I wrote a comprehensive portrait of Berufsverband Musik TKV Sachsen, the professional body of musicians and music educators in the German state of Saxonia, for the Kulturmanagement Network magazine. The nine board members, Stephanie Dathe, Christoph Geibel, Nikolai Kähler, Felicitas Ressel, Anne-Kathrin Ludwig, Christiane Vogel, Sophia Schulz, Victoria Flock, and Christian Scheibler, are doing a great job in cultural administration, political lobbyism, and advocacy of freelancers. See pp. 78–85 of the current issue, which also contains a number of other noteworthy contributions, dealing with multiple aspects and challenges of the cultural sector in East Germany. Please have a look!

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The probably most popular composition of female authorship, even though this fact evades the attention of many classical musicians, is the song Bésame mucho by the Mexican composer-pianist Consuelo Velázquez (c. 1916–2005), written in the mid-1930s, and subsequently becoming a worldwide success through all musical styles and genres. The initial melody is presumably based on the 1911 piece Quejas, ó la maja y el ruiseñor, part of the Goyescas piano cycle by Catalan composer Enrique Granados, which he adopted as an aria for the opera of the same name a few years later. Consuelito, as she was called by her friends and family, provided the tune with soulful lyrics and a relaxed bolero rhythm, and transformed it into a regular periodical theme, while maintaining its melancholic mood and Phrygian-inflected harmony.