The history of the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation began 50 years ago with its first prize winner, Benjamin Britten. Since then, the foundation has accompanied, promoted and, to a certain extent, shaped musical life. The anniversary year is an occasion to look back on five decades of the Music Foundation, to develop future perspectives and to celebrate a milestone birthday.
The anniversary program is dedicated to the history of the Music Foundation and, with it, the history of music over the past five decades. In a series of concerts, the foundation celebrates its award winners once again. In addition to repertoire pieces by well-known composers from the circle of the music prize, the program also includes works from the latest generation of sponsorship prizes. Two compositions were commissioned especially for the anniversary. Lisa Streich and Christian Mason dusted off material from the foundation’s archives and shaped it into something new. The result is a flip book and an immersive sound installation. Both works can be seen for the first time on the concert weekend in Berlin at the beginning of March. The anniversary year will be accompanied by media. Five essays reflect the history of the Music Foundation from different perspectives, philosophize about trends in new music and look to the future. You can take a journey through time from the beginnings of the foundation to the present day on the anniversary website: 50years.evs-music-foundation.ch. Historical documents, photos and videos guide you through the past five decades in a multimedia chronicle. The anniversary is also an occasion to support the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation Professorship. In the 2023/24 winter semester, a guest professorship will be established at Freie Universität Berlin in the field of music research in order to enable the examination of new music in research and teaching and to strengthen the dialogue between science and art.
With the founding of the Music Foundation 50 years ago, Ernst von Siemens laid the foundation for decades of substantial music funding. With its funding focus on new music, the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation is unique today and now supports more than 120 projects worldwide every year with an amount of around 3 million euros. Every year, the board of trustees of the foundation honors an outstanding personality in musical life with the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize and awards prizes to young composers and ensembles.
At the start of the anniversary year, February 28th in the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts in Munich under the title “About having and needing: new music, where to?” discussed what contemporary music needs today. The composer Jessie Cox and the composer Iris ter Schiphorst, the music journalist Florian Hauser and the curator Berno Odo Polzer talk about how contemporary music is currently changing, in which direction contemporary composing could develop and what challenges this poses to the institutions of contemporary music puts. The Salzburg ensemble NAMES, winner of the ’23 ensemble prize from the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation, plays works by Luke Bedford and Øyvind Torvund.
The two concerts on March 4th and 5th in Berlin’s Pierre Boulez Saal with the Klangforum Wien and the Arditti Quartet review the music of the last 50 years. The program includes works by Benjamin Britten, the first prizewinner of the Music Foundation, and other main prizewinners by Witold Roman Lutosławski, Luciano Berio, Friedrich Cerha, Helmut Lachenmann, Beat Furrer and Olga Neuwirth. In addition, two award winners, Zeynep Gedizlioǧlu and Alex Paxton, will be performed. The Norwegian composer and cultural manager Lars Petter Hagen will hold the laudatory speech.
On the Sunday of the concert October 1 works from the rich history of the foundation can also be heard in the Zurich Tonhalle. The Quatuor Diotima plays string quartets by Per Nørgård, Wolfgang Rihm, Pierre Boulez and Henri Dutilleux as well as this year’s award winner Sara Glojnarić. In the evening, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, a pianist who has won a music prize, will be on stage. Together with Tamara Stefanovich he interprets a selection of works by the award winners Olivier Messiaen, György Kurtag, György Ligeti and Rebecca Saunders as well as the award winner Eric Wubbels.
The two too resonance – _Donor concerts in Lucerne and Munich are dedicated to the anniversary. Playing at the Lucerne Festival on 7. September Les Siècles conducted by François-Xavier Roth Works by the prizewinners Enno Poppe and György Ligeti. As part of the concert series live music of the Bayerischer Rundfunk are on 17. September the Berliner Philharmoniker with Kirill Petrenko in the Isarphilharmonie in Munich and round off the concert activities in the anniversary year.
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50 years Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation