Future Lab

Unlocking potential through music

The decision to move the orchestra’s rehearsal rooms to the building of the Bremen East Comprehensive School (Gesamtschule Bremen-Ost) was one of the most momentous steps in the orchestra’s history. Since doing so, the orchestra members have devoted themselves with great personal commitment to the joint projects with the Bremen East Comprehensive School, which aim to use music to promote individual development and build self-confidence – in a disadvantaged neighbourhood with a variety of social challenges.

For over ten years, orchestra, school and local community have formed the nucleus of the Future Lab, where the building of relationships stands at the heart of its work in music education. Musicians, schoolchildren, teachers, parents and the multinational residents of the local high-rise community of Osterholz-Tenever meet in the most diverse circumstances, projects and on all levels. The unique collaboration between school and orchestra has been honoured with numerous awards, including the 2007 Future Award for the Best Social Innovation. In 2009, the Future Lab was declared a nationwide pilot project by the Minister of State for Culture.

Visit us at zukunftslabor.com

Future Lab website

Driving force for development

School shapes the future

The aim of the Future Lab is to unlock individual potential through music and enable young people to discover entirely new perspectives. The aesthetic education projects are realized at the heart of a Bremen community where child poverty and educational disadvantage are a stark reality. Alongside projects such as the ›Community Opera‹, ›Melody of Life‹ and ›Club 443 Hz‹, many smaller encounters in the corridors and canteen, as well as regular visits to rehearsals and collaboration with the strings and woodwind classes are a normal part of orchestra and school life.

Since 2015, the Future Lab has been part of the nationwide project ›Art Lab for Music‹, by MUTIK gGmbH, financially supported by Stiftung Mercator. Its aim is to develop working principles, methods and formats from the Future Lab so that they can be absorbed into other schools’ practices and routines, thus making practical materials available into which a wealth of experience and valuable knowledge have been incorporated. The ›Art Lab for Music‹ thus helps to ensure that all pupils receive enduring high-quality cultural education.

Everything at a glance

The current Future Lab Brochure available as a download in English and French.

Future Lab formats

Joint productions

Ideas are continuously flowing at The Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen’s Future Lab, resulting in a wide range of aesthetic education formats. As well as visits to concerts and rehearsals and mentoring between individual musicians and classes, these also include the joint ›Melody of Life‹ and ›Club 443 Hz‹ series. The highlight is the now legendary ›Community Opera‹.

Online Orchestra for all

Whether with an instrument or without, whether solo, in a choir or with the whole family, everyone can join in the Future Lab’s newest project – the Music Swap Lab – and become a member of a gigantic online orchestra! With the help of online video tutorials which you can find on www.musicswaplab.com, all those taking part can practise a piece of classical music, film themselves playing their own orchestra part and send their videos digitally to Future Lab. There, the videos will be compiled into one unique orchestral film and published online.

The short website-workshops, with their helpful tips from the professional players of the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen and their guests, are aimed just as much at instrumentalists as they are those who play no instrument – because the Music Swap Lab needs everyone’s creative ideas. You can make music with everyday objects, you can sing and you can dance. The most important thing is taking part and making music!

The result will be an Opus Klassik award-winning online orchestra which has been under constant development (Music Lab during the pandemic), resulting in new music. The project is now called the Music ›Swap‹ Lab.

go to Music Swap Lab

Art Labs

Making principles of success tangible

From 2015–2019, the Future Lab was part of MUTIK gGmbH’s nationwide sponsorship programme Art Labs, financially supported by Stiftung Mercator. As one of five labs selected from all branches of the arts, the Future Lab had the possibility to gain insights into and develop its own working principles so that they can be absorbed into other schools’ practices and routines.

The aim of the programme is to develop formats and methods for implementing high-quality artistic offerings in schools. The resulting website www.kunstlabore.de/musik offers deep insights into the work of the Future Lab. It makes useful practical materials available into which a wealth of experience and valuable knowledge have been incorporated.

In a number of so-called transfer schools, the formats were tested and adapted to suit the local area, for example Frankfurt am Main and Bad Kissingen. The key factors for the success of the Bremen model are thus made tangible and, in this way, a wide range of similar projects can take their inspiration from the original Bremen Future Lab.

Website Art Labs

Future Lab Tunisia

From Bremen to Tunisia

Inspired by the success in Bremen and in cooperation with the Kamel Lazaar Foundation, the Future Lab has been developing Future Lab Tunisia since 2017 based on the Bremen model. Thus the musicians of The Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen are for the first time transferring their experiment to a completely different cultural situation.

Future Lab Tunisia

Exemplary

Model for a successful future

As part of the Future Lab initiative, The Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen shares its successful economic concept with the business community. The orchestra has developed the ›5 Seconds Model‹, a training programme for managers that makes the orchestra’s success as a high-performing team tangible for top executives. A number of larger companies listed on the German stock exchange have in the meantime integrated the ›5 Seconds Model‹ into their daily routines.

The artistic initiative and social commitment of The Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen have led to a number of awards – for example, just two years after it was established, the Minister of State for Culture, Bernd Neumann, declared the Future Lab a nationwide pilot project in the area of cultural education. The Future Lab has received the Future Award, an Echo Klassik in the category ›Special Prize for the Promotion of Young Talent‹, the Vision Award and the Würth Prize of Jeunesse Musicale Deutschland (2014), to name just a few.

Participatory musical theatre

One for all

In 2017, the Future Lab organized an international academy on participatory musical theatre, which granted fellowships to selected representatives from cultural and educational institutions, artists and scientists. Over the past decade, the principle of the ›Community Opera‹ has become firmly established as a consistent form and new genre within participatory musical theatre that combines all aspects of a cultural concept oriented towards society as a whole. The academy’s aim is to make the interdisciplinary sub-areas and their mechanisms of action tangible and transferrable for interested institutions.