 27, 2014, at 8 a.m., all performers who want to represent Switzerland at the Eurovision Song Contest 2015 in Austria can submit their songs composed especially for this event on the internet platform srf.ch/eurovision publish. The nine final entries from German-speaking Switzerland will be decided in equal parts by the public and a jury of experts.

In a second phase, these and six candidates from RTS and three candidates from RSI will present their song live to a panel of experts. The experts will assess the live competence, vocal quality and stage presence. Of these 18 candidates, the team of experts will send a total of six into the race - three for SRF and RTR, two for RTS and one for RSI.

The six qualified performers will present their song as well as a cover version of another song in the national live show on Saturday, January 31, 2015. This show will be broadcast live from the Bodensee-Arena in Kreuzlingen. The TV audience and a jury of experts will each decide 50 percent who will represent Switzerland at the Eurovision Song Contest in Austria in 2015.

In text, images and sound, the show "25 Years of the Jazz Archive" in Uster from September 5, 2014 honors the founders of this institution as well as all those donors who have made a special contribution to the valuable and sometimes unique holdings of this national archive.

The SwissJazzOrama collects and archives audio and video recordings, literature and testimonies of all kinds from the world of jazz, but concentrates on items with a Swiss connection. It all began in 1989 with the founding of the supporting association Pro Jazz Schweiz and the expansion of Otto Flückiger's jazz collection into the jazz archive in Rheinfelden. After a four-year interim phase in Arlesheim, the Swiss Jazz Archive moved to Uster, where it flourished in 1998 in new structures and under new sponsorship as SwissJazzOrama.

The anniversary exhibition "25 Years of the Jazz Archive" celebrates its vernissage on Friday, September 5, 5 pm, at the headquarters of SwissJazzOrama. The first quarter of a century of the Jazz Archive is also the occasion for a concert jazz weekend (November 7/8/9, 2014) and other events.

Other prizewinners are the French painter Martial Raysse, the Italian sculptor Giuseppe Penone and the American architect Steven Holl.

The Praemium Imperiale is awarded by the Japan Art Association under the patronage of the Japanese Imperial Family. It is being awarded for the 26th time this year. A total of around 130 artists have been honored to date, including Pierre Boulez, György Ligeti, Alfred Schnittke and Luciano Berio.

Arvo Pärt was born in Paide (Estonia) in 1935. After studying in Tallinn, he worked as a sound engineer at Estonian Radio from 1958 to 1967. In 1980 he emigrated to Vienna and a year later to Berlin on a DAAD scholarship.

He uses a self-developed compositional principle that he calls Tintinnabuli. It does not strive for progressively increasing complexity, but for extreme reduction of the sound material and restriction to the essentials.
 

With this award, which goes to an ensemble for the first time, the festival, which is supported by the city, honors the boys' choir "for its great services to the cultivation of sacred music and for its importance in promoting young musical talent, which has grown over 800 years".

The prize honors "high-ranking performers and composers for groundbreaking achievements in the field of sacred music". Previous winners include Sofia Gubaidulina, Klaus Huber, Arvo Pärt, Krzysztof Penderecki, Dieter Schnebel, Hans Zender, Helmuth Rilling, Peter Schreier and Clytus Gottwald.
 

According to the German Press Agency, festival director Valentina Marcenaro emphasized that Levy, whose films deal with the Jewish self-image in a humorous and controversial way, is the perfect representative for the 18th edition with the motto "Jewish.now!".

As part of the 18th edition of the festival, modern, partly contemporary interpretations from the fields of music, theater, dance, literature and film can be seen and heard. Young artists, contemporary art and fresh approaches dedicated to Jewish culture in all its facets are presented in a total of almost 30 events.

In Kabbalah, 18 corresponds to the word chai, which stands for "life". And that is exactly what this year is all about, according to the festival flyer. Under the title "Jewish. Now!", the festival is focusing in particular on the very lively present.

More info: www.juedische-woche-dresden.de
 

Thirty cultural practitioners from Bern applied for the two grants, each worth CHF 18,000, for a stay in New York from February to July 2015. Together with the Städtekonferenz Kultur (SKK), the City of Bern offered a grant of CHF 4,500 for a three-month stay in Genoa from March to May 2015 and a grant of CHF 9,000 for a six-month stay in Cairo from February to June 2015. Five applications were received for Genoa and three for Cairo. The Cultural Affairs Division and representatives of the cultural promotion commissions awarded the Genoa scholarship to the musician Karin Jampen

Rico Baumann works as a drummer with musicians and bands of various styles such as Baze, King Pepe, Don Li and the Swiss Jazz Orchestra and travels Europe, America and Asia with the jazz bands Le Rex, Der Wawawa, Weird Beard and European Jazz Orchestra. As a producer and composer, Rico Baumann runs the avant-garde beat duo KG & Morricone and is attracting international attention with his new synth-pop band True.

Karin Jampen is a freelance musician and music educator and teaches at the Bern Conservatory Music School. As a pianist with a diverse repertoire ranging from baroque to contemporary, experimental music, she performs on various platforms. She is also the initiator of the interdisciplinary music performance "Lines & Clusters" (2011) and the concert project "Schichtwerk - SchlagzeugPianoComputer" (2012).

The two want to explore how computer science can help musicology to recognize musically relevant structures, what tasks the computer can take on and whether new connections can be discovered by visualizing the harmonies.

Meinard Müller, who has already worked on similar topics at Saarland University's Computer Science Cluster of Excellence, will use signal processing methods. Audio data will be used to record and graphically process changes in harmonies. The researchers have published the results of their collaboration to date in the renowned Journal of New Music Research.

Musicologist Kleinertz is interested in when, for example, the complexity in Beethoven's piano sonatas increases and when he deviates from conventions. In Wagner's operas, on the other hand, mood changes play a central role. It will be interesting to find out whether the digital analyses lead to new cross-references that have not yet been recognized in the approximately 16-hour work through pure listening or score reading.

With the new digital tools that are to be developed in the research project, the musicologist also wants to be able to better interpret pieces that have so far eluded harmonic analysis.

The German Research Foundation is funding the joint project between musicology and computer science with a total of 540,000 euros over three years. Researchers at Saarland University and Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg will each receive half of the funding.
 

The Center for Cultural Management (ZKM) at the ZHAW School of Management and Law has conducted an empirical study to collect relevant data and development scenarios for Winterthur and the region for the first time. According to the press release, the great opportunity for Winterthur and the region lies in stronger networking between the various submarkets of culture and the creative industries.

Winterthur's size favors independent developments that can be used more economically. This requires innovative ideas and a focus on potential customers and clients.

The study was commissioned by the City of Winterthur, the Winterthur Region Location Promotion Agency and the Office of Economy and Labor of the Canton of Zurich. The publisher is the Center for Cultural Management at the ZHAW School of Management and Law. The study is based on statistical structural data from the 2008 business census.

Based on this, stakeholders and companies from the various submarkets of the cultural and creative industries in Winterthur and the region were asked about their working methods, experiences and assessments by means of a quantitative online survey, expert interviews and focus group discussions.

Download the study:
www.sml.zhaw.ch/fileadmin/user_upload/management/zkm/forschung/pdf/Studie_KuWi.pdf

Born in 1965, Martin Jann studied law at the University of Bern. He has acquired extensive knowledge in cultural, political and financial areas through several additional studies, including strategic communication, urban identity and design as well as spatial development at ETH Zurich.

Jann was Managing Director of the Swiss Booksellers and Publishers Association for nine years. He then worked at ETH Zurich in the Department of Architecture, and from 2010 to 2013 he was Managing Director of the International Building Exhibition IBA Basel 2020. He also managed various projects in the fields of design, theater and exhibitions.

Martin Jann will take up his position as the new Head of Cultural Promotion on September 1, 2014. Nathalie Unternährer is moving the center of her life and work to Basel for family reasons.
 

The second prize was awarded to Min-Jun Kim from Korea. The first prize is endowed with 6000 euros, the second with 3500 euros and the third with 2000 euros. The competition, founded by pianist Svetlana Eganian, was held for the sixth time.

The president of the jury is Michel Dalberto. Other members are Akemi Alink-Yamamoto, Alain Lompech, Elena Rozanova, Philippe Raskin and Thomas Herbut, who is also the teacher of the two HKB students.

In 2013, pianist Pavel Yeletskiy completed his Master of Arts in Specialized Music Performance in Bern - the HKB's highest course in the field of music - and won the 2013 Eduard Tschumi Prize, which is awarded annually for the best soloist examinations at the HKB.