This article is transferred from author | Zhang Lushi
In the face of a long economic winter, the German government did not forget to spend money to "send warmth" to art groups. This is in interesting contrast to the British approach.
Earlier this month, Arts Council England (ACE) announced a drastic adjustment in the allocation of literary and artistic funds for next year, planning to cut the original subsidies for the literary and artistic center of London, and instead focus more on the development of literary and artistic arts in cities outside the capital. Among the most notable is that the century-old institution The National Opera (ENO) and the famous Barbican Centre will lose all funding from ACE, and 24 cultural institutions, including EO, will need to move out of London by the end of 2024 to receive a corresponding "moving fee". The London literary and artistic circles wailed, and then wrote articles for days to protest in the mass media. The prevailing view is that diversifying government funding is not a bad thing, but it would be better if it didn't have to cut funding to one place. In contrast, last month I observed quite different scenes in music venues in the north-west, southwest and northwest of Germany. During the pandemic last year, the German federal government announced a billion euros for cultural and media relief. In this funding scheme based on the "NEUSTART KULTUR" framework, 250 million yuan will be used to assist small and medium-sized private cultural institutions to make necessary renovations, such as adding disinfection facilities, ventilation systems and setting up online ticketing systems; 450 million yuan is used as the "industry revitalization" fund, of which the music industry, including concert halls, music festival organizers, small music scenes, etc., receives 150 million yuan.
The Enjoy Jazz Festival, which I have been following since 2009, was founded in 1999 by a music lover and has grown into a large-scale festival spanning the cities of Mannheim, Heidelberg and Ludwigshafen. Returning after two years, I found that Enjoy Jazz had applied for funding for "Rebooting Culture" and launched new projects in the name of reinforcing cooperation between the literary and artistic communities in various European regions, including inviting Greek and Swiss pianists as artists-in-residence. During my trip to Germany, I focused on several music groups formed by freelancers. Reboot Culture accepted more than 380 applications for subsidies from freelance music groups last year, and after screening, funds were distributed to each case as appropriate. Among them, Eliot Quartett, founded by several young musicians in Frankfurt eight years ago, signed up last year for the maximum amount of 150,000 euros that a single group could be allowed to apply for, and eventually received 140,000 euros, which will be used to launch the chamber music festival "Eliot am Main" under the name "Eliot". Members of the orchestra told me that the name "Eliot Quartet" came from the English poet T.S. Eliot: Eliot's poem The Four Quartets were inspired by Beethoven's late string quartet.
The "Elliott Quartet" performs at a music festival he founded.
Michael Preuß, a cellist from Leipzig, told me that all four of them liked the connection between music and words. The first violinist, Maryana Osipova, and the viola Dmitry Hahalin are both from Moscow, while the second violin, Alexander Sachs, was born in Canada. The four met while studying in Germany and formed an orchestra together in 2014. In late October, the quartet's own chamber music festival was set in the lobby of an 18th-century Masonic building in central Frankfurt, and with funding, we saw the likes of 91-year-old piano master Alfred Brendel on the program. Six performances and lectures received attention from local mainstream media. The quartet hopes to continue to hold the second edition of "Eliot am Main" next year, but "Restart Culture" is only a one-time subsidy, and everyone will have to work hard to raise funds to sponsor it. The next day, I took the tram north for 15 minutes from central Munich and got off the bus, and on the façade of the old stables of Munich more than a hundred years ago, I saw the word "UTOPIA" in the distance, which was the theme of this evening's performance by the young Munich musical arts group HIDALGO. If you don't specifically explain it, the audience wears a bracelet when you enter the door, a sound recordist sits in the audience with the computer software turned on, the recycled lighting materials are made into art installations, the retro small TV is placed in the table, etc., you will not guess the content of the performance after entering the venue: it is actually very serious music.
The "UTOPIA" sign on the façade of the old stables in Munich was the subject of a performance by the young musical arts group HIDALGO.
The first to sound is Wagner's Siegfried Idyll, in which alternating black and white and color appear on the oval double window doors of the old stable. The second performance was Alban Berg's Sieben fruehe Lieder (Seven Early Songs), and solo soprano Corinna Scheurle joined the Nuremberg State Theatre last year as a rising singer. Finally, the contemporary classical composer Getty's Ramifications for strings. These are all works that are not performed often. The sound engineer, who was sitting in the table, sampled the live performance clips, cut and mixed them immediately, and then played them on the spot. Don't be fooled by these dazzling multimedia tactics as flashy or, as my fellow North German musicians put it, "avant-garde, but in fact boring and bourgeois". After all, the group has a serious patron: Christian Gerhaher, a baritone singer who also lives in Munich. I could feel at the scene that the performance was about something.
HIDALGO APPLIED FOR MORE THAN 100,000 EUROS IN FUNDING FROM "RESTARTING CULTURE" AND USED IT TO BUILD THIS YEAR'S "UTOPIA" SERIES. THE PICTURE SHOWS THE PERFORMANCE SCENE OF HIDALGO.
After the performance, I learned from the two founders, Philipp Nowotny and Tom Wilmersdoerffer, that HIDALGO was named after Schumann's art song of the same name, "Nobility", and the two had known each other in the boys' choir in Munich since childhood, and Tom became a baritone singer when he became an adult. HIDALGO APPLIED FOR MORE THAN 100,000 EUROS IN FUNDING FROM "RESTARTING CULTURE" AND USED IT TO BUILD THIS YEAR'S "UTOPIA" SERIES. Philip handed me a cotton bag with a phrase from Nobleman: "Flowers or wounds / I'll bring them tomorrow when I come home." HE SAID THAT TAKING RISKS AND TRYING NEW IDEAS IS WHAT HIDALGO IS ALL ABOUT. A few days later I traveled to Nuremberg to see a concert by the Bayerische Kammerphilonie in a Jewish community center. Founded in 1990 and based in Augusto, the orchestra is an all-freelance musician and is therefore eligible to apply for funding for Reboot Culture. Earlier this year, the orchestra was awarded a maximum subsidy of 150,000 euros to introduce the German public to Paul Ben-Haim, a Jewish composer who is still unknown in the country. Valentin Holub, the orchestra's violist and orchestra manager, told me that the orchestra knew about Benheim, a composer born in Munich who fled Germany on the eve of World War II, only a few years ago. The Israeli-Jewish musician, originally based in Munich, fled to Palestine on the eve of the rise of Nazi Germany and changed his original Germanic surname to the Hebrew name "Benheim". In Palestine, Benheim created a unique musical vocabulary by mixing Jewish and Arabic music with Western "art music," what we today call "classical music." His exploration of composition became more active after the end of World War II and the establishment of the State of Israel, imprinting the style of a generation of Israeli musicians. Germany currently has the "Benheim Research Center", but research is limited to the academy. This year marks the 125th anniversary of Benheim's birth, and Valentine and the orchestra naturally filled in the "Benheim Project", recorded an album of Benheim's works, and embarked on a tour of Germany.
The Bavarian Chamber Philharmonic performs at the Jewish Community Center in Nuremberg. At the beginning of this year, the orchestra successfully received a maximum subsidy of 150,000 euros
It's a bit unusual for an orchestra as high-caliber as the Bavarian Chamber Philharmonic, combined with a line-up like Jerusalem/Munich soprano Talia Or, who often shines at Milan's La Scala and Bregenz Opera Festivals, to perform for free in a community centre today. Valentine replied that more than 300 orchestras applied for and received the Restart Culture subsidy last year, and that one of the rules of the subsidy program at the beginning was that the money from the application must be spent within this year. Therefore, the orchestras that planned to perform at the same time rented the music venue for almost the same. Valentine said that since it is impossible to rent a professional place such as a concert hall, the orchestra should simply "go to the crowd".
But Restart Culture recently extended the orchestra's spending time until next summer, and the Bavarian Chamber Philharmonic has just some money left after this round and continues to use its new plan. The next day I went to Berlin, where my German friend Hibastian, who had started a contemporary music label six years earlier, took me to a converted space in an old bus repair shop on the northwestern outskirts of Berlin. It is not difficult to recall the "revitalization" of old industrial areas in many cities at home and abroad, and in the past decade, there has been no suspense in repeating the period drama of artists stationed in creation, being caught by real estate developers, and artistic dilemmas. We are here to see Andromeda Mega Express, a contemporary experimental jazz band that has been in the military for 16 years, a group of 18 musicians that has been hit hard by the pandemic, and many musicians have left the band in the past two years because of their livelihoods. After three years of reorganization, the orchestra was also encouraged by the "restart culture" funding: the orchestra applied for 100,000 euros.
"Andromeda Mega Express" was hit hard by the epidemic, and the orchestra was reorganized and then re-emerged, which was also financially supported by "Restart Culture".
Still, Cibastian told me that the "culture reset" subsidy is one-off, and the current bustling situation of multiple groups competing to take the stage is nothing more than a momentary firework. The Elliott Quartet said that in addition to the "restart culture", there are various financial subsidies at the state and municipal levels.
However, relying on government subsidies alone, the survival significance of literary and artistic groups is not complete. This time in Germany, although the audience I went to was not small, I heard local friends and practitioners mention that since the epidemic, Germans have become a little accustomed to "home", and the attendance rate of concerts is generally lower than before the epidemic.
A small music festival originally planned in Munich at the end of last month was even temporarily cancelled because tickets were running out. But at the same time, like the HIDALGO I saw in Munich, the performance venue, although a bit remote, is basically full. The audience includes not only music fans, but also lovers of visual arts, film and theater. HIDALGO's idea was to gather and form "think tanks" in music, science, physics, and a variety of other fields, to create new art like a crew that did not have its own theater. Maybe this is a new way to work. In response to the current situation of "homestays", Germany launched a new "cultural pass" program in mid-November, and young people who will turn 18 next year can apply for this 200 euro "cultural pocket money" to be used for cultural and artistic consumption, performances and other consumption. The Government's painstaking efforts to encourage people to go out of their homes and restore their habits of literary and artistic consumption are self-evident. In this way, there is indeed a difference between England and Germany today in their attitude towards literature and art.