Ohne Musik keine Bildung – without music no education
randform reported already earlier about the decline of music education in Berlin. The last post was about a protest note by well-known musicians who protest against the cutbacks of music education in schools .
Currently you can hear the Vuvuzelas everywhere here in Berlin — they are quite LAUUUUt (this is approximately the noise of a german Vuvuzela) — thus one could easily conclude that the decline of music education already reached the bottom.
But of course the Vuvuzelas are due to the soccer fever and luckily there are still some people left in Berlin who prove that its music education has not (yet) reached the bottom. Here a video snippet from the concert of the Musikalische Werkstätten (a music project with pupils from the Berlin districts of Lichtenberg-Hohenschönhausen, Treptow-Köpenick und Marzahn-Hellersdorf, organized by Landesmusikakademie Berlin) where pupils perform not with Vuvuzelas but partially with similar simple instruments the piece “seven nation army” (here the original) in a very cool style.
During the concert I was a bit concerned that parts of the ceiling in the gym at FEZ, where the concert took place would fall down, however then I told myself that just because the ceiling is deformed (probably due to ball shots, see image) that doesn’t necessary imply that it will fall down. ??
The protest has now a website at http://www.ohne-musik-keine-bildung.de/ and you can leave your signature against the cuts in music education (german newspaper article in Morgenpost about the campaign)
December 9th, 2011 at 11:11 am
nad wrote:” luckily there are still some people left in Berlin who prove that its music education has not (yet) reached the bottom. ”
i think you are exagerating – there is so much innovative music going on in berlin! you should just go and see noise festivals and the avantgarde! I haven’t seen any report on these on this blog.
December 10th, 2011 at 10:36 pm
A lot of the innovative music comes from outside or is still subsisting from earlier times or as above from the work of very engaged people (see also this article about bad salaries at music schools). It is actually also not so easy to provide extragood education within the given institutional framework in Berlin as can be seen for example at the problems of the Jugendsinfonieorchester Marzahn.
About the “noise festivals and the avantgarde”. We do eventually go to concerts, but its currently not so easy for us as it had been and if we go then this is at the moment not much noise and avantgarde festivals. Like I wanted to give Tim as a birthday present a ticket to this concert by Ute Lemper but he had to work in munich at that day. He is a rather good tango dancer (I find), but he currently hasn’t much time to dance Tango.