Membership Weekend

tell. your. stories. your stories Membership weekend 15-16 November 2019 Ljubljana, Slovenia European Choral Association - Europa Cantat In year 3 we will continue thepeer-to-peer programme as well as the other regular activities. We have decided to combine this year’s capacity building workshop on storytelling with our - One Voice for Collective Singing - Membership Day and General Assembly in Ljubljana to make it easier for members to attend, and we look forward to seeing many of you there. In October our Board went on a 2-day strategy retreat to develop a first vision of which focus our association would like to have beyond 2021, when the network funding project will end, and you will have the opportunity We are a network of organisations, choirs and individuals in the field of collective singing in to comment on it during the Membership Day. We also started working on a strategy for the Europe. Through our membership, we directly represent more than 2,5 million singers, vocal long-term financial sustainability of the association. On our website we want to promote all leaders/conductors, creators/composers, educators/teachers and managers in over the composers who have won prizes in one of our competitions or were commissioned new 40 European countries, and reach out to more than 37 million people in continental Europe works. And we will start preparing the last year of the project, when the meta-study on the active in the field of collective singing. benefits of collective singing should be ready and we want to launch a Europe-wide cam- Our vision is to be the leading pan-European nonprofit organisation dedicated to life-long paign, culminating at ourEUROPA CANTAT Festival in Ljubljana in 2021. 2 learning and cultural exchange through collective singing. 3 Sonja Greiner, Secretary General of the European Choral Association - Europa Cantat Since 1955, our aims are to promote singing as an art form, foster cooperation and mutual understanding between cultures, nations and individuals across social and political borders, represent the collective singing sector, promote and use singing as a tool to connect people. Welcome to the Membership Weekend! Upgrade - Connect - Reach Out Raising Awareness for Collective Singing in Europe Table of contents About theEuropean Choral Association - Europa Cantat 2 In the second year, which ended in August 2019, we continued many of the activities we had started in 2017, we developed our Annual Report and our Website further, we worked on Welcome words 4 membership development, also offering grants to (potential) members from Central-Eastern Schedule and map of Ljubljana 6 and South-Eastern Europe, and we offered a second capacity building workshop, this time Practical info and ‘must-sees’ in Ljubljana 8 on Membership issues. The peer-to-peer programme which was a development of the staff Membership Day: project presentations 10 exchange programme we offered in the first year was well accepted. Membership Day: interactive sessions 14 In addition we commissioned 5 new works in connection with activities under the label of Welcoming concert & musical dinner 16 ECA-EC and were very happy with the results, to be found on our website. And we started General Assembly 19 collecting a number of useful guidelines and handbooks which were partly developed in the frame of other EU-funded projects and partly developed as part of our network funding pro- Capacity building workshop: how to tell your stories 20 ject during the last year. This includes a handout with questions that organisations, choirs Musical workshop 21 and festival organisers can ask themselves concerning environmental sustainability, a topic Concert in the cave 22 we will discuss during our Membership day, and a guideline on how to organise a low-budget choral festival on the model of Youth Choirs in Movement 2019. Last but not least we continued our efforts toconnect to other choral associations andreach out to other sectors, and to promote collective singing at different levels. Note: The European Commision support for the production of this publication does not constitute an endorsement of the contents which reflects the views only of the authors, and the Commision cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein. Dear members and friends of the European Choral Association – Europa Cantat, Welcome to our home-town Ljubljana, host of the Festival Europa Cantat 2021. Ljubljana is a safe and charming capital of Slovenia Dear members and friends of the European Choral Association – Europa Cantat, situated between the Alps and the Adriatic Sea. It is a mid-sized European city, but it has preserved its relaxed Welcome to Ljubljana for our 2019 Membership Day, General Assembly and Workshops! small-town atmosphere while providing all the facilities of a modern capital. We cannot wait to fill it with varied and We would like to thank our member JSKD for hosting us during these days in the town that will also host colourful choral music, singers from across the world, spe- the festival EUROPA CANTAT 2021. The Festival Music Commission has already started working on the cial events, and create a musical delicacy for all the partic- programme and many of our members, advisors and music consultants have sent in proposals that will 4 ipants and visitors. 5 make this creative process and interesting one. You will be able to discover the special atmosphere of the city and start imagining the festival – and of course we hope to see you all back in Ljubljana in July 2021! We greet you in the name of the Festival organiser - Republic of Slovenia Public Fund for Cultural Ac- tivities (JSKD), a professional network of 59 local branches for development and support of all fields of Now we are looking forward to two exciting days with our members, potential members and guests. The amateur arts, among them choral singing. We are extremely proud of our choral tradition, the multiplicity, first day will be dedicated to our membership, to your inspiring projects and your active contribution to quality, extraordinary choral personalities and performers. the shaping of our association’s future strategy and action plan. Two sessions are also open to non-members especially for the members of the Choral Festival Network also present. We hope that you will also The successful choral story of today has grown from a rich tradition: folk singing did resemble choir use the day to network, start new connections, plan future projects together and make new friends. singing in the past as it used to be 3 – 5 part. Already centuries ago, we had people who shaped international musical happenings, we can name the bishop and founder of the court chapel in Vienna - today’s On Saturday morning we will hold our annual General Assembly with reports and proposals for the future, Wiener Sängerknaben Jurij Slatkonja (Georg Chyssipus, 1456–1522) and composer Jacobus Handl Gal- including some changes in our statutes. We will inform you about the next activities planned in our pro- lus (1550–1591). Famous music personalities were connected to Ljubljana: honorary members of the ject “Upgrade – Connect – Reach Out”, co-funded by the European Union Creative Europe Programme, Academia philharmonicorum (1701) included Joseph Haydn, Ludwig van Beethoven, Johannes Brahms we will introduce the EPIC project which started on November 1st 2020 which is also co-funded by the and Nicolo Paganini. Between 1881 and 1882, Gustav Mahler was its resident conductor. Creative Europe Programme, and the SHIFT project coordinated by the European Music Council and co-funded by Erasmus+ in which we are partners. You will also hear about the “Training Leading Voices” And today? Choirs now represent the most numerous and successful amateur activity with approx. project which we would like to start in 2020 and for which we will submit an application later this year. 100.000 singers active (schools’, children’s, youth choirs, adults in choral societies, and church choris- At the end we will introduce to you three international/European networks, the Choral Festival Network ters). They regularly present themselves every year at JSKD events where the choirs are professionally in which we are a member, and EAS, the European Association for music teachers in schools, with which assisted and advised by the best Slovene conductors. For the best of the best, International choral com- we have started a strategic partnership partnership, and Jeunesses Musicales International who are our petition Gallus – Maribor (member of the European Grand Prix for Choral Singing Association) is the partners in the World Youth Choir Foundation. place to be. We are also proud of our school system where every primary school is required by law to offer children’s unison and two- or three-voices choir, and conducting a school choir is a part of music teach- On Saturday afternoon we will offer two parallel workshops meant to inspire you: In the first one you can ers’ job. Operating for three decades is the professional Slovenian Philharmonic Choir (TENSO member), learn how to tell the story of what you do in your association, which tools you can use and how your sto- holding a choral season series with invited foreign conductors. ries can be most effective. You will hear and see some inspiring examples and will get to practice telling your own story. You will also hear about why evaluating your activities can be important. In the second Several Slovenian Choirs have made significant international apperances: Carmina Slovenica under one you can discover why you must love Slovenian choral music. You will be taken on an exciting journey Karmina Šilec who developed “Choregie – Vocal Theatre” and opened new spaces to multi-form choral through Slovenian music and will get to sing and dance, too.

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