Education

The teaching of new and contemporary music in schools is mostly limited to a few selected works and composers. This selective look at individual works largely ignores the fact that the language of contemporary music is a form of personal expression available to amateurs, too. A lack of understanding and tolerance towards the large variety of new music is the result.

QuerKlang counters this tendency by encouraging pupils to conduct their own experiments with musical material and to create their own compositions. The aim is not just to inspire curiosity and openness towards unusual musical materials, but also to develop a basic understanding of the working process involved in composition: Pupils will see themselves as composers who – beyond all criteria of “beautiful” or “ugly” music – invent, assess and modify musical processes and finally perform them together in public.

Under the guidance and accompaniment of composers, music teacher and music students of the Berlin University of the Arts, around 1,000 pupils from Berlin have explored the creation of musical processes as part of their music teaching since 2003: The goal is for them to develop compositions of their own to be performed in public as part of MaerzMusik.

With the launch of the pilot project QuerKlang+, the 20 years of experience of the programme and UNESCO model “QuerKlang - Experimental Composing at School” will now expand into the artistic fields of theatre and the visual arts. Nor, for the first time, as part of QuerKlang+, pupils and teachers will work with artists and student teachers in various artistic disciplines and develop collaborations as a team, which will be presented as a cross-section of the three disciplines as part of MaerzMusik 2024.