After a first edition, Salto! is preparing for its second season. The initiative, originally supported by a network of Valais concert halls for contemporary music, will be continued by the Valais Department of Culture in collaboration with the School of Jazz and Contemporary Music (EJMA-Valais).

The aim of this biennial support program, which is aimed at musicians and training courses in the field of contemporary music in Valais, is to develop professional skills while encouraging collaboration between the canton's cultural players and venues. Interested musicians and bands from Valais can apply until May 31, 2024.

On the one hand, the recommendations for the funding bodies aim to take the existing guideline tariffs into account when assessing funding applications and to apply them to all phases of cultural creation. Secondly, the professional associations should provide information on appropriate compensation for creative artists and raise awareness.

In 2021, the National Cultural Dialogue set up a working group on the topic of "Compensation for artists". Its aim was to develop a coherent practice for the compensation of artists by the municipalities, cities, cantons and the federal government that takes into account the interests of artists and their entitlement to appropriate compensation.

Link to the recommendations

Phoebe Bognár, born in Australia in 1997, studied at the Hochschule für Musik Basel and the International Ensemble Modern Academy (IEMA), among others. Her musical practice is characterized by a variety of genres, art forms and disciplines, including gestures, voice, various flutes, theater and electronics.

Santiago Villar Martín was born in Spain in 1998. He studied at the Frederyk Chopin University of Music in Warsaw and currently at the Hochschule für Musik Basel. Villar Martín has already performed with ensembles such as Studio Musik Fabrik and the Basel Sinfonietta. He is also a co-founder of the experimental ICE 3 Ensemble and the Ex-Sentia Ensemble.

Born in Portugal in 1999, Francisco Morais Fernandes is currently completing his master's degree at the Bern University of the Arts (HKB). He has attended master classes with Katia Veekmans and Piotr Anderszewski, among others. Morais Fernandes is active as a soloist, ensemble and orchestral musician as well as a conductor.

Launched in 2015, the Fritz Gerber Award is awarded three times a year. The prize money amounts to CHF 10,000 each and also enables participation in the Lucerne Festival Academy in the amount of CHF 10,000 each. Candidates must have Swiss citizenship or have lived in Switzerland for at least three years. The competition is organized by the Lucerne Festival Academy. The jury is made up of Michael Haefliger, Director of the Lucerne Festival, and the composer and conductor Heinz Holliger.

All of the Zurich Jazz Orchestra's (ZJO) rehearsals, composition and administrative work now take place in the former craftsman's workshop at Heinrichstrasse 69. Thanks to a corresponding conversion, the Jazzhaus now has a two-storey rehearsal room, two smaller music rooms, recording facilities and a further room that serves as an office and meeting place. The premises can also be rented by other musicians, ensembles, bands and productions outside of rehearsals.

The costs for the renovation of the Jazzhaus amount to around 1.6 million francs. The Zurich Jazz Orchestra raised the majority of these funds itself: around 500,000 francs came from charitable foundations and private individuals, 380,000 francs from the Canton of Zurich's cultural fund and 125,000 francs from the City of Zurich. The remaining funds for the renovation were contributed by the Dr. Stephan à Porta Foundation.

Open day: Sunday, April 21, 2024, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., no registration required.

Ingrid Frauchiger studied singing and piano in Freiburg i. Br. As a concert and oratorio singer, she also championed Renaissance music (in historical performance practice) and New Music. She sang over 50 world premieres and many composers wrote new works for her, including Isang Yun, Heinz Holliger, Jürg Wyttenbach, Hans Ulrich Lehmann, Armin Schibler and Norbert Moret. She was also open to musical experiments and improvisations in collaboration with jazz musicians such as Pierre Favre, Jonas Helborg, Runo Erikson and David Dramm.

From 1972 she was professor of singing at the HMT Bern. Master classes took her to the Menuhin Academy in Gstaad and various American universities, among others. In 1986 she was Visiting Professor at the University of California (UCSB).

The Federal Folk Music Festival (EVMF) is the largest and most important folk music event in Switzerland. Every four years, the festival brings together over 1,100 musicians from all genres and around 50,000 to 60,000 visitors from all over Switzerland. The focus is on making music together and cultivating traditions.

In addition to the free music-making, there will also be musical performances throughout Altstätt town center, which will be judged by experts. Around 230 musical performances, including around 50 performances by young musicians, and a parade await the guests.

In the run-up to the EVMF, various events and activities will take place throughout the St. Gallen Rhine Valley. The region will also be involved during the festival: The car and touring car logistics on the Allmend in Altstätten will be used as a parking space for the numerous motorhomes and campers expected.

The actress Ursina Lardi will be honored with the Chur Culture Prize 2024, endowed with 8,000 francs. In addition to Estrada, performer Martha Mutapay and the collective Piera Buchli & Luc Isenschmid will also receive a sponsorship award. The recognition and sponsorship prizes are endowed with CHF 4,000 each.

The bass clarinettist Marc Lardon was born in Chur. He is co-founder and director of Soundhund - a concert series for improvised and experimental music in Chur. After studying in Chur and Amsterdam, he is active as a performer and improviser. He is currently pursuing solo projects and is part of the duos Splitter (with Andreas Glauser, Zurich), Pol (with Daniel Sailer, Graubünden) and Kontrabach (also with Daniel Sailer).

Christian Klucker is a freelance choir conductor. He teaches at the Bündner Kantonsschule and conducts the vocal ensemble incantanti. In 2019, Klucker was a guest conductor at the Basel University of Music and is still a guest conductor with the Swiss Youth Choir. He was also awarded a special prize for best conductor at the international choir competition in Assisi in 2017.

Jamira Estrada, born 1998 in Chur, lives and works as a composer, performer of electronic music and DJ in Zurich. While currently completing her bachelor's degree in electroacoustic composition and classical music at the Zurich University of the Arts, Jamira is working on her own projects and collaborating with various artists from different disciplines such as visual arts, film and dance.

The canton writes in the explanatory report that music schools are currently only barely regulated in the Education Act. They are managed and financed independently by the local communities. These regulate the employment of music school teachers, the cost sharing of parents or the organizational allocation of the music school itself. During the drafting of the bill, various options for increased coordination were examined with the music school directors and in the project committees.

Due to the different starting positions of the municipalities, the canton intends to retain the current model. The employment conditions for music school teachers are now to be standardized at cantonal level, for which a separate draft (school staff ordinance or extended teaching staff ordinance) will be drawn up.

More info: https://www.ow.ch/aktuellesinformationen/113116

The survey is being conducted for the first time. The 5,000 people contacted by post can complete the questionnaire online. Participation is voluntary. The evaluation is anonymous. It is not possible to draw conclusions about the individual person. The sample is selected randomly from the population register. The survey is conducted by Interface Politikstudien on behalf of the Basel-Stadt Department of Culture. 10 museum passes will be raffled off among the participants in the survey.

The population's assessment will be incorporated into the development of the new cultural mission statement. With the cantonal cultural mission statement, the cantonal government sets out the cultural policy guidelines for the years 2026 to 2031. Another basis is a comprehensive impact analysis that retrospectively examines the implementation of the cultural mission statement from 2020 to 2025. The results will be published as part of Basel-Stadt's new cultural mission statement.

Co-operative Director and Chief Conductor of the Opera Nicholas Carter will step down in summer 2025 after four years in Bern. The Russian conductor Alevtina Ioffe has been appointed as the opera's new chief conductor from summer 2025. Her contract begins in summer 2025 and is initially for four years. She has lived in Berlin since 2022 and conducts regularly at the Komische Oper Berlin, Staatstheater Stuttgart and Gothenburg Opera.

With the new ballet production On the move she introduced herself to the Zurich Opera House audience in December 2022. Born in Moscow, Alevtina Ioffe studied choral conducting, classical singing and piano and graduated from the Moscow Conservatory under Vladimir Ponkin. For ten years, until 2021, she was music director of the State Opera and Ballet Theater for Young Audiences "Natalia Sats" in Moscow. Between February 2021 and July 2022 she was Music Director of the Mikhailovsky Theater in St. Petersburg.

By the end of February 2024, Bühnen Bern had already recorded around 14,000 more admissions than at the same time last year. This significantly exceeds even the pre-corona level, according to the press release.

Michael Boder, born in Darmstadt in 1958, began his career as assistant to Michael Gielen at the Frankfurt Opera. From 2008 to 2012, he was music director at the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona, and from 2012 to 2016, he was chief conductor of the Royal Danish Theater and the Royal Copenhagen Orchestra. He is considered a specialist in 20th and 21st century music and has conducted world premieres of works by Georg Friedrich Haas, Friedrich Cerha, Hans Werner Henze, Krzysztof Penderecki, Manfred Trojahn and Aribert Reimann, among others.

The trio studies with Claudio Martínez Mehner. Winning the competition includes their debut at Wigmore Hall on June 19, 2024 as well as further appearances at festivals and concert series in the UK. Ayla Şahin, the violinist of the trio, studies with Rainer Schmidt and Alina Pogostkina, Finn Mannion (cello) with Danjulo Ishizaka and pianist Mar Valor with Zoltán Fejérvári.

Founded in 1910, the Royal Over-Seas League is a non-profit private members' club. Established in 1952, its annual ROSL music competition offers prizes worth more than £75,000. The competition is open to nationals of the UK, current and former Commonwealth countries, the USA, all EU and EEA countries and Switzerland. At least one member of an ensemble must be from the UK or Commonwealth.

Measures were identified and developed during the preparation of the candidature. For example, actions are planned to improve the networking of the yodelling world throughout Switzerland. New training and further education courses are to be developed and young talent promoted. Measures are also planned to raise public awareness, better document the tradition and expand research into this singing practice.

Yodelling is widespread in Switzerland and enjoys unbroken popularity, writes the Federal Department of Home Affairs. The tradition is passed on in very different ways: within families, in yodeling clubs and at schools or simply among singers.

Most of the more than 12,000 yodellers in Switzerland belong to one of the 780 groups of the Swiss Yodelling Association. Yodelling is also performed informally and spontaneously outside of this organization. Yodelling is a very lively tradition that is also inspiring more and more professional musicians to reinterpret the song in their compositions.

More info:
https://www.bak.admin.ch/bak/de/home/aktuelles/nsb-news.msg-id-100587.html

Born in Trier, guitarist and composer Henrik Dewes studied guitar in Basel with Pablo Márquez, Andreas von Wangenheim and Maurizio Grandinetti as well as composition with Johannes Caspar Walter and Bettina Skrzypczak. He also completed a teaching degree in school music and German studies in Karlsruhe. He performs regularly as a duo with Tobias Klich and with the singer Cosima Büsing. He also performs with Borsch4Breakfast across the diverse styles of Eastern European music. His latest ensemble Metafora performs classical romantic orchestral pieces in a special way: "Umverpackt" arranged for guitars, cello and clarinet. As a lecturer, Henrik Dewes teaches guitar at the Zurich and Basel Universities of Teacher Education in the field of music, specializing in instrumental pedagogy.

Since its founding in 1975, the German Music Competition has been the national competition with the broadest range of support for young professional musicians. It is one of a total of 13 funding projects of the German Music Council and is held annually in alternating categories between Bonn and another German city.

Igor Ozim was born in Ljubljana (Slovenia) in 1931 and studied with Max Rostal in London, where he also won the Carl Flesch Prize in 1951. He won the ARD competition in 1953. As one of the most sought-after violin teachers in Europe and worldwide, he taught at the Hochschule für Musik in Cologne, the Hochschule für Musik in Bern and, from 2002, at the Mozarteum Salzburg.

His repertoire includes around 60 violin concertos and numerous chamber music works. Many contemporary compositions that he has premiered are dedicated to him. His concerts have brought him together with major international orchestras such as the Berlin Philharmonic, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the London Symphony Orchestra, the Warsaw Philharmonic, the BBC Orchestra and numerous radio orchestras. His students in Bern include Patricia Kopatchinskaja, Gwendolyn Masin and Primož Novšak.