Visiting lovely Husum for the first time in three years! Excited to have the chance to attend a couple of concerts at the festival Raritäten der Klaviermusik again. After the delicate and expertly presented recital of Christian Grøvlen yesterday, I am now looking forward to the performances of Clare Hammond, Patrick Hemmerlé, Matthias Kirschnereit, and the one and only Severin von Eckardstein.
General
Holistic Funding Instead of Only Tax Reduction
In my opinion, the current debate over turnover tax exemptions for music education somewhat lacks cultural-political vision. From the perspective of funding bodies and service providers, there are legitimate concerns about tax liability of educational services that do not serve a public benefit or a purpose of vocational training, as this would inevitably cause a cost increase at the expense of the final customers—who should actually profit from the funding—and thus a lack of equal opportunities. A full alignment of German tax legislation with the EU directives, which demand overall turnover tax exemptions for all educational services, is necessary to ensure that music lessons are affordable for all social classes and to avoid competitive distortion at the expense of private service providers (see the statement of the Bundesarbeitsgemeinschaft Selbstständigenverbände). On this occasion I am sharing the corresponding petition again, encouraging everybody to take notice and sign.
However, this claim does not go far enough: In order to achieve a nationwide and sustainable basic education in music, regardless of the families’ income and social status, not only tax incentives are needed, but also an increase in municipal and state funding. Any qualified extracurricular music education serves a purpose of social welfare and needs to be equipped with a negative tax, as it were, in the form of public subsidies, irrespective of the services being offered in communal responsibility, by private institutions, or by freelancers. Besides a general turnover tax exemption for all institutional and legal forms of music education, the following funding models are required, as claimed by the Bundesverband der Freien Musikschulen: a top-up for public education vouchers, and a full tax deductibility of the fees for music lessons. If the public authorities subsidised the customers’ costs with 50 % in general, it might be possible to decouple the charges from the income of teachers and operating expences of the service providers, and there would be no need to play off the interests of providers and customers against each other anymore. Fair payment of teachers would be justifiable without the risk of accusations of making music education too expensive. On the side of budgetary politics, such a subsidisation would mean a shift of the tax burden from educational institutions to the topsellers and profit-oriented companies in music business, obliging them to increase their contribution to funding basic education in music.
Music Theory Teaching with Digital Tools
My article »The Digital Music Theory Classroom: Considerations for Technology-Based Teaching at Music Universities« has now been published in the ZGMTH, the journal of the Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie. It outlines a concept for teaching music theory to undergraduate or graduate students based on the application of digital media, online platforms, and collaborative tools and documents. Two different strategies of realisation are suggested, varying with regard to contact time and course organisation: a blended learning approach and a combined face-to-face and flipped classroom scheme, both comprising a mixture of on-site instruction, remote teaching, and asynchronous e-learning units.
Vokalsystem Performs Piccinni
On stage with Vokalsystem Berlin again! We will be appearing as an opera choir this week for the first time, embodying the Trojan and Carthaginian people in Niccolò Piccinni’s blockbuster Didon, a tragédie lyrique that amounted to over 250 performances in the late 18th century. The semistaged spectacle is part of this year’s programme of Kammeroper Schloss Rheinsberg on 25, 27, and 28 July, with Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin under the direction of Bernhard Forck. If you’d fancy an enjoyable lakeside opera experience, see here for tickets.
Electronic Concert by Vokalsystem
Warm invitation to this summer’s performances of Vokalsystem Berlin! We are presenting an electronic choral concert programme named [ˈkʁiːzə] (crisis), featuring music by Claudio Monteverdi, Benjamin Britten, Melissa Dunphy, Caroline Shaw, Ted Hearne, Radiohead, and others. Johannes David Wolff and Artschi Loyan are already bursting with playfulness and creativity, and I’m sure it will be a blast. Tickets at €14 / €9 are still available for the events on Friday 12 July, 8 pm, or Saturday 13 July, 6 pm and 8 pm, at the former distillery Monopol Berlin (a really cool space for vocal performances, by the way). Please refer to this website to book your ticket.