Kaos Protokoll's second album with the tongue-twisting title Questclamationmarks was just three years ago, but a lot has changed in the band since then: Mark Stucki has been replaced on saxophone by Simon Spiess and keyboardist Luzius Schuler is also new. As a result, the trio has grown into a quartet. According to press material, the new album, Everyone Nowhere, between "post-future beats" and "modern spiritual jazz". The line-up changes have not completely overturned the sound of Kaos Protokoll, but have left an audible mark: The music seems more meditative and spherical. The first track is already a sign of this, Flash Frame, which combines muscular rhythms with drawn-out sounds of the bass clarinet and frenetic keyboard playing - and seems as cool as it is bold.

Kaos Protokoll repeatedly show their preference for electronic music. This lends the songs penned by bassist Benedikt Wieland a certain aloofness. However, melancholy moments constantly break through it. The formation particularly appreciates dealing with contrasts: While Waiting room oscillates between quiet melancholy and noise elements, works its way The Cosmos In My Backyard sometimes free jazz, sometimes elegiac art rock. As the four musicians are able to contrast abstract soundscapes almost incessantly with gentle melodies, the record gains both sharpness and tension. On the eight new songs, Kaos Protokoll constantly give free rein to their ideas. This is wild and curious, but not entirely coherent. The experiment of ending the album with a kind of rap called SunRaColtraneSolar is a daring decision, but the only non-instrumental number turns out to be a charming foreign body.
 

In cooperation with the Lucerne School of Business, Guidle has published the practical handbook Cultural professionals and the digital transformation has been published. It provides background knowledge and solutions to questions about the right content strategy, the right channels, building a community and other topics relating to social media. The authors, Barbara Kummler, lecturer at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, and publicist Clemens Maria Schuster, entrepreneur and lecturer at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, provide many valuable tips and practical instructions. 

The 180-page guide is available as a paperback for CHF 39 (plus shipping) or as a free PDF version at: www.guidle.com/de/buch-bestellen
A reading sample and the table of contents are also available on this website.

According to the German Music Industry Association (BVMI), the number of audio streams grew by a good 40 percent year-on-year in 2018 to a total of 79.5 billion, reaching a new all-time high. Although 48.2 million CDs were sold, 23% fewer than in 2018, the compact disc was still the second most important market segment in Germany in the year 36 following its market launch, as shown by fans' purchasing behavior.

Downloads ranked third with 49 million units, including 7.5 million albums and 41.5 million individual tracks. Vinyl records sold a total of 3 million units last year, a slight decline of 7 percent, but vinyl still clearly has its fans in the niche market and therefore also plays a role for many artists when planning their release formats.

Physical music videos (DVD/Blu-ray) also made it into the top 5 most used or sold music formats with 2.6 million units sold. - This preliminary sales trend calculation covers the number of units purchased and streamed in 2018. The BVMI is expected to report the overall market development based on sales at the beginning of March 2019.

According to the press release from the University of Applied Sciences Würzburg-Schweinfurt, the focus is on the activation of brain functions that are impaired in old-age depression. Together with 13 European partners from the university, clinical and industrial sectors, interdisciplinary work is being carried out in the fields of neuroscience (University of Geneva, Reha Rheinfelden), gerontopsychiatry (University of Würzburg, University of Tours, University Hospital Tours), music intervention (University of Cambridge, University of Jyväskylä, University of Aalborg, Würzburg-Schweinfurt University of Applied Sciences) on this development. A Finnish and a French small and medium-sized enterprise and an IT engineering team (University of Barcelona, University of Genoa, FHWS, University of Augsburg) are also involved.

The Würzburg-Schweinfurt University of Applied Sciences is also involved in a project investigating interventions for people living with dementia. From May 2019 to April 2023, a training program for family caregivers of people with dementia to learn and apply music interventions in home care will be developed and its effectiveness tested. The relevant consortium consists of the University of Melbourne (consortium leader), Anglia Ruskin University Cambridge, FHWS, Oslo University of Music and the University of Krakow. Thomas Wosch (Faculty of Applied Social Sciences at the University of Applied Sciences Würzburg-Schweinfurt) can provide further information.
 

The resolution is based on the motion "For the future of music in Brandenburg: Adequate wages for freelance musicians and vocal soloists" by Ulrike Liedtke, cultural policy spokesperson for the SPD parliamentary group and Vice President of the German Music Council. It was adopted after intensive discussions between the four parliamentary groups of the CDU, SPD, Die Linke and Bündnis 90/Die Grünen. From 2020, the minimum fee standards will apply to state-funded projects, and from 2021, institutionally funded orchestras will also be obliged to comply with the minimum standard when engaging temporary staff.

Christian Höppner, Secretary General of the German Music Council, welcomes the decision. He sees it as a forward-looking signal to strengthen the economic framework conditions for freelance musicians. The situation of freelance creatives in artistic and music education professions is "predominantly disastrous in the fourth strongest industrial nation in the world". The current decision of the Brandenburg state parliament in favor of freelancers is "a blueprint for the other state parliaments to guarantee social security for artists that does not lead to poverty in old age."

Under the direction of Lawrence Foster, several soloists will perform with the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra at the award ceremony - for example Nelson Freire (Lifetime Achievement Award), Javier Perianes (Artist of the Year), Matko Smolcic (Young Artist of the Year), Eva Gevorgyan (Discovery Award) and Stephen Waarts (Orchestra Award).

This year's winner of the ICMA "Special Achievement Award" is Numa Bischof Ullmann, who as artistic director of the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra "has shaped the Swiss orchestral scene for many years with his innovative artistic ideas, his tireless enthusiasm and his foresight", as the jury writes in its laudation. The Orchestra Award, which is presented by the respective host orchestra, goes to the young violinist Stephen Waarts.

The ICMA have been awarded annually since 2011. They are awarded by independent media professionals. In recent years, the ICMA awards have been presented in countries such as Finland, Italy, Germany and Poland.

The competition will be further developed under the direction of Weithaas and Wille. The next competition will take place in Hanover in fall 2021. Krzysztof Wegrzyn, the founder and previous artistic director, will remain closely associated with the competition as honorary president.

In Antje Weithaas, born in 1966, the Foundation has recruited the first prizewinner of the first Joseph Joachim Violin Competition in 1991 for the position of conductor. Weithaas was artistic director of the Camerata Bern for almost ten years and was responsible for its musical profile. Her own CD recordings include the complete recordings of the solo sonatas and partitas by Johann Sebastian Bach and the solo sonatas by Eugène Ysaÿe.

Oliver Wille, born in 1975, continues the competition's close cooperation with the Hanover University of Music, Drama and Media (HMTMH). He has been a professor of string chamber music there since 2011. Wille is also a founding member of the Kuss Quartet and has been the director of the Hitzacker Summer Music Days since 2015.

Five people, three men and two women, trapped in a house or a hut, far away, in deep snow. No escape. And it keeps on snowing. The world premiere of Beat Furrer's new opera could not have been more topical than in these January days, when the Alpine region is sinking under the white masses. The initial situation is typical of the Russian writer Vladimir Sorokin, who has already described similar situations in other stories, for example in The snowstorm from 2010. And as always, it doesn't just stick to the bare reality. Certainly, there are brief love scenes, almost romanticized in a hut, there is a quartet over warming tea. Peter is afraid of medical treatment if he is rescued half-frozen. But there are also three ensembles of loneliness, Jacques sings an arietta about dark matter, Silvia tells how a buzzing hornet grew in her viola and blew up the instrument. A dead woman appears, the situations become increasingly unreal, surreal. Did the table burn? Did the five of them eat the snow? In the end, the material takes us into the cosmic-fantastic. The uncertainty of the situation leads to uncertainty about the universe. That is Sorokin.

Eight years ago, he sketched this story for Beat Furrer. Dorothea Trottenberg translated it, and Händl Klaus, long one of the most sought-after librettists of contemporary music, created a linguistic-musical textual basis from it, on which Furrer has now based his new opera Purple snow can play out a whole range of musical forms in a more varied and entertaining way (than before): Duets, which certainly have something operatic about them, arettas, ensembles, all with a high degree of text comprehensibility, by the way; plus choral singing in the background (with the Vocalconsort Berlin), in which Furrer introduces a doomsday scenario by Lucretius (not for the first time) - as a kind of ancient commentary on current events. In between, the orchestra blossoms in all colors from pale white to bright red and back to violet. Matthias Pintscher brings the music to life lucidly with the Staatskapelle Berlin, and an outstanding vocal quintet with Anna Prohaska, Elsa Dreisig, Gyula Orendt, Georg Nigl and Otto Katzameier performs on stage. State opera level in the most positive sense.
 

That is one fascination, the other comes from the congenial staging by Claus Guth and his team. Everything fits together perfectly with the music and text: Set design (Étienne Pluss), costumes (Ursula Kudrna), video (Arian Andiel) and lighting (Olaf Freese). It's wonderful to watch the snow drift by. It opens up an additional level.

The moving overture, for example, is accompanied by a projection of a blurred snow flurry, out of which a concrete painting slowly emerges: the "Return of the Hunters", created for a cycle of monthly depictions in 1565 by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, the painter of everyday life with all its playfulness and brutality, with its highs and lows. Here he tells of the joys and hardships of winter. The image is an essential part of the play and appears several times. At the beginning, in the spoken description of the undead Tanja (Martina Gedeck), but also later again and again, together with other Brueghel images. When the characters leave their hut, they are transported out of time into a 16th century setting. Brueghelian figures pass by in slow motion, in patina-clouded colors, in a dusky blur.

The different levels come together here in a dreamlike, somnambulistic way: in a kind of magical realism, narrative and at the same time impassable, with a floating emotionality. Opera does what it does particularly well, it exaggerates, it takes the ground of reality from under its feet. Furrer's new work is contemporary and yet it gets lost ... Where? The Latin "Nix" - snow combines with the German Nichts. There.

And why is the opera called Purple snow? In the final scene, the people, not only the occupants of the hut, but also other figures from Brueghel's tableaux are found on the surface of the stage. In an end-time vision, the light - the moon, the sun, Mars - rises again. The snow shines purple. It's beautiful, the people sing, but they don't understand the phenomenon. Something has changed, something has happened, but we don't know what or why.
 

Photo: Monika Rittershaus

"Violet Snow" at the Berlin State Opera

Ensemble

The TapTab music venue will now receive CHF 25,000 a year from the city (previously CHF 10,000). These increases will make a targeted contribution to the consolidation of operations and strengthen the competitiveness of the region's most important cultural center, writes the canton. The cantonal contributions to the TapTab music room (CHF 20,000), the Kumpane association (CHF 26,000) and the Haberhaus Bühne association (CHF 25,000) remain unchanged.

The agreements are valid from 2019 to 2023 with the Kultur im Kammgarn association and the TapTab Musikverein and from 2019 to 2022 with the Kumpane association and the Haberhaus Bühne association.

The previous service agreements between the canton and the city of Schaffhausen on the one hand and the service providers on the other have proven their worth, according to the official announcement. The renewed service agreements are also contracts that have been in place for several years.

It had also been known for some time that the financial support for the Kammgarn cultural center was no longer appropriate in relation to its supra-regional importance. Both the canton and the city of Schaffhausen have therefore increased their contributions. The city's contribution to culture at Kammgarn has increased from CHF 70,000 to CHF 110,000 per year, while the canton's support has risen from CHF 90,000 to CHF 100,000 per year.

Schneider has managed the Künstlerhaus Boswil as a cultural institution since 2006, "modernizing and expanding its operations and making a lasting positive impact at all levels". During his time as Managing Director, he established the Künstlerhaus Boswil as a center for classical music, anchored it as a cultural beacon in Aargau and renewed the infrastructure through construction projects.

According to the official press release, the Board of Trustees deeply regrets the decision of its Managing Director and thanks him "for his many years of extremely valuable work". The Board of Trustees is once again looking for an overall manager for the Künstlerhaus in order to continue the successful work of recent years.

The center for classical music Künstlerhaus Boswil, which includes the old church and other properties in Boswil, is run by a private foundation. It organizes a festival, master concerts and other events. An emphasis is placed on new music and the promotion of young musicians: with the Boswil Ensemble for New Music, the Aargau Youth Symphony Orchestra and the Freiamt Youth Orchestra, the Künstlerhaus supports three of its own ensembles in the field of orchestral education.

Since 1996, the Apfelbaum Foundation has awarded the Integration Prize annually at the beginning of each year to one person and one organization for special integration achievements. The award focuses on "growing together in culture/cultures, in the world, in society, in the economy, in the sciences, between generations, through women's initiatives and between religions".

Previous winners include Amnesty International, the cabaret artist Hanns-Dieter Hüsch, the international cultural magazine Lettre International, the women's and human rights activist Alice Schwarzer and the theologian and church critic Hans Küng.

The Apfelbaum Foundation promotes long-term development processes geared towards community. At the same time, it is the sponsor of the dependent New Music in Dialogue Foundation and the Theology and Nature Foundation. The Gare du Nord, the station for new music based in the Badischer Bahnhof, is a "venue for the extremely lively and productive contemporary music scene in Switzerland, the three-country region and beyond".