Music publishers in Germany are countering the growing competition from publications on the Internet, which often show little publishing commitment, with high quality, emphasized Winfried Jacobs, Chairman of the DMV's E-Music Committee, at the award ceremony. The growing number of educational literature that includes new forms of music-making, such as beatboxing, is also particularly pleasing.

The jury, consisting of five representatives from the fields of design, musicology, sheet music trade and music journalism, had to choose from 72 submissions. All submitted works were judged according to the following criteria:

1. Graphic and editorial overall impression, whereby an editorial claim must also be fulfilled
2. Special publishing achievement or idea
3. Correctness and graphic quality of the music (engraving, typography, electronic notation, calligraphy)
4. Cover design, title page, page layout
5. Printing, paper, binding

German music retailers stock more than 300,000 editions of sheet music from publishers, with around 5,000 new releases every year.

Manfred Schmitz, Piano - The first way to play by chord symbols, Volume I
AMA Publishing House, Brühl

Instead of the initiative, the committee unanimously adopted a committee motion. This is intended to instruct the Federal Council to submit alternatives to the current levy on blank data carriers to Parliament. This is to take account of the fact that "electronic means are currently available on the market that can easily circumvent this legal obligation".

Suisseculture suspects that the initiative will soon be definitively rejected by the plenary session of the National Council at the request of the WAK. However, the discussion is not yet off the table due to the Commission's motion. However, by demanding that alternatives should not result in any restrictions on remuneration, the National Council's WAK has "clearly rejected the abolition of blank media remuneration without replacement".

Fifty-year-old Ruedi Roth has been a gentle innovator for years as a composer of yodelling songs and is firmly anchored in folk music as an organizer, writes the canton of St. Gallen. He has made a significant contribution to reviving the Bödele dance, which is reminiscent of flamenco.

As the successor to his teacher Willi Valotti, he has been conducting the Wattwil Yodelling Club since 2000. The highlight of Ruedi Roth's career as a composer to date was the 2013 Northeast Switzerland Yodelling Festival in Wattwil. He wrote a mass for this major festival. The prize is endowed with CHF 10,000.

The St. Gallen artist David Bürkler has been awarded the St. Gallen Cultural Foundation's recognition prize "for his extraordinarily precise and substantial work".

Jörg Germann, born in St. Gallen in 1931, holds a doctorate in music and taught German at the cantonal school in Sargans for many years. Last December, he was honored with Serenata of a clown presented his third novel, published by Verlag Johannes Petri in Basel. The two recognition prizes are endowed with CHF 15,000 each.

Younghi Pagh-Paan was born in South Korea in 1945 and came to Freiburg im Breisgau on a scholarship in 1974, where she studied with Klaus Huber, Brian Ferneyhough and Edith Picht-Axenfeld. From 1994 to 2011, she was Professor of Composition at the University of the Arts in Bremen.

Pagh-Paan achieved her breakthrough as a composer with the orchestral work Sori, which was premiered at the Donaueschingen Music Festival in 1980. Since then, her works have been performed at international festivals and she has received commissions from renowned institutions.

Younghi Pagh-Paan's work is characterized by socio-political commitment and the reflection of both Eastern and Western philosophies. The uncompromisingly progressive composer also integrates the tradition and thinking of her East Asian homeland on a musical level.
 

A loud howl, a throaty flute, rhythmic staccato, melodies in rising and falling pitches - the gibbons in the South East Asian jungle sing a song of the most exotic kind at dawn. The territorial morning songs of these great apes are among the most spectacular calls of all mammals.

The special exhibition at the Anthropological Museum of the University of Zurich documents the gibbons, which make up around 70 percent of the great apes with their 19 species, but are threatened with extinction worldwide.

Info:
Opening hours: Tuesday to Sunday, 12:00 - 18:00, admission free,
Museum of Anthropology, University of Zurich, Winterthurerstrasse 190, Irchel site, 8057 Zurich. www.aim.uzh.ch
 

The recorder is still an important entry-level instrument for children. But if they want to play in the school band later on, they have had to change instruments until now. Elody, the electric recorder, which corresponds to an alto recorder in terms of fingering and blowing technique, can now hold its own on rock and pop stages alongside thundering guitars and basses. With a powerful sound and a range of up to three octaves, it can be used in a wide variety of styles - from rock and pop to metal, jazz, blues and folk.

The integrated pickup transforms Elody into an electro-acoustic instrument. Thanks to a specially developed passive cable, it works completely without remote voltage. And the instrument can then be connected to all effect devices and amplifiers via a mono jack plug.

Nik Tarasov, Head of Development at Mollenhauer, emphasizes the user-friendliness and the enormous tonal versatility of the instrument (Sound examplesElody also looks unusual: the atypical, non-round shape is emphasized by various striking metallic designs. Elody costs around 1900 euros. Tarasov comments that they did not want to produce a cheap "gadget", but a high-quality instrument that would be a worthwhile, long-lasting purchase for schools, music schools and bands.

www.elody-flute.com

Over 40 new exhibits, amazing sound spaces, sound sculptures and numerous freehand experiments make the phenomena of sound not only audible. Acoustic vibrations in the air, metal, glass, wood and plastic can also be observed with the eyes and felt as vibrations with the whole body. New sound spaces and unusual sound installations are available.

Photo:zvg

Klankkaatser

For example, there is the Klankkaatser or sound reverberation chamber by Dutchman Hans van Koolwijk. The ten-metre-high egg-shaped room is astonishing: music seems to emerge from nowhere directly in the heads of the listeners, and anyone who climbs a little way up the ladder inside hears their own voice as full and powerful as never before with a reverberation of over ten seconds!

An audio bar does not serve drinks, but sounds. Here you can listen to music over your own bones, make glasses vibrate, turn the bar furniture into instruments and make fire dance to the rhythm of the music. And because music is often also a social interaction, the bartender invites guests to a spontaneous jam session. Other unusual musical instruments include percussion and pump organs, cogwheel and perforated sirens or a giant xylophone ball track, all of which playfully open up completely different possibilities for sound production.

Even if you don't know anything about bells and whistles, this is the right place for you. You can't go wrong when experimenting in the sound worlds! Each exhibit comes with instructions for experimenting and further information.

The exhibition will run at least until summer 2015: Tue-Sun 10-17 h
Technorama website

Nathalie Unternährer has headed the Culture Division of the Department of Education and Culture since January 2013. During this time, she initiated the consultation process and the associated revision of the planning report on cultural promotion, which will be discussed in the Lucerne cantonal parliament this summer.

For family reasons, Nathalie Unternährer will be moving to Basel to live and work. Karin Pauleweit, the responsible head of service at the Department of Education and Culture, would like to take this opportunity to thank Nathalie Unternährer for her dedicated commitment to promoting culture in the canton of Lucerne, writes the canton.
 

With this volume, Carus-Verlag continues its scholarly-critical edition of Reger's complete works for organ. The source situation for the chorale preludes is not quite as complicated as for the larger organ works. Editions that go back more or less directly to the first edition and have not been distorted by "corrective" editorial interventions are still commercially available; modern Urtext editions of some works also exist. Nevertheless, the new edition also offers a masterly editorial achievement here: in addition to the extraordinarily beautiful volume of music with introductory texts to the works, a DVD is also included, which contains not only the musical text of the edition but also the surviving sketches, any engraver's models, the first print (particularly valuable in the case of the individually surviving chorale preludes - usually magazine supplements) and other sources. This allows textual differences in the sense of the critical report to be traced down to the last detail. In addition, there is a wealth of background information on the works, letters, reviews, lexical information on chorales, publishers, performers and even special features, such as the harmonium arrangement of the 30 Little chorale preludes op.135a.

An edition that should set standards for further major editorial projects; the wealth of material and the quality of the sheet music and DVD naturally also explain the high price.

Max Reger, Works Edition, Volume I/4, Choral Preludes, incl. DVD, CV 52.804, € 188.00, Carus-Verlag, Stuttgart 2013

"The visible, itself the hypostasis of music, was now able to emanate musical emanations." Dieter Schnebel wrote this learned sentence, which leads to the center of Christa Brüstle's investigation. Basically, it is about the inclusion of the visual, far removed from opera or music theater, mind you. Concert scenes, the title of the extensive treatise, is ultimately more of an embarrassing solution. For it is not only Mauricio Kagel's "Instrumental Theater" or Hans-Joachim Hespos' concert rituals that are addressed, but also many visual-acoustic variations away from orchestral or ensemble podiums. Christina Kubisch's installations are discussed, as are body performances by the Australian Stelarc and a performance of George Brecht's "Event-Partitur" that Brüstle witnessed in Berlin backyards Water Yam (1959-63).

It is questionable whether the subject area is not too large, whether it can even find a meaningful place in a book. Brüstle answers the latter in the affirmative and thus expects the reader to take quite a detour. In view of the incompatibility of the phenomena, their chronological presentation is not really suitable. The introduction in particular, which deals with the strictly serial phase of the early 1950s, is unconvincing. The extension of serial parameters to spatial properties does touch on the theme of "movement" hinted at in the book's subtitle. But the avant-garde of the 1950s seems to have (still) wanted little to do with the integration of the visible, which increased explosively in the course of the "fringing of the arts" in the 1960s.

Brüstle gets down to business with Mauricio Kagel's "Instrumental Theater", although there is less need for research here than on "Wandelkonzerte", "Interaktion in Konzert und Klangkunst" or "Musik mit Bild - Videokonzerte", the concluding topics of the presentation. Video concerts alone have gained enormously in importance, especially since the 1990s. Brüstle uses Carola Bauckholt's video for In familiar surroundings III for video, cello and (prepared) piano (1994) demonstrates the diverse combination possibilities of the audible and the visible, which allow visual doublings of the acoustic as well as surrealistic episodes or the friction of music with the visible. Further excursions into the multimedia art of Erwin Stache and Susanne Stelzenbach demonstrate how confused, even diffuse, the relationships can be in video art alone.

Brüstle cannot get to grips with such a thematic proliferation in her fundamental approach. She only deals with many works in broad outline, more descriptive than interpretive. In this respect, the 400-page tome Concert Scenes has become more of an opulent collection of material than a facilitator of access to artistic multimedia. However, Brüstle's courage in venturing into this largely unexplored terrain remains unreserved.

Christa Brüstle: Concert Scenes. Movement, Performance, Media. Musik zwischen performativer Expansion und medialer Integration 1950-2000, (=Beihefte zum Archiv für Musikwissenschaft, Vol. 73), 413 p., € 78.00, Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart 2013, ISBN 978-3-515-10397-8

The brass quintet scene is inundated with new arrangements of popular songs and classical highlights, but if you are looking for new original literature for this instrumentation, you have to dig a little deeper - and once again you will find it with Editions Bim. Spanish Dances was awarded first prize by the select jury of the International Trumpet Guild ITG; Stanley Friedman has once again proven that he can not only play the trumpet, but is also a remarkable composer.

The work is divided into three movements, which are strongly reminiscent of the Spanish coloring in Bizet's Carmen remind us. Right at the beginning of the first movement, the Habanera, the famous accompanying motif can be heard in the tuba, the first trumpet slips into the solo role of Carmen and has its own thoughts about love, repeatedly interrupted by isorhythmic passages in the five brass instruments. The Pavane, the second movement, captivates with its variation form and a continuous accelerando. The concluding Bolero plays with the themes of the first two movements in 7/8 time and brings the Spanish triology to a brilliant and virtuoso conclusion.

Stanley Friedman, Spanish Dances for Brass Quintet, score and parts, ENS 174, Fr. 45.00, Editions Bim, Vuarmarens 2012

Much of what the Spanish composer Isaac Albéniz wrote for the piano in his relatively short life belongs in the realm of cultivated salon music. Of course, this does not apply to his masterpiece, the Suite Iberia, which was created during the last years of his life in Paris and Nice.

In this homage to his homeland, which he was no longer to see, Albéniz - not least under the influence of his French composer colleagues - unleashes a pianistic blaze of color that is unparalleled in the piano literature. It should be noted that, conversely Iberia has also rubbed off on many a French master: on Debussy, for example, in his Sérénade interrompueor to Messiaen, who considered the suite to be one of the greatest piano works ever written.

With the Fourth issue Henle-Verlag has now also published the last part of the suite, and in an exemplary manner. In the three concluding pieces, Malaga,Jerez and Eritaña, Albéniz once again pulls out all the stops Iberia are so typical: finely stylized Spanish dance rhythms, dazzling harmonies, long organ dots and dynamics that are differentiated to the extreme. The music is correspondingly complex. However, the editor Norbert Gertsch not only succeeds in eradicating the numerous printing errors and mistakes that haunt the older editions, but also in presenting the musical text, which is littered with many annotations by the composer, in an astonishingly lean and clear manner. This even applies to the final piece Eritaña (An inn near Seville), which is a tour de force for any pianist with its breakneck leaps and incessant voice crossings.

Debussy particularly loved this piece: "Jamais une musique n'atteint des impressions aussi différenciées et aussi colorées et les yeux se ferment comme s'ils étaient aveuglés par ces images toutes trop éclatantes."

Isaac Albéniz, Iberia, Viertes Heft, Urtext edited by Norbert Gertsch, HN 650, € 20.00, G. Henle, Munich 2013

"Je vais m'atteler avec courage à l'orchestration de Ghiselle, tout en faisant aussi autre chose" - with these words, César Franck described his activities in 1890, a sign of his unbroken creativity, despite the late effects of a traffic accident, which would ultimately lead to his death. By "autre chose" he probably meant two cycles of works: a series of over 60 harmonium pieces, published under the title L'Organisteand the Trois Chorals. Even if these - like so many "last works" - are often regarded as the swan song of the suffering composer, who once again soars to the highest compositional perfection and into mystical spheres, it seems to have been a composition commissioned by the publisher Durand, which Franck completed relatively quickly. Autograph fair copies indicate that he was also able to prepare the publication. However, as the first edition only appeared around the turn of the year 1891/92 (i.e. more than a year after Franck's death), it was probably no longer possible for him to correct proofs and supervise the publication.

Friedemann Winklhofer's new edition of the Trois Chorals outlines the genesis of the works in a detailed preface and summarizes the essential findings that Joël-Marie Fauquet compiled in his epochal Franck biography (Fayard, Paris 1999), which unfortunately received relatively little attention in this country. Certain details - some registration issues or the names of the dedicatees, grateful material for the rumor mill - will probably not be conclusively clarified on the basis of the available sources.

For the musical text published here, however, the editor appears to have had access to previously inaccessible autographs of the first and third chorales in addition to the first edition. These allow for various minor additions and corrections to the "known" musical text, such as that presented by Günther Kaunzinger in 1991 for the Vienna Urtext edition (with practically identical pagination, incidentally). For example, the opening semiquaver figures in the A minor chorale are "newly" summarized with legato slurs, which perhaps somewhat relativize the occasionally heard "drumfire" articulation. Further details can be checked with the detailed Critical Report, but do not lead to any really groundbreaking new insights. Interpretative notes, such as a statement on the "eternal" problem of the coupling possibilities of the Récit manual, are only mentioned in the preface, but the actual musical text is then kept neutral and also dispenses with the English registration indications of the first edition or interpretative additions by the editor.

Conclusion: a reliable edition that is up to date with the latest Franck research, with clear and elegant music. And another Franck edition from Bärenreiter has already been announced ...

César Franck, Trois Chorals pour Grand Orgue, edited by Friedemann Winklhofer, HN 975, € 26.00, G. Henle Verlag, Munich 2013

There is often a lack of male voices in choirs. Conversely, female choirs are looking for new heavyweights in their repertoire. This leads publishers to publish works for mixed choir or soloists in a new form. Here are some examples from Bärenreiter.

Vivaldi's famous Gloria was composed in 1716 in the Ospedale della Pietà, an orphanage in Venice, where Vivaldi worked as a caregiver and musician. It is therefore reasonable to assume that it was also performed there, and thus exclusively by children's voices. The arrangement by Malcolm Bruno shows that this masterful composition does not suffer any loss of quality even in the version for equal voices.

The Kyrie for two four-part female choirs and two string groups unfolds its own charm in this arrangement. Combined with the Gloria results to a certain extent in a short measurement setting.

Mozart's universally popular Coronation Mass and the Missa brevis in D for three-part female choir. Such adaptations require expertise and musical sensitivity. Heribert Breuer attempts to preserve the substance of the original versions and at the same time gives them a new sound character.

In the performance history of Pergolesi's Stabat mater there are indications that there were earlier choral performances. The new arrangement by Malcolm Bruno mixes solo aria movements with three-part choruses and movements for three individual voices, with the existing musical material forming the basis for the newly added parts. The repertoire for female choir has thus been extended by another famous work.

Antonio Vivaldi, Gloria RV 589, arranged for choir SSAA by Malcolm Bruno, score BA 8953, € 12.95,Bärenreiter, Kassel 2012
id., Kyrie RV 587, BA 8954, € 12.95

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Missa in C KV 317 "Coronation Mass", arranged for female choir SMA by Heribert Breuer, score, BA 5691, € 30.95, Bärenreiter, Kassel 2013
id., Missa brevis in D KV 194, piano reduction, BA 5690-90, € 8.75

Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, Stabat mater, arranged for female choir SMA by Malcolm Bruno, score, BA 5692, € 24.95, Bärenreiter, Kassel 2013

David Philip Hefti composed this work for the Medea Trio, which premiered the composition on October 16, 2012 at the Wigmore Hall in London. It is intended as a compact, single-movement and bright counterpart to the first piano trio Shadow play conceived. Various impulses lead to points of rest - as an echo, as it were - and develop steadily from the initial stagnation to flowing movement. The subsequent Cantabile passage, taken from his orchestral work Moments lucides as an echo, dissolves into a shadowy conclusion.

The strings are challenged in various exotic playing styles: Tapping, scratching, crunching, "iridescent and hissing pizzicato" (fun to try out!) and flageolet shooting stars. They only get a "real" cantabile without double stops in the aforementioned reminiscence from the orchestral piece. Technically, this one-movement, nine-minute piano trio is not too difficult - for professional musicians, of course, and those with a sense for new sounds!

Because the rhythm is practically never audible, the question arises as to whether scores for the strings would not make more sense than the individual parts. The performers of Lights Hall a lot of pencil work ahead!

David Philip Hefti, Lichter Hall, Trio No. 2 for violin, violoncello and piano, score and parts, GM 1887, Fr. 36.00, Edition Kunzelmann, Adliswil 2012