Search

The article presents information about the achievements of Swiss composer Klaus Huber, who was awarded the Siemens Music Prize in February 2009. Descriptions are given of Huber's compositional philosophy, his compositions' intentional slowness, and his history as a music instructor at European universities. Further comments are made concerning Huber's compositions "Inwendig voller Figur," "Metanoia," and "Tenebrae."

Much critical debate in cultural studies is directed towards knowing if or how urban spaces and creative cells influence each other. Relevant publications stylize the city as the "space" of artistic creation par excellence. This is surely not fundamentally wrong. However, there are also many art forms of great worth produced in the inspiration of isolation. In order to reach a more differentiated view of the presumed interdependency between the city and art, it is worth asking oneself what urban, social, economic and political factors influence the evolution of the art business and the behavior of those involved (and naturally vice versa). This is investigated in the present article by means of the example of the jazz sociotope of the small-scale city of Bern. The result of this analysis is the discovery of a postmodern, somewhat proletarian subculture with strong creative potential that struggles to assert itself in the face of more potent agents on the market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Just over twenty years ago, Eric F. Todd and Neil Clarke suggested that performers of Western art music use expressive devices in order to clarify their own perspective of the structure of a composition. Performance analysis can study the characteristics of a performance in order to discover those structural features of the composition which are highlighted in the interpretation - an analytical approach that can be called "inverse interpretation". This article presents an inverse interpretation of Martha Argerich's expressive timing during bars 13-16 of Chopin's Prelude op. 28A in E minor on her 1975 Deutsche Grammophon studio recording. The authors focus on a few seconds of music in order to analyze them in detail, and they demonstrate that Argerich shapes her accelerando in bars 13-16 in response to certain structural features of Chopin's composition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the current musical theater scene in Switzerland, providing brief biographies of several people active in the scene, including Berlin composer Daniel Ott, Désirée Meiser, a producer and art director at the Gare du Nord, in Basel, Switzerland, and Leo Dick, a composer in Bern, Switzerland.