According to Caiti Hauck, postdoctoral researcher and head of studies at the Institute of Musicology at the University of Bern, the publications show that the history of Swiss choirs not only reveals aspects of musical life. Historical research on choral life in Switzerland also sheds light on socially relevant topics such as political and social life, the role of women and even the establishment of a national unity around the founding of the Swiss federal state.

Hauck's project "CLEFNI - Choral life in the cities of Bern and Fribourg in the long 19th century" was funded from 2019 to 2023 by the European Union's Horizon 2020 program as part of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA).

Julien Cachemaille, the author of the comic, has already made a name for himself with the science comic La course de pirogues He gained experience in this form of knowledge transfer via pile dwellers in the Late Bronze Age. He sees it as an innovative and increasingly popular format of communication. According to Cachemaille, the use of images makes the text more compact and the information can be conveyed more simply and easily.

The links:

Swiss choral life since 1800: music, practice and contexts:
https://books.unibe.ch/index.php/BB/catalog/book/13

Three Swiss choral singers in the 19th century
https://clefni.unibe.ch/index.php/de/2025/03/05/comic-buch

Universal patterns such as the acquisition of basic rhythm and pitch recognition play an important role in musical development in childhood. However, there are also very individual patterns that are based on environmental, educational and innate factors. In order to document these precisely and thus close a gap in research, the research team at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics (MPIEA) has developed the "Child Musicality Screening" as part of a total of three studies.

This method can be used, for example, to recognize developmental trajectories, identify musically gifted children at an earlier stage and specifically promote musical education. The questionnaire was recently published with the study results in the journal PLOS One, where it is available as a free download.

Original publication: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0317962

Over the past year and a half, the Cultural Promotion Commission and the Cultural Office have worked together with Aarau's cultural practitioners to scrutinize existing cultural promotion practices. The focus was on clarifying the questions of what is already working well and where the principles need to be adapted.

Digital projects are now explicitly included in the funding. Experimental, daring projects are also welcome and will be able to obtain advice on feasibility from the cultural office in future. Communication is to be improved: cultural professionals should be able to obtain information more quickly and easily, for example about assistance with the implementation of cultural projects or about alternative funding bodies.

Funding is open to all age groups and will be generally strengthened in terms of communication: in addition to the guidelines in easy/simple language, there will now also be FAQs that answer important questions about funding. As before, only projects that are accessible to the people of Aarau and have a connection to Aarau in terms of content and/or personnel will be supported.

In the documentary "Vracht", the young sailor Rudmer works on a container ship and dreams of becoming a captain himself one day. According to the jury, the interplay between the visual and acoustic levels in the film is perfect. It is an immersive film for the eyes and ears, in which the individual artistic voices of direction, camera, editing and music have become a harmony.

Mirjam Skal, born in 1996, is a freelance media composer from Zurich. She studied composition for film, theater and media at the Zurich University of the Arts and has composed numerous soundtracks for short films, games, commercials and documentaries, for radio and television. In 2021 she was part of the Berlinale Talents. She has been honored with the Zollinger Art Prize, the Rolf-Hans Müller Prize for Best Film Music at the Televisionale Baden-Baden and other awards.

Since 2019, the German Documentary Film Music Prize has been awarded as part of DOK.fest Munich, the largest documentary film festival in Germany. It is sponsored by Versicherungskammer Kultur, is endowed with 5000 euros and is supported by the German Composers' Association.

Alicia Suárez Medina was born in Spain in 1997 and studied at the Conservatorio Superior de Música "Manuel Castillo" in Seville and at the Conservatorio Superior de Castilla y León before joining the Bern University of the Arts. She currently combines her artistic activities with her teaching work in Switzerland. She has been a piano teacher and accompanist at the Oberemmental Music School since 2023 and regularly performs at concerts and festivals in Switzerland, Spain, Germany and France.

The Kiwanis Music Prize is awarded every three years to graduates of the HKB's Master of Arts in Music Pedagogy program who are above average in both artistic and pedagogical terms. Great importance is attached to an exceptionally high level of pedagogical competence in passing on the skills acquired.

The first prize includes prize money of 1500 euros and a production budget of 5000 euros. Echo Theory are the HKB students Erin Torres (Master Specialized Music Performance, specialization Music in Context), Béatrice Garrido (Bachelor Classical Music) and Julian Schletti (Bachelor Sound Arts).

The second prize of 600 euros went to Duo Zwischen from the Stuttgart and Leipzig music academies, the third prize of 200 euros to soloist Tibor Kovács from the Mozarteum Salzburg and the fourth prize of 200 euros to the On5 Quintett from the Nuremberg University of Music.

This year's competition jury consisted of Sonja Stibi, Professor of Music Education at the Munich University of Music, Anja Christina Loosli, Artistic Co-Director of the Schlosskonzerte Thun, and Bernhard Günther, Artistic Director of Wien Modern. The audience was also able to vote online.

Named after the minstrel Hugo von Montfort, the Montforter Zwischentöne international student competition for new concert formats provides a motto and a location each year that the participants have to address in their concepts.

The quintet consists of Guillem Cardona Zaera (trumpet), Joan Pàmies Magrané (trumpet), Maria Servera Monserrat (horn), Xavier Gil Batet (trombone), and Oriol Reverter Curto (tuba) and studies with Anton Kernjak and Claudio Martínez Mehner at the Basel School of Music, Classical Studies.

At the Ljubliana Festival International Competition, it performed in front of a renowned international jury made up of Branimir Slokar, Reinhold Friedrich, Nina Šenk, Radovan Vlatković and Andreas Martin Hofmeir. In addition to these two awards, including prize money, the winning ensemble will have the opportunity to perform in several concerts.

The Cité musicale-Metz comprises the Arsenal concert hall, the Orchestre national de Metz Grand Est and the Établissement public de coopération culturelle (EPCC). Martin will take up her post on July 1, 2025, succeeding Florence Alibert, who has been appointed Cultural Advisor to the French Embassy in Italy and Director of the Institut Français d'Italie.

Daniela Martin, who studied musicology and teaching music and literature, has been Managing Director of the Basel Sinfonietta since 2020. Among other things, she worked for several years in the organization of the Radio-France Montpellier Festival and was General Director of the Ensemble Variances, which she co-founded with composer Thierry Pécou in 2009.

The cellist won the Instrumentalist Award at the Royal Philharmonic Society (RPS) Awards 2025. The RPS Awards have been presented annually since 1989 for live classical music creation in the United Kingdom. In 2014, the prize was awarded to Patricia Kopatchinskaja.

Laura van der Heijden was born in England to Dutch-Swiss parents and made her first public appearance as a cellist at the age of nine. She is a student of the British-Russian cellist Leonid Gorokhov and has regularly taken part in masterclasses with David Geringas, Ralph Kirshbaum and Miklós Perényi. In 2016 she was honored by the Orpheum Foundation in Switzerland. She is involved with the Prince's Foundation for Children & the Arts and the Brighton Youth Orchestra.

Kulukundis comes from a Greek-American shipping family and worked for many years in the New York branch of the family business. He laid the foundations of his collection as a musicology student at Yale University in the 1950s. Even before the donation, Kulukundis loaned his collection to the Bach Archive in Leipzig for academic analysis.

The collection comprises a total of around 1000 documents, mostly music manuscripts, first and early prints and letters from the four Bach sons, who themselves embarked on a career as musicians. There are cimelia such as the long-lost autograph score of the opera Zanaida by Johann Christian Bach, letters from Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach to the Leipzig publisher Breitkopf (with a well-preserved Bach seal) and the first Bach biographer Johann Nikolaus Forkel as well as documents from Johann Christian and Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach, in addition to artistically hand-colored aria collections and family registers from the second half of the 18th century.

With "Förderung konkret", a new handbook is now available that provides guidance on funding practice. According to the canton's press release, a key component is the procedure in addition to the funding requirements and criteria. The most important change is that there are now only two submission deadlines for applications of CHF 10,000 or more - at the end of February and the end of August. Smaller project contributions can still be applied for on an ongoing basis.

The second part of the cultural concept is the "Perspectives" section, which reflects on the focal points of the last cultural concept and contains an overview of the resources used. The second part also captures the voices of various cultural stakeholders. They formulate their perspectives on cultural promotion in the coming years. Pictures by Bühler-based artist Regula Engeler give the publication a further perspective.

More info:
https://ar.ch/schnellzugriff/medienmitteilungen-der-kantonalen-verwaltung/detail/news/das-fuenfte-kulturkonzept-gibt-impulse-fuer-die-zukunft/

Lietha's politically incisive songs and virtuoso music enriched the attitude to life of three generations, writes the canton of Graubünden. As a publisher and passionate book collector, he "made a significant contribution to the preservation of Graubünden's cultural and artistic history".

Walter Lietha, born in Chur and raised for the most part in Graubünden, has written countless dialect songs as an author, poet, interpreter and critic of the times. In the 1980s, he worked with Max Lässer in the Lietha-Lässer band, which included Corin Curschellas, Joel Reiff, Sal Celli and Pedro Haldemann. Today he is also active as an antiquarian bookseller and director of Calven Verlag in Chur, and has been running his own antiquarian bookshop "Das Narrenschiff" for several years.

The jazz musician Rolf Caflisch receives a recognition award. He is "a virtuoso jazz drummer and a gifted string-puller of jazz in Graubünden". Thanks to him, there is "jazz from and for Chur and Graubünden that shines far beyond the canton". Sponsorship awards go to folk musician Anita Dachauer, performer Livia Rita Heim and pianist, composer, singer and performer Cinzia Regensburger, among others.

Born in 1963, Jojo Mayer is largely self-taught. He received his first permanent engagement with Monty Alexander's band at the age of 18 and toured extensively throughout Europe at jazz festivals such as Montreux, Nice and Athens. This career start led to collaborations with jazz greats such as Dizzy Gillespie and Nina Simone. In 1991, he moved to New York and shortly afterwards became a member of the experimental rock band Screaming Headless Torsos.

Jojo Mayer later led the movement of an entire generation of drummers who recreated machine sounds on acoustic instruments. In his career, he has "explored the limits of what can be played, renewed percussion playing and thereby established himself as one of the most innovative and globally influential percussionists of his generation", writes the Canton of Zurich.

A 2025 Medal of Honor will also be awarded to the literary figure Ilma Rakusa and the actress Heidi Diggelmann. The Golden Medal of Honor is awarded "in recognition of the life's work of an exceptional literary figure and intellectual who has left her mark on Zurich's cultural landscape and will continue to do so".

With this program, the Confederation is implementing the requirement of Art. 67a para. 3 of the Federal Constitution that musically talented people are to receive special support. In collaboration with the Appenzell music school and a representative of the music department of the St. Antonius Appenzell grammar school, the cultural office has designed the program for the canton and is now implementing it, according to a press release.

The grants are between CHF 1,000 and 2,500 per year, depending on the level of support a talent is at. The grants are linked to requirements. For example, the recipients must take additional lessons in their main subject and additional lessons in music theory or ensemble playing.

The program will be implemented from the 2025/2026 school year and is designed in such a way that the beneficiaries can attend as many local events as possible. Details of the program can be found online at www.ai.ch/junge-talente-musik.

Born in Germany in 1971, Markus Poschner has been Chief Conductor of the Orchestra della Svizzera italiana since 2015 and Chief Conductor of the Bruckner Orchestra Linz since 2017. From this year, he will lead the Basel Symphony Orchestra as chief conductor. He has signed a five-year contract. He will not extend his contract with the Bruckner Orchestra, which runs until 2027. At the start of the 2027/28 season, he will also become Principal Conductor of the Utah Symphony Orchestra.

The RSO Vienna emerged from the Great Orchestra of the Austrian Radio in 1969. Marin Alsop has been Chief Conductor since September 2019. The orchestra is currently recording complete editions of Anton Bruckner's symphonies (with Markus Poschner) and all solo concertos by Mozart, Saint-Saëns and Goltermann in cooperation with the Swiss Orpheum Foundation for the Promotion of Musical Talent.