Bremen – brief history and preconditions

The symphony orchestra The Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen is a singular case in German cultural landscape. No other is owned by its musicians, who form a legal entity and who are directly involved in all aspects of artistic and financial decision making. Artistic freedom is linked to business risk, and it is this existential paradox which distinguishes the orchestra from its more then 130 professional, highly subsidized orchestras in the Federal Republic of Germany (MIZ 2016). Since its establishment in 1980, The Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen has steadily grown and established itself among the top orchestras of the world. Next to numerous prices for recordings and the celebrated cycle of Beethoven’s Symphonies, there was another point of interest for the public: the entrepreneurship of the musicians. Their successful, sophisticated democratic structure has led to praise even from the economical world in form of awards (Deutscher Gründerpreis) and invitations to coach and consult. Managing Director Albert Schmitt, former double-bass player of the orchestra, has kept records with this development. Together with a specialist on human resource management, he put his and the orchestra’s experiences and observations into a book on how to train high-performing teams (Scholz, Schmitt 2011). The finding sounds fairly simple: successful high-performing teams, be it classical musicians or a team of surgeons, accept conflicts. More than that, they use conflicts to strengthen their positions, to advance and to outperform. And it is exactly this characteristic of the musicians of The Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen which proves to be the stepping stone to cultural education.

The establishment of the «Future Laboratory» in 2006 made the orchestra’s subliminal obligation to cultural education visible. It marks the move-in of the musicians into their new rehearsal space, the Gesamtschule Bremen-Ost (GSO), a 9-year secondary school with approximately 1000 students. Since the foundation as post-grad student orchestra, The Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen has always had a strong emphasis on educational work – starting with the simple fact that some musicians wanted to convey contemporary music to their audience. 25 years later, the group had relocated from Frankfurt a.M to the city state of Bremen in Northern Germany and was in need of rehearsal space. The building that was offered to them by the city was far from downtown in a fairly dangerous and unattractive neighbourhood, and to make matters worse, part of a comprehensive school. Any other classical orchestra would have declined – The Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen accepted and set up a unique experiment: what happens, when a world-renowned orchestra leaves the noble concert hall and moves into a socially challenged community?

The experiment was not unprepared. As mentioned, the premise was the unique attitude of the musicians. They found a district which had been equipped by the state of Bremen with a programme of civic participation to foster social and economical development. The public housing corporation had put a plan of urban development into action to turn down some of the most demolished housing blocks which had been uninhabited for years due to the miscalculation during the planning of the «sleeping town» in the 1970s (Goldschmidt p. 10). And the school was not unprepared either: years before, they had realized their substantial relevance in the district and set up an all-day-curriculum. In 2006, the district had better statistics than ever before: two thirds of Osterholz-Tenever’s overall population of 37.000 had an immigrant background, one third was depending on state support and more than a quarter was under 18 years old (Goldschmidt p. 35). Osterholz-Tenver holds several unpopular records; the most substantial still is the highest rate of childhood poverty in the state of Bremen (Bremen Poverty Record 2007). When the latest educational research of OECD compares the social background of a child in comparison to its chance to advance to secondary education, Germany ranks second last: here, the academic success of a child depends largely on the education and the social setting of its parents (OECD p. 78). The challenges of a public school like the GSO are enormous, and the decision to establish a strong focus on the arts was observed with a sceptical eye from some inner-city schools. When renovation works were finished and the world-class orchestra finally moved there, some sceptics did not understand how Beethoven could be relevant to a place like Osterholz-Tenever. The sceptics stopped thinking altogether when the first big part of the experiment was successfully conducted in 2009: an opera with and for the community based on Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s «Faust II». For more than one year, ca. 400 participants from the district were involved in the development, preparation and presentation of a musical play that dealt with one of the most complex plays in German literature. The age of the participants ranged from 10 to over 70 years, and next to the student body of about 300, there were numerous organizations and institutions from the district involved. This «community-opera» proofed to be the prime method to involve the orchestra into the district and to establish a reliable and effective relationship with the community.