Swiss Music Council: Review and outlook

As the Schweizer Musikzeitung reported last spring, there has been a change in the management of the Swiss Music Council. A good six months later, the planned handover of the management of political work from Stefano Kunz to Executive Director Sandra Tinner also took place. This six-month period served to ensure as good an introduction as possible to the issues, but there are nonetheless big shoes to fill after the 10-year era of Stefano Kunz. At the beginning of December, the board and management of the Swiss Music Council (SMR) had the opportunity to bid farewell to Stefano Kunz with a gift. The brief tribute by President Rosmarie Quadranti will be published here in written form:

Stefano Kunz was elected Managing Director at the SMR delegates' meeting on April 14, 2012 at the Bahnhofbuffet Olten. He held this position for six years before handing it over to his successor Nina Rindlisbacher (now at SONART). However, Stefano remained with the SMR for a further four years as Head of Political Work. From 2014 to 2018, Stefano was Vice President of the European Music Council (EMC), of which the SMR is a member. The political highlights over the past 10 years were certainly the adoption of Article 67a of the Swiss Constitution on music education in Switzerland (vote in 2012) and the successful campaign against the so-called "No Billag Initiative" in 2018. Stefano also organized major events such as the Fête de la musique 2017 in Bern under the slogan "Faites de la musique!". "Jugend & Musik" and the "Musiklexikon Schweiz" were also matters close to Stefano's heart. For the "Parliamentary Group Music", he organized the meetings for the parliamentarians and the members of the SMR three times a year. Stefano Kunz has built up a large network with many contacts from which the Swiss Music Council will continue to benefit in the future. The Board and Executive Board of the Swiss Music Council would like to thank Stefano most sincerely for his many years of commitment to music in Switzerland and wish him all the best and much satisfaction in his future professional, political and private activities.

Outlook 2023

As the members of the Swiss Music Council have already noticed, Stefano Kunz is supervising a research project on behalf of the SMR (in collaboration with TA-Swiss) on the effects of digitization on the music sector in Switzerland. Surveys will be conducted among our members this year. This topic will also occupy the Swiss Music Council politically this year.

As is generally known, we and all those active in the music sector are not satisfied with paragraph 2 - "high-quality music teaching in schools" - of Article 67a of the Constitution. The Music Council is addressing this problem this year, because after 10 years of implementing the constitutional article, it is high time to do so. The Swiss Music Council and its members will take part in the consultation on the 2025 - 2028 cultural message in the spring - the preparatory work for this has already begun.

However, the most politically charged topics this year are once again the changes in cultural life "after" the pandemic and during the current energy crisis, in regular collaboration with the Culture Taskforce.