The 2021 Festival Motto
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Classical curiosities!
Heavy metal or classics? The brain decides! Those who hear the deep basses in a sound have a special liking for percussion music, but also for piano music with short, sharp notes. Those who perceive the higher notes better feel more attracted to the gentle sounds of wind or string instruments. The question of which type of listener we are is to a large extent determined in the brain.
Source: Anne-Marie Seither-Preisler, neuro-psychologist
Fan culture
Classical curiosities!
Composer Dmitri Shostakovich was a passionate football fan and a qualified referee. He blew his whistle at many matches, wrote articles for sports magazines, and kept statistics about all the results of the Soviet championships – including those for goal scorers, which were not mentioned in the socialist media. To this day, Shostakovich’s reporting is one of the most important sources for researching the football history of the early Soviet Union.
Source: Harald Hodeige, music researcher
Classical curiosities!
Cheers, Europe! Schiller’s Ode to Joy was originally a drinking song. It was Beethoven’s music that made it the (official) European anthem. When Europe lay in ruins after the Napoleonic Wars, Beethoven, already deaf, composed his vision of a democratic continent in the Ninth Symphony: “All people become brothers.”Locations
Classical curiosities!
Festivals, concerts, operas, operettas, dance, musicals: in the 2017–18 season, about 34.7 million people attended performances of classical music in Germany. In the same season, the first and second divisions of the football Bundesliga had 18.8 million spectators – 45 % fewer than the classics.
Source: Deutscher Bühnenverein 2019
Classical curiosities!
Music, the intergalactic language: since 1977 the probes Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have been traveling through space. On board they have a gold-plated copper disk containing sounds from Earth – for example, works by Beethoven, Mozart and Bach that might one day arouse aliens’ curiosity about our planet.
