As announced by the Executive Board, Pedro Zimmermann is leaving the company after six years of successful work. Ensemble Corund. The advertisement for the position of Managing Director produced many qualified candidates. The Board of Directors has now appointed singer and manager Harald Schneider as Managing Director as of January 1, 2014. Schneider has worked for many years as managing director, manager and director for orchestras such as the Basel Sinfonietta, the Hamburg State Opera Orchestra and the Freiburg Philharmonic Orchestra. However, his first love is vocal music and he brings with him a wealth of knowledge in the field of choral literature and professional choral music, according to the press release.

The Ensemble Corund was founded in 1993 as a professional vocal ensemble and has been directed by Stephen Smith ever since.
 

According to an announcement from the Bern University of the Arts (HKB), five Swiss formations have made it through from almost two hundred applications: The Colin Vallon Trio, the duo Andreas Schaerer and Lucas Niggli, pommelHORSE, Rom-Schaerer-Eberle and A.Spell are not only based in Bern, but the majority of the bands are also HKB graduates and HKB lecturers.

Jazzahead is the world's most important jazz music trade fair and will be held in Bremen for the ninth time in 2014. In addition to the trade program, there will be a showcase festival with 44 concerts. The European Jazz Meeting presents 18 selected bands from all over Europe (excluding Germany) on April 26, 2014.

Born in Karlstad in 1922, Edlund was a student of Ina Lohr in Basel. He later taught at the Royal School of Music in Stockholm. He became a member of the Swedish Academy of Music in 1975.

Edlund was primarily known as an extremely prolific composer of choral works, some of which have found their way into the official hymnal of the Church of Sweden.

Lillian Boutté, the grande dame of New Orleans jazz, funk founder Pee Wee Ellis and blues icon Ron Thompson will be performing. English piano virtuoso Simon Holliday and a selection of international jazz stars, including Evan Christopher, Don Vappie and Patrick Artero, will close the festival.

The Blues & Jazz Sessions Berne 2014 are being organized by Nicole Wälti, who co-organized the Jazz Tage Lenk for many years, and her partner Mike Grossenbacher, who is also a musician himself.

Tickets will be available from January 10, 2014 via the Kursaal Bern website.

Born in Lyon in 1988, cellist Astrig Siranossian passed the entrance exam to the Conservatoire National de Lyon at the age of eight and studied with Patrick Gabard and later with Yvan Chiffoleau at the Conservatoire National Supérieur Musique et Danse de Lyon.

This was followed by a move to Switzerland and a Master's degree with Ivan Monighetti at the Basel University of Music, which she has just completed with distinction.

The competition is organized by the Department of Cello and Double Bass at the Academy of Music in Krakow. The jury is under the honorary patronage of Krzysztof Penderecki and is chaired by Zdzisław Łapiński. The first prize is endowed with 40,000 zlotys (12,000 Swiss francs).

Between 1940 and 1960, the folklorist Hanny Christen (1899-1976) traveled through German-speaking Switzerland and compiled her huge collection of folk melodies. On the one hand, older minstrels played or sang to her, which she then wrote down in her little notebooks; on the other hand, she was sometimes allowed to copy entire dance books of the minstrels. As many of these musicians were already between sixty and eighty years old at the time, this collection goes back well into the 19th century.

Under the patronage of the Society for Folk Music in Switzerland (GVS) and under the direction of Fabian Müller, a team of authors worked for around a decade on the publication of this collection, which was found in the estate of Hanny Christen. In 2002 it was published as an encyclopaedia in 10 volumes with around 12,000 melodies, extensive illustrations and an additional index volume.

The publisher, the Society for Folk Music in Switzerland, and the Mülirad publishing house are now offering the complete edition at a particularly attractive price:

All 10 volumes + index volume: instead of Fr. 598.- only Fr. 200.-
Individual volumes CHF 30 each Volume IX out of print! 

Volume I: Zurich, Schaffhausen, St. Gallen I, (with extensive information on the collection, on Hanny Christen and on Swiss folk music in general)
Volume II: St. Gallen II, Graubünden, Ticino
Volume III: Appenzell
Volume IV: Aargau, Basel I
Volume V: Basel II, Law
Volume VI: Fribourg, Valais, Bern I
Volume VII: Bern II, Solothurn
Volume VIII: Zug, Lucerne, Uri I
Volume IX: Uri II, Schwyz, Unterwalden I
Volume X: Unterwalden II, Glarus
Volume R: Index volume

The Cultural Promotion of the Canton of St.Gallen awards annual grants to artists. The grants support artists in the fields of applied and visual arts, literature, music, theater and dance with a budget-independent, fixed contribution. The support is intended to give artists the time they need to develop their ideas, projects or works or to further develop their artistic activities.

It is also possible to submit an individually tailored further education idea that includes a special residency or stage that specifically promotes further development. The work grants are intended to enable projects that give new impetus to artistic work or offer the opportunity to try out other forms of collaboration and encounters.

An additional funding opportunity is a stay in the studio apartment in Rome, which is now being 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.

More info: www.sg.ch/home/kultur/foerderung/beitraege.html

As announced by the company, Javier Hagen was elected by the General Meeting of Shareholders in Bern on December 15. Swiss Society for New Music (SGNM) - of the Swiss section of the International Society for New Music (IGNM) - as the new President. Hagen succeeds Nicolas Farine, who will continue to serve as Vice President of the SGNM. Max E. Keller (Secretary), Pierre-Alain Monot and Egidius Streiff will also join the SGNM Board.

Javier Hagen is a singer and composer, president of the IGNM-VS (International Society for New Music Section Valais), founder of the festival for new music Forum : : Valais, board member of Swissfestivals and with UMS 'n JIP one of the most active ensembles for contemporary new music. In 2013, he was awarded the Culture Prize of the Canton of Valais.

Cellier, an amateur organist, originally worked in private industry as an accountant and salesman. This led to his contacts in Eastern Europe.

In the 1960s, he traveled with his wife Catherine to the then still inaccessible countries of Eastern and Southern Europe and documented the local folk music with tape and camera.

As promoter of the Bulgarian women's choir "Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares", he was awarded a Grammy in 1990. In 2012, his work was also portrayed with critical undertones in the documentary "Balkan Melody".

Recorded in a Lausanne church, Cellier and Zamfir's "Flûte de pan et orgue" embodies a piece of popular music history from the 1970s. It has sold over 1.5 million copies and triggered a boom in pan flute music and Eastern European folklore in Switzerland.

Doctoral candidates who completed their doctorate between January 1, 2012 and December 31, 2013 (including the defense) are eligible to apply.

They must also be Swiss citizens or have completed their doctorate at a Swiss institution or make a relevant contribution to Swiss music history with their dissertation; citizenship and academic affiliation are irrelevant.

Applications will be accepted by the SMG office until February 28, 2014; electronic applications can be sent to the secretary Benedict Zemp. The prize is endowed with CHF 10,000.

More info: www.smg-ssm.ch

Johanna Wanka remains Minister for Education and Research. She will continue to be responsible for major model projects in cultural education, writes the German Cultural Council. Dorothee Bär, who headed the Digital Agenda working group during the coalition negotiations on the CDU/CSU side, will become State Secretary for Digital Affairs. Maria Böhmer, previously Minister of State for Integration at the Federal Chancellery, will become Minister of State for Culture at the Federal Foreign Office.

There will be no actual Federal Ministry of Culture in the new federal government. A number of federal ministries and the Federal Chancellery will be responsible for cultural policy. In addition to the Federal Chancellery, cultural policy will be actively pursued over the next four years, particularly in the Ministries of Foreign Affairs, Education, Economics, Labor and Justice.

The agreement regulates the license remuneration of authors and their publishers for the use of their musical repertoire in four future tariffs: individual events with live music (U-V) or sound carrier reproduction (M-V) as well as the use of music in music pubs (M-CD II 1) or clubs and discotheques (M-CD II 2).

The newly agreed tariff structure is linear, i.e. the larger the event area and the higher the admission fee, the higher the copyright remuneration that the organizer must pay. Concert events are not affected by the structural reform. A separate tariff has applied to them since 2010.

More info: www.gema.de/veranstaltungstarife

On the album released on the Heidelberg label Note1, Michael Form and Dirk Börner group movements from Bach's works into six new recorder sonatas.

The recorder player Michael Form is a member of various ensembles. At the HKB, together with the harpsichordist Dirk Börner, who teaches in Bern and Lyon, he supervised the research project on the relationship between dance and music with Marin Marais.

The document was discovered by an employee of the Leipzig Bach Archive in Döbeln. The letter from a Bach pupil proves that the composer largely withdrew from his duties as cantor and director of church music in the later years of his life. The last phase of the Thomaskantor's life has remained largely in the dark until now.

The discovery was made by private lecturer Michael Maul in the final stage of the research project "Systematic exploration of the lives of Bach's St. Thomas Boys Choir", funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation, which began in 2012 to mark the 800th anniversary of the St. Thomas Choir.

The competition is aimed at young, up-and-coming artists who develop a project on the theme of "Psyche" alone, in pairs or in threes. "Psyche" is the general motto of Lucerne Festival 2014, which will take place from August 15 to September 14. The violinist Midori and the soprano Barbara Hannigan will act as "artiste etoile", while the Korean Unsuk Chin and the Austrian Johannes Maria Staud will be "composer-in-residence".

This year, clarinetist Nils Fischer and light artist Kurt Laurenz Theinert created the first soundzzz project under the motto "Recode Revolution" in the "Revolution" exhibition at the Lucerne Art Museum. The museum space, exhibits and audience served as a projection surface for them - and thus became part of a light and sound spectacle. Numerous improvisation artists from Lucerne took part in the grand finale on September 13: dancers, performers and musicians.

The project now selected by the jury will be realized during the Lucerne Festival in summer 2014 in the exhibitions at the Lucerne Art Museum. The deadline for applications is Friday, February 14, 2014.

More info at www.lucernefestival.ch/en/lucerne_festival_academy/soundzz_2014/