Appendix 6 - International Music Council

Musical Practice (making music) is the prerequisite of the diversity and plurality of
musical creation. Only when a lot music is made, you can assume that musical diversity
will be emerge.
To prevent the drying out of the pool of music making, it is necessary to support
amateurs making music. It is no use here, to select projects following criteria of quality,
therefore the infrastructure for amateur associations, orchestras, choirs, exchanges of
ensembles should be promoted.
Learning and training musical skills needs a lot of time. So the ideal situation is, if
children already grow up in an atmosphere of making music. Kindergarden could be a
place, where measures and projects could start.
Musical practice is automatically promoted by all kinds of activities and events that
require musical participation. So prizes and competition, not only on professional, but
also on lower levels, stimulate activity and practice.
A good example is the German Creole-Wettbewerb (s. section 6) and its regional
edition Musica Vitale in Berlin, a competition for newcomer bands in traditional and
world musics.
This also applies for all kinds of festivals that provide the option of participation like
the Fete de la Musique (s. above), the Karneval der Kulturen (s. above) and others.
5. Promotion of democratic structures of decision-making
Instead of totalitarian decision-makers, who arbitrarily decide following their own
estimation and then recommend, what they themselves prefer and like, structures should
be promoted and subsidized, that allow to make these decisions more democratic. This
can be achieved by e.g.
• building expert committees, that represent also the society and not only "the chosen
club of decent and mighty musicologists"
• pay heed to the plural composition of these expert committees, the competence of their
members, if music is to be judged by quality criteria or judged at all, and if this decides
about subsidies and promotional measures.
• stimulating and permitting a public discourse about this issue and take it into account
during the decisionmaking-process
6. Preserving and promoting local music traditions
The wealth of local musical traditions together with musical practice forms the core and
the very substance of the diversity of music forms. The manifold of local musics
constitutes the real diversity of our cultural environment. To bring an analogy, think of
visiting a main street in any European city: you will find many different shops there –
but you will find the same shops in any other European city. To avoid such a
"homogenous diversity" in music, we have to strengthen local music traditions!
Local traditions are also essential for maintaining local identity. It is the task of local
authorities, to protect and to promote these traditions.
One of the instruments for protecting and promoting local musical traditions is the
UNESCO convention on intangible heritage. We bring here the „Living Human
Treasure“ programme realisation in Bulgaria as an example of a best practice. From the
official website www.treasures.eubcc.bg :
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