When a young musician wins a competition, what happens next? Short-term celebrity and perhaps a long-term career await the prize-winners at the Van Cliburn Competition in Texas, the Queen Elisabeth in Brussels and the Chopin Competition in Warsaw. What about all the others? Some award winners may still be completing their education; others will be conservatoire students, and older ones will have begun to ply their trade as a professional. Few of them will have been picked up by artist-management agencies. All of them will be in need of direction, connections, and help to plot the next step ahead.
At this pivotal stage of an artist’s development, the BRAND New project has broadened horizons for hundreds of young musicians across the European Union. Over the course of the last four years, they have met online and in person – taking brass quintets by train across northern Europe; playing music for cacti in Luxembourg; flash-mobbing the Museum Quarter in Vienna; staging a festival of harp music in Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine, and much more.
Some acronyms need spelling out. Standing for Business, Relations, Audience, Narration, Digital, BRAND New has arisen from the work of EMCY, the European Union of Music Competitions for Youth. EMCY was founded in 1970 as an umbrella organisation to link up and regulate the music competitions springing up across Europe. Its current president is Justas Dvarionas, a pianist with teaching posts at the conservatoires in Vilnius and Kaunas (and grandson of a notable Lithuanian composer, Balys Dvarionas). As a former student of Mikhail Pletnev at the Tchaikovsky Conservatoire in Moscow, Dvarionas is acutely aware of the challenges facing today’s young musicians as they attempt to negotiate an ever more fragmented cultural landscape.
“The original idea of EMCY,” he explains to me on a call from Vilnius, “was to unite the most significant national competitions and, over time, to welcome many international competitions into the fold. This collaboration was designed to foster a network that would not only connect competitions but also facilitate concert opportunities for the winners: just one of many important areas of EMCY’s activities and responsibilities. We believe that winning a prize – money or a certificate or whatever – is not an end in itself. It should be the beginning of a musical experience. Therefore we are always searching for possibilities for the young musicians to perform on stage. This was the motivation behind creating the BRAND New project.”
Accordingly, each of the individual projects sponsored so far has been devised with a view to future commercial success (Business), to bringing musicians and listeners together in new ways (Relations and Audience), to telling a story outside the box of the standard concert-hall programme (Narration) and to communicating the fruits of the project online and through social media (Digital). “It is more important than ever to bring classical music and musicians closer to the audience,” says Dvarionas.
Even basic communication skills can take on vital importance in this field. “Young musicians sit in their classrooms. They practise for hours and hours. They don’t know how to reach out. We have organised many sessions of teaching them about PR and how to do PR for themselves, even how to communicate with concert organizers. They don’t know that they have to answer emails from promoters, who don’t get in touch on Facebook, and who don’t trust TikTok.”
Today’s young musicians can no longer take for granted a hall full of receptive listeners. Accordingly, several BRAND New projects have taken the music to the audience, rather than the other way around. In 2022, in a project organised with the Center for International Cultural Projects and UGDA Music School, trombonist Jovaras Šiekštelė took part in a brass quintet that travelled by train from Kaunas to the Luxembourg city of Esch-sur-Alzette (both cities at the time being designated as a European Capital of Culture), and then on to Brussels. En route, they gave impromptu recitals in railway stations, and even on one occasion next to a building site. “We had to find a place near the train station, and it was the only one. The combination of our pieces of Lithuanian brass music with the builders next to us felt like a parody of modern dance!”
Once in Luxembourg, the travelling brass players linked up with an equally itinerant string quartet, drawing its members from Denmark, Serbia, Slovakia and the US, and together they performed as a nonet. Rather more intimate in scale was the “Drumming in the Living Room” project which drew a quartet of percussionists to a studio in Luxembourg for a week. One member of the quartet was Jonathan Zenker, from the town of Hermaringen (near Giengen, home of the Steiff teddy bears). Zenker shares the conviction of Dvarionas that young musicians have to put themselves out there.
“If you practise in your room your whole life,” he says, “you can’t be a good musician, because you don’t gain impressions to put into your music. I love to gain impressions. It doesn’t matter where from. It could be classical music, or the brass band in my home town. The audience wants to hear you putting something of yourself into what you play. You can only do this if you have some kind of life beyond your own music.”
Zenker and his fellow participants certainly stepped outside their comfort zone for “Drumming in the Living Room”. Coached for a week by professors from Luxembourg’s UGDA School of Music, they played Steve Reich’s Drumming alongside Branches and Living Room Music by John Cage. Zenker was familiar with Drumming as a classic of the genre, but he had never previously made music with the cacti or cushions which belong to Cage’s everyday instrumentaria.
“I definitely want to play more Cage in the future,” reflects Zenker. “The closer you listen and pay attention, the more details you hear within it, and you can listen in such a way that you are giving your full attention to the melody, or the countermelody, or the bass line, and each of them feels like a piece of theatre, especially while you are playing.” He was struck by the egalitarian nature of the arrangements, which saw the teachers eat and travel and rehearse with the students: “It was like a big family from start to finish.”
Of equal significance, says Zenker, “none of us seemed to feel any shyness around each other, even though we had never met. We all had one thing in common, and that was the music. There were no awkward silences, because we could immediately talk about the music, and go on talking about it all day. It’s in the nature of making music that it makes you a better communicator.”
The most striking example of the ambition and courage underpinning BRAND New is the Glowing Harp Festival which has been supported by EMCY since 2017. Two Ukrainian harpists, Larisa Klievtsova and Veronika Lemishenko, founded Glowing Harp as a celebration of their instrument, incorporating a competition, masterclasses and concerts. The 2024 edition still took place in Kharkiv, Kyiv, and Lviv across five days in September, with masterclasses given by the British harpist Amy Turk, alongside coaching from the Czech composer Jiří Trtik and the artist manager Alisa Kupriyova. All the participants were Ukrainian, and the concerts had to be held in bomb shelters.
Dvarionas is justly proud of the role played by EMCY in supporting the Volodymyr Krainev Piano Competition held in Kharkiv since 1992. For the 15th edition, postponed from 2022 on the outbreak of Russia’s invasion, the competition was moved to Zurich and rebranded as “Kharkiv Meets Zurich”. Taking place in February 2024, the competition retained its international status by welcoming pianists from Europe, Israel, China and Australia. Most of the competition rounds took place at a high school in Uster, a suburb of Zurich.
“The rector of the high school, Patrick Ehrismann, made the competition part of the life of the school,” recalls Dvarionas. “There were often two hundred children in the hall, listening to the young pianists. They were captivated – the way they would be with a sporting competition. The rector told me that a student had come to him asking if he could miss some lessons the next day. The student said he wanted to attend the orchestral rehearsals for the competition final – which he did. This experience opened up the world of classical music for that student.”
It might be as well to forget the acronyms, and focus on the music, and the musicians. In the work of both EMCY and BRAND New, Dvarionas sees himself as coordinating a “social mission” at a time when co-operation across borders is more necessary than ever. “Culture can be a kind of glue. It brings people together in a spirit of good will. And it is extremely important we work for young people who are trying to find an identity for themselves through culture… I have seen many situations where young musicians come to a competition and live with host families for a week. They become close to the family, and they stay in touch. They become aware of another corner of the world.” Zenker would call it “gaining impressions” – otherwise known as life experience.
See online documentation from all BRAND New performance projects.
Featured projects this year include Digital Concert Neuwied 2024 and Peace – Music – Freedom: Masterclasses and Concerts 2024, which both brought Ukrainian young musicians together with others from across Europe.
BRAND New project is co-funded by the Creative Europe program of the European Union.
This article was sponsored by Creative Europe and the European Union of Music Competitions for Youth.
