The Parliamentary Group on Music (PGM) had no choice at its second meeting of the year. For better or worse, it had to deal with the consequences of the coronavirus crisis. While the topic had been on the agenda in the spring, but not really on the agenda, the motto was now "5 months of the Covid-19 storm: consequences and implications for the music sector". And the latter are really drastic, as Stefano Kunz, Head of Political Work at the Swiss Music Council, explained at the beginning. The industry's turnover is likely to plummet this year - in view of Suisa's license income from performance rights (from concerts, music in the hospitality industry or entertainment events), which is down by around two thirds this year. Suisa is also expecting significantly lower revenues in 2021 compared to 2019.* This will have serious long-term consequences for music creators, who will have to expect significantly lower distributions from the copyright society in the coming years.

But that's not all. Another important source of income is also disappearing: music schools are reporting a drop in student numbers of up to 20 percent. Freelance music teachers in particular are feeling the effects of this. It was therefore clear to the Music Council that the previous financial aid from the federal government must be continued - which the National Council decided on the same day, but the Council of States rejected again the following day for the time being. Furthermore, freelancers and the self-employed should finally be given access to unemployment insurance (ALV) and loss of earnings compensation (EO).

Beat Santschi, the representative of the Swiss Musicians' Association (SMV), did not have much better to say. The permanent members of the orchestra are still protected by the collective employment contracts and have "only" had to accept wage cuts of up to 20 percent in some cases. Freelancers also suffer the most in the orchestral landscape, as they are the first to be cut by orchestras. However, it is completely unclear how concert life and thus the orchestras' income will develop. Organizers are therefore increasingly demanding that they be released from any obligations in the event of concert cancellations. After seven months of crisis, many freelancers are now definitely on the brink of financial collapse, emphasized Santschi.

Christoph Trummer, Head of Political Projects at Sonart, the professional association of freelance artists, explained what this means for him: most of his concerts have been canceled or postponed until next year, and he has had only one booking for the new tour planned from December since April. Gigs with an entrance fee have become financially unpredictable. The fixed business costs - primarily a rent of 650 francs - are barely covered by 750 francs EO. According to Trummer, planning the 2021 season is practically impossible. Cross-financing models would disappear, there would hardly be any larger festivals, which would also leave the agencies with nothing. A clear-cutting of the cultural ecosystem is to be feared.

The ideas of many politicians that the worst is now over for culture because events - even larger ones - are possible again were contradicted by the representatives of music clubs, festivals, labels and music managers who were also present. A typical music event has a lead time of around six months. There are still major hurdles even in the programming stage: prohibitive requirements, planning uncertainty due to changing entry regulations and unpredictable last-minute permit withdrawals turn the organization into a lottery. Ticket sales are not at all back to pre-corona levels. As a result, most event organizers are still facing a drop in sales of 80 to 100 percent. On average, their liquidity will last for another six months, after which many will have to call it a day: Lights out.

The Culture Taskforce of the Swiss Music Council lobbied parliamentarians intensively following the Council of States' decisions. In the end, one week after the PGM meeting, the Council of States also largely followed the National Council's line. The support measures for the self-employed and freelancers will be continued with confidence in the self-declarations of those affected, albeit not until the end of 2021, as the Culture Taskforce had called for, but initially until mid-June next year.

Even under the current difficult circumstances, the FHNW School of Music and the Basel Music Academy are planning a whole series of musical highlights for the coming fall semester, according to their press release: a symposium on dance as music, podium concerts with young up-and-coming talent, a cooperation project with the Basel Theater, concerts by the new Focusyear Band at the Jazzcampus Club and, last but not least, the traditional Open Day of the Basel Music School.

The music academies open the fall semester, coordinated throughout Switzerland, in mid-September. Due to the spring lockdown, final examinations, concerts and recitals are still being postponed. The primary goal of the management of the FHNW Academy of Music / Basel Music Academy is to maintain teaching and concert operations and thus the valuable culture of togetherness on site while adhering to a constantly updated protection concept.

Original article:
https://www.fhnw.ch/de/medien/newsroom/medienmitteilungen/medienmitteilungen-2020/studien-lehr-und-konzertbetrieb-nimmt-wieder-fahrt-auf-praesenzmodus-dank-schutzkonzept
 

Only expenditure on streaming showed growth of 22% compared to the same period last year. In contrast, however, sales of physical sound carriers in particular fell drastically, with spending on CDs dropping by 25%. The live sector was hit even harder: spending on concerts fell by 80%.

There has also been a decline in the amount of time people in Germany spend listening to music. Since the study was launched in August 2018, weekly music consumption has fallen by eight percent (one hour and 46 minutes): It fell from 21 hours and 29 minutes to now 19 hours and 43 minutes.

Conventional radio in particular is in constant decline with a drop of 15%, although this is partially offset by strong gains in online radio. The latter recorded growth of 73%. According to the researchers, one possible explanation for the decline in music consumption is limited mobility and the focus on news in times of the coronavirus pandemic.

The "Music Industry in Germany" study conducted by DIW Econ is based on an online survey carried out between May 11 and June 29, 2020, in which 861 companies and self-employed individuals took part.

Original article:
https://www.musikindustrie.de/presse/presseinformationen/studien-zu-musikwirtschaft-und-musiknutzung-in-hamburg-vorgestellt

Apparently, the coronavirus spread unnoticed within the production team during rehearsals at the Theater an der Gumpendorfer Strasse (TAG), writes the Music and Arts University of the City of Vienna (MUK). It was only after the premiere that the managing director of TAG, who was present at the theater, learned that there had been a suspected case in the production during the rehearsal period, which later tested positive.

According to the Viennese media, dance scenes had taken place in the auditorium at the TAG, among other things, meaning that there had been an impermissible mixing of stage and public areas. An employee of the State Opera, who had only been present as an audience member wearing a mask, had been informed too late to isolate her immediately. She later tested positive. As a result, changes had to be made to the cast at the State Opera.

The University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna (mdw) is not affected by the incidents.

Nevertheless, a deviating flow behavior was detected, especially in flutes, oboes and clarinets, which prompted members of the Federal Association of German Musical Instrument Manufacturers (BDMH), together with team leader Christian Kähler, to look for protective devices to remedy the situation, with the aim of eliminating any risk of infection.

In the course of further studies, the researchers discovered that room air filters make it possible to teach music; an important finding not only for general education schools, but also for music schools and so on, and with a view to the systemic relevance of music and culture in general.

In this context, an extremely high level of carbon dioxide exposure was identified even after a short period of teaching. This leads to concentration problems and has an impact on performance and effectiveness; numerous similar areas of public life are also affected. This is accompanied by the demand to use modern room air filters to counteract not only the coronavirus, but also the carbon dioxide problem in the future.
 

Of the first-year students at the ZHdK, 292 enrolled on a Bachelor's or Master's degree course in Music, 114 in Design, 83 in Fine Arts, 109 in Art Education and Transdisciplinarity and 99 in Performing Arts and Film.

The ZHdK is conducting the fall semester 2020 in face-to-face classes despite Corona. In the fall semester, masks will be compulsory in public areas as well as in courses, when working in groups or in the workshops. There will also be some digital teaching options. Masks for use at the ZHdK will be made available to all ZHdK members and guests.

The ZHdK's guidelines and specifications can change at any time. Based on the experience gained in the spring semester 2020, the proportion of digital teaching could be expanded quickly if necessary.

A total of 2194 people are studying at the ZHdK. Of these, 1246 are studying one of the eight Bachelor's degree programs and 948 one of the eleven Master's degree programs. The number of students has remained constant compared to recent years.

What would music history be without the creative moment? Or simply without the practical performance opportunity? So it was more of a coincidence that led to the creation of the Equal WoO 30 for four trombones, which today already seem somewhat strange in terms of the instrumentation. We owe these brief movements to a stay Beethoven made in Linz in 1812, during which he became friends with the then cathedral conductor Franz Xaver Glöggl (1764-1839). The latter is said to have asked him to write it, "to compose so-called Equale for 4 trombones for All Souls' Day (November 2) in order to have them blown by his musicians in the traditional manner on this festival". At least this is what Ignaz von Seyfried recalled. As Beethoven did not know the arrangement of these pieces, which had only been handed down locally, he asked for them, "to hear an aequal, as it was blown at the corpses in Linz". And the then 16-year-old son of the cathedral conductor, Franz Glöggl, continues in his much later record: "So it happened that one afternoon my father ordered three trombonists, as Beethoven was dining with us anyway, and had one of them play the aequalizer."

The three trombonists were presumably supported by Father Glöggl himself, and pieces were played that probably belonged to those days. 1200 Instrumental batteries which the cathedral chapel master could fall back on when blowing from the tower. However, the whereabouts of this collection are completely unknown. The strange work designation "Equal" also seems to originate from this local tradition of homophonic movements. It can also be found in pieces by a certain Wenzel Lambel (four-part, before 1844) or by the young Anton Bruckner (only three-part, 1847). These occasional pieces, composed on an afternoon in the fall of 1812, thus document a once lively custom that would otherwise have sunk into the maelstrom of history. - In Vienna, on the other hand, the three short movements were evidently of little use; they were provided with texts and performed with a male choir for Beethoven's own funeral and for the dedication of the gravestone.

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As the central body for the implementation of the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, the Intergovernmental Committee defines the strategies for the safeguarding and dissemination of living cultural heritage. It is responsible for the implementation of the Convention and, in particular, decides on inscriptions on the List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

With the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, UNESCO aims to protect cultural heritage that is less related to buildings or spaces and more to time, community practices and social interactions. From Switzerland, the list so far includes the Basel Carnival and yodeling.
 

Anyone taking a look at the festival calendar will have long since noticed that for years now, a programmatically dense, discursive, imaginative and colorful-sounding music festival has been taking place in Bern at the beginning of September on both traditional and unconventional stages. This year's festival theme, "Tectonics", explored large and small-scale shifts, stratifications, folds and cracks. However, since the basic idea of the Board of Trustees, "As solid as the earth's crust seems to us, it still holds the unproven", proved to be true in such a radical way due to the corona crisis, the governing bodies of the Bern Music Festival were faced with difficult decisions. Even during the lockdown, however, the board of trustees, management and board of directors had agreed in principle that the festival would definitely go ahead with a strict protection concept depending on how things developed. At best, the program should be realized in a fragmented or even very reduced form - possibly even in fragments, paraphrasing the theme as it were. Cancellation was not an option, especially in view of the situation of freelance musicians. It is obvious that the new situation required partial changes to the program, larger rooms and, in particular, great flexibility on the part of all those involved. Surprisingly and fortunately, this did not affect the density and variety of the almost forty events held over five days. Only the presence of Toshio Hosokawa, the composer in residence, had to be dispensed with, but not his music and his presence via video link. The interpretation course planned with him for the students of the Bern University of the Arts was taken over by the Arditti Quartet. The fact that an ensemble of this renown made itself available for this additional engagement was a unique stroke of luck, but also a sign of the ensemble's sympathy, as the four musicians had already expressed their enthusiasm for the festival's concept and program at their performance last year.

The quartet's performances also clearly characterized this year's edition. The cooperation with young musicians in the performance of Toshio Hosokawa's monodrama The Raven (text by E. A. Poe) made a key feature of the festival a reality: The collaboration between local performers and top-class guests. The opening concert in the large hall of the Berner Reitschule with mezzo-soprano Christina Daletska (Hosokawa) and the Basel Sinfonietta (Ives) provided a wonderful introduction.

Photos: Annette Boutellier/Music Festival Bern

Toshio Hosakawa: "The Raven"

Christina Daletska, the Arditti Quartet and the festival ensemble

The large hall is another characteristic of the festival: the combination of thematically linked projects with special, sometimes surprising venues. For example, the newly developed Contrabassclarinet extended (Ernesto Molinari) entered into a dialog with live electronics in the Klingendes Museum, performative interventions inside the Monbijou Bridge made it possible to experience seismographic activities and the Trio Tramontana interpreted Kaija Saariaho's New Gates in the Blood Tower on the Aare. A magical and thought-provoking constellation awaited the audience in the middle of the Dählhölzli Forest, where the Mycelium collective, together with Brane Project (acoustic installation) and Idéehaut (buildings), created a floating net in the trees as a concert venue and combined contemporary music with Penan songs from the rainforest of Borneo in a composed program.

Anyone who ventures into the layers of the earth's crust cannot escape the different sounds of stone. In the stone studios of the Bernasconi company, the Mondrian Ensemble and Erika Öhmann (percussion) demonstrated the sometimes floating, sometimes electrifying sound world of the serpentine stone instruments orgalitho and lithophone in works by Edu Haubensak, Hans-Jürg Meier, Matthias Steinauer and in a world premiere by Samuel Cosandey. Peter Streiff and the Ginger Ensemble in the Nydeggkirche and the Stadttheater showed how Bernese building materials, be it sandstone or granite, sound in their natural state.

The audience in the crypt of St. Peter and Paul's Church experienced not just a "grandiose catastrophe", but a literally shattering experience when René Waldhauser tuned the instrument down to a string-banging noise to Peter Conradin Zumthor's hammered grand piano performance.

The unique versatility of the festival almost makes it impossible to speak of main acts. However, the concert in Bern Minster with the BernVocal ensemble (conducted by Fritz Krämer), the Arditti Quartet and a percussion quartet in the organ loft (Mihaela Despa, Peter Fleischlin, Pascal Viglino, Sacha Perusset) deserves a mention. The juxtaposition of Antoine Brumel's Mass Et ecce terrae motae with works by Hosakawa was a space-sound event of a special kind. Here too, sonic density, contrast and a change of listening perspective formed an unmistakable "trademark".

The Nigerian-born St. Gallen composer Charles Uzor tells of a completely different kind of layering in Mothertonguewhen he layers texts by the Igbo (an ethnic group in several equatorial African regions), Novalis, Celan, Rauhavirta and Beckett with old European music and music by the Gbaya peoples. The result is a conglomerate of cultures and sounds that may seem strange to us, but is also an expression of a current reality. In a project by Elina Bächlin and Noel Schmidlin, together with spoken word guests Guy Krneta and Marco Gurtner, cross-generational layers of text were transformed into the sound of language.
 

The concert by the quintet for reed instruments with Matthias Arter, Martin Bliggenstorfer, Valentine Collet, Béatrice Laplante and Béatrice Zawodnik proved to be an unconventional program of spatial sound. Unusual, because the program with music by Daniel Glaus, Barblina Meierhans, Heinz Holliger, Toshio Hosokawa and Matthias Arter in the rooms of the Berner Kunsthalle ranged from the singing of the oboe d'amore to the sharpness of the ensemble sound.

The cycle addressed a disturbing reality 5to12to6where composers and scientists addressed shifts in our minds, namely urgent questions about climate change, sustainability and social discrepancies.

Should and may one speak of a highlight or climax in such a concentrated offering? Before the intensity and technical mastery of the Arditti Quartet's concert with two quartets by James Clarke, the third string quartet by Ferneyhough and Tetras by Xenakis, paraphrases fade. The presence, apparent lightness and virtuosity of the four strings drew a standing ovation from the audience - and rightly so.
 

On the campus, more than 500 Bachelor's and Master's students, almost 500 continuing education participants and around 200 employees of the School of Music will learn, teach and conduct research as well as present their work to the public on around 8,000 square meters. With the new building, the Lucerne School of Music is bringing together its previous four locations spread across Lucerne in one place. The new building will be officially opened with a musical program from 11 to 13 September. Public events will be held in the three new concert halls until the end of the year.

The coronavirus crisis is particularly evident in the numbers of foreign students: most international students come from Europe, while enrolments from non-European countries have decreased significantly. The group of exchange students who only come to HSLU for one semester has shrunk. Only half as many students registered for an exchange semester as in the previous year.

With the aim of enabling a rapid assessment of general aesthetic responsiveness, a research team at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics has developed a method that should make it easier to select samples for studies in the future. The so-called Aesthetic Responsiveness Assessment (AReA) makes it possible to differentiate between people who regularly react intensely to works of art and those who rarely experience more than an everyday appreciation of aesthetic objects.

The scale is based on a questionnaire that was compiled with the aim of identifying people who react particularly to aesthetic stimuli and are therefore suitable for participation in a study. How strongly a person reacts to music, visual arts and poetry can be determined with the AReA scale within the categories "Aesthetic Appreciation", "Intense Aesthetic Experience" and "Creative Behavior" and can be used for the selection of particularly responsive samples.

The assessment procedure was tested with almost 800 participants in studies in the United States and Germany and can be carried out equally in both languages. The publication has appeared in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts of the American Psychological Association.

Original publication:
Schlotz, W., Wallot, S., Omigie, D., Masucci, M. D., Hoelzmann, S. C., & Vessel, E. A. (2020). The Aesthetic Responsiveness Assessment (AReA): A screening tool to assess individual differences in responsiveness to art in English and German. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/aca0000348
 

The style of European classical music has also been composed on distant islands in the past. For example, the Riemann Music Dictionary mentions the composer Otto Jägermeier, born in Munich in 1870, who emigrated from war-torn Europe to Madagascar in 1915 and composed symphonic poems such as In the jungle or the Suite tananariviennenamed after the Malagasy capital Tananarive. And recently there has also been talk of another islander who wrote his scores far away from our civilization. He went by the Portuguese-Spanish name José Diego Coimbra and lived, it is said, from 1824 to 1865 on the island of Mondariz, a small volcanic island in the South Atlantic, five days' journey by mail boat from the South American mainland.

Coimbra is an apparition that arouses curiosity. An eccentric who you would hardly have heard of if he had not been made the ghostly protagonist of a novel. The author is Yorck Kronenberg, who was born in 1973 in Reutlingen, Swabia. Mondariz has now published his fifth novel. As a writer and concert pianist, he has a double talent. This makes him uniquely capable of both telling an exciting story about the long-dead composer and expressing himself with musical expertise. According to Kronenberg, the scores were long kept in the island's main town, a sleepy settlement from the colonial era, where the inhabitants do a poor job of keeping the memory of the exotic composer alive. In the hope that tourists will come one day, they have set up his house, the Casa Coimbra, as a small memorial and thus saved it from creeping decay.

Between hyperrealism and fiction

Kronenberg's book offers the reader a sly mixture of hyper-realistic description and fiction. The first-person narrator, who we can assume is the author himself, visited the island ten years ago to investigate the composer's footsteps. Now he has come back for a second time to take a closer look at the scores and the documents stowed away in old trunks and to reappraise Coimbra's living environment biographically. He delves into village life and the colonial history of the island, but has mixed experiences with the suspicious locals during his research. While he tries to find his feet in this foreign world, his European past catches up with him in the form of text messages from his former partner. She had accompanied him on his first visit to the island, but now the two are thousands of kilometers apart in a painful separation process. These two levels are skillfully intertwined in the narrative.

Despite all the practical shortcomings and heartache, the figure of the composer and his music gradually take shape. When the narrator leaves the island again on a barge at the end, he is a few experiences richer. By immersing himself in a foreign land, he has also plunged into his inner self. He now knows that the world of the islanders will always remain closed to him, he has distanced himself from his ex-girlfriend in distant Europe, and the music of Coimbra has become more familiar to him, intertwined with the inscrutable reality of the island. He takes a few scores home with him as trophies.
And here they are in the hands of the author and pianist Yorck Kronenberg. He has described them knowledgeably in his book, for example the great symphony in C sharp minor, a late work from 1862, in which the conductor can ask the musicians to only fake the playing so that the movements continue but no sound is heard. Here, Coimbra anticipates the experiments in instrumental theater that avant-garde composers such as Dieter Schnebel were to take up again a hundred years later.

In a musical-literary Sunday soiree at the Künstlerhaus Boswil on August 30, 2020, visitors were able to gain a concrete impression of Coimbra's hitherto literary existence and his music. Kronenberg and the Casal Quartet performed two of the composer's works, with the author reading a few passages from his book in between. Christine Egerszegi, President of the Advisory Board of the Boswil Foundation, chatted with him and guided the audience through the program.

Kronenberg is a reader and conversationalist who is a pleasure to listen to. As a pianist, he takes full risks. This was particularly evident in Bach's Piano Concerto in D minor. It was played in a version with string quartet at the end of the evening. At a brilliant tempo and technically well-equipped, he chased through the outer movements, the quartet always close on his heels and quick to react. One more rehearsal would have done the whole thing good. In the middle movement, the pianist was also able to show off his introverted side to advantage.

The core of the concert and the audience's curiosity were, of course, the two original works by the mysterious composer. At the beginning, Kronenberg played Dos Estudios para Piano. The first etude trumps with motoric chord repetition in the left hand and sweeping, monophonic melodies in the right hand. The second is freer in movement and harmonically more colorful. Both sound like an innocent anticipation of the rhythm pieces by Prokofiev or Bartók. The following string quartet was a world premiere. The four-movement work is imbued with a warm emotionality, a thoughtful tone prevails. A uniform, polyphonically layered network of voices characterizes the first movement. In the second, individual expressive figurations emerge, which then take on a concrete character in the form of laments in the long final movement with descending lines and torn-off small glissandi. It seems as if Coimbra had anticipated the pain of love of his later biographer.

What are we to make of the musical achievements of this loner, who wrote his scores undauntedly on a godforsaken tropical island in the South Atlantic, in the knowledge that he would probably never be heard in his lifetime? Anyone reading Kronenberg's novel is drawn step by step into this improbable situation. One begins to believe in the existence of Coimbra, behind the fiction a new, strong reality becomes visible. However, the listening impression of his compositions only partially confirms the promises of uniqueness that the book makes. The fiction remains stronger in this case. Nevertheless, the discovery of Mondariz's musical and literary world was well worth the trip to Boswil.

PS: The composer Otto Jägermeier is a musicological-lexigraphical joke. The island of Mondariz cannot be found on any map.
Yorck Kronenberg: Mondariz. Dörlemann publishing house, Zurich 2020, 283 pages

The number of participants per year is steadily increasing, writes the BAK. In 2019, the number of applications more than doubled compared to 2017. This can be seen in the report on the 2016-2020 funding period published by the BAK.

In total, over 46,000 children and young people across Switzerland have taken part in Y+M programs to date. As of June 2020, around 17,000 children and young people were registered for Y+M courses and camps (2017: around 8,700; 2018: around 15,500; 2019: almost 21,000). At the end of June 2020, the program had 1,036 certified Y+M leaders.

Since the launch of Y+M, the federal government has invested around CHF 7.5 million in the program. Around CHF 5 million of this was spent on supporting Y+M courses and Y+M camps, and around CHF 500,000 on contributions to the training and further education of Y+M leaders. Since 2019, the Principality of Liechtenstein has also been participating in the Y+M program on the basis of an intergovernmental agreement concluded in May 2018.

Original article:
https://www.bak.admin.ch/bak/de/home/aktuelles/nsb-news.msg-id-80298.html

When you read that the composer Martha von Castelberg (1892-1971) received neither piano nor composition lessons, listening to the CD with her motets as well as secular and sacred songs makes you wonder: if Lili Boulanger had written her song cycle Clairières dans le ciel without regular composition lessons, Fanny Hensel wrote her piano work The year be able to write without many years of piano lessons? Does self-taught learning of an instrument lead you to discover new paths, and could it be that composing without studying with a teacher prevents you from following well-trodden stylistic paths?

Castelberg's songs, but not her motets, lead one to believe that a trained craftsman would have been more conducive to her composing and that her undoubted talent could have unfolded more freely. One has the feeling that her songs are accompanied somewhat simply by the piano and that a little pianistic sophistication would also suit the sacred texts.

Who was Martha von Castelberg? The Zurich native grew up as the daughter of a private banker in a strictly Catholic middle-class home. She received violin lessons at an early age, but was not allowed to study music despite her talent. As Sibylle Ehrismann writes in her informative CD booklet, von Castelberg, who was very devout and spiritually interested, campaigned with her husband for Zurich Catholicism, which had a difficult time in the reformed city. Many of her compositions have a religious background, others have a connection to Disentis in Graubünden, her husband's homeland.

The four singers and the pianist interpret the songs with audible commitment, rich in color and finely crafted. If you listen to all the songs, which are quite attractive individually, one after the other, a certain monotony sets in, especially with the sacred songs, as the works are not varied enough. It is remarkable that there are hardly any other settings of the chosen texts - for example by Fontane, Rückert, Bergengruen and Rhaeto-Romanic poets.

The real discovery on the CD, however, are the five motets for mixed voices. They are interpreted by the Basel larynx vocal ensemble under the direction of Jakob Pilgram at the highest level, with a beautiful sound and with every desirable differentiation. Although firmly anchored in the tradition of sacred music, the motets fascinate with their distinctive, "modern" harmony. They are probably Martha von Castelberg's most important contribution to Swiss music of the 20th century.

The names, work titles and song texts in the booklet contain quite a few errors, which is particularly noticeable in an otherwise so careful edition.
 

The ZHdK buildings are once again open to the public every day, Monday to Sunday, from 7 am to 7 pm. This also applies to the Museum of Design, the Le Corbusier Pavilion, the bar and garden of the Mehrspur music club and the Chez Toni bistro. The Media and Information Center (MIZ) is open again until 11 September from Monday to Friday from 10 am to 4 pm.

On August 17, the university management decided to conduct the fall semester in face-to-face classes. Since August 24, masks have been compulsory in all courses, including those in pre- and continuing education. In addition, masks are now compulsory wherever they are indicated. Masks are also compulsory in the Media and Information Center (MIZ). In the public areas of the ZHdK buildings, the distance rule applies, but there is no general obligation to wear a mask.

From now on, guests' contact details will be collected every time they visit Mensa Molki, Chez Toni, Kafi Z and Café Momento. Contact details can either be collected using the Campus Card or a QR code. In addition, masks are compulsory in the self-service area, in front of the issuing points and at the checkouts. The recommendations of the Federal Office of Public Health (FOPH) and the Canton of Zurich also apply. The guidelines and specifications of the ZHdK may change at any time.