Concert design: Institutional outreach and participation

As part of »tuned«, Beethovenfest Bonn in 2025 will become an experimental platform for experience design and educational activities.

Under the artistic direction of Steven Walter, extraordinary and interdisciplinary concert formats and a wide range of music education activities are nothing new at Beethovenfest. However, these approaches have so far focused on stage and spatial events in special formats and projects. As part of the »tuned« funding programme of the German Federal Cultural Foundation, this framework is being expanded in 2025. All aspects and rituals of the classical concert experience will be consistently questioned and further developed.

With the help of this year’s »tuned« funding and project funding from the Commerzbank Foundation, we intend to significantly expand the music education programme. Going forward, all artists performing at the festival will be given greater prominence and involved from the outset in our outreach activities. This is based on a structural change at Beethovenfest Bonn, where music education is now an institutional cross-sectional task in all areas. In this way, the festival opens its programme to a wide range of population groups and enables participation.

In collaboration with concert organisers, artists and experience designers, a structurally innovative approach is being developed. Experience and concert design, as an interdisciplinary field and artistic principle, runs through the entire festival programme 2025. Thanks to lovingly and sensually designed sequences and details, nearly every one of the approximately 80 concerts at 30 venues offers a special experience.

Several interdisciplinary individuals have been engaged over the four weeks of the festival to design and contextualise concert programmes for specific projects, venues and series, working alongside the invited artists. All parameters of the concert and associated long-standing rituals are examined, questioned and redesigned to maximise their experiential potential.

This approach marks the beginning of a new era, in which concerts and events are recognised as artistic creations, and festivals actively shape all aspects of the audience experience and hospitality.

To achieve this, the Beethovenfest is collaborating with four experience designers this year, each of whom contribute their own artistic specialisation and area of activity to the project.

The second structural concern to be addressed on a prototypical basis as part of the »tuned« project 2025, with the support of the Commerzbank Foundation, is Open Beethovenfest. This involves scaling up and embedding music education activities in all programme areas.

The project comprises various modules arranged in a comprehensive grid, which will be brought to life by artists from the respective Beethovenfest year. To increase the musical range and bring the festival to the whole city, a variety of modular formats are being prepared that can be implemented by all festival musicians. These include one-to-one concerts, street music, discursive and communication formats, spontaneous flash mobs, visits to institutions and performances on public stages. Access to the musicians and concert experiences is improved and increased.

Some formats also allow participation in our long-established outreach projects, as well as those that we will launch in the future. Thus, the concept of Open Beethovenfest aligns with the process-oriented participation strategy of Beethovenfest. Guest artists will be involved in long-term participation projects through numerous community projects. For instance, the festival has an ambitious community music programme since 2025, resulting in various further lively intersections with Open Beethovenfest.

Music education also plays a cross-sectional role in other areas: artists can contribute to it through discursive formats, such as pre- or post-performance talks, panels and discussion rounds, or through special collaborations with the communications department, such as podcasts, social media takeovers and video formats.

Lydia Kappesser (Programme/Music Education Department) and Henrike Alscher (Development Department) are responsible for coordinating the »tuned« projects at Beethovenfest 2025.

Marion Leuschner and Julia Klein (Programme/Music Education Department) organise all projects by and with festival artists outside their main engagement at the festival.