50 signatures reached
To: Tibor Navracsics, Commissioner, Education, Culture, Youth and Sport
Save The European Union Youth Orchestra from closure.
Tell Tibor Navracsics, Commissioner, Education, Culture, Youth and Sport to restore and protect full funding for The European Union Youth Orchestra.
Why is this important?
These musicians are the future of our orchestras, pop band ensembles, film/tv soundtrack session musicians, pit players for ballet, opera and musical theatre shows and your childrens' future teachers and mentors. The great majority of classical musicians flourished from training orchestras such as these! Closing the orchestra down is ignorant and shameful.
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"EU has just cut every Euro of funding to the young musicians of the Orchestra (backdated to last October), without so much as an advance whisper? The consequences of this decision are incalculable: the destruction of one of the world’s greatest training orchestras, generations of young musicians denied unique opportunities, and the loss of 40 years of patient tradition, and one of the EU’s greatest arts organisations.
This funding decision is simply the consequence of a change in the EU’s cultural funding policy. Two years ago it was decided by the EU that there was to be no more cultural funding for any single organisation. Instead, €1.45bn of cultural support over seven years (a 7% increase on the previous programme) was only allowed to be used on projects with a highly complicated partnership structure. The new Creative Europe programme has wonderful objectives. But it is project funding to encourage national organisations to get together to become more European, not core funding for what is the original pan-European organisation.
This “one size fits all”-approach to cultural funding doesn’t work for an EU orchestra with members from 28 countries, and that we were being forced into the wrong funding box.
“The European Union Youth Orchestra remains one of our most distinguished ambassadors … a potent symbol of our European Union.” (Jean-Claude Juncker, EU Commission President).
“I was moved not simply by the beauty of the music they produced, but also by what they stand for: the EUYO perfectly embodies the power of being united in diversity,” (Juncker’s colleague Martin Schulz, European Parliament President).
And here is Tibor Navracsics, EU Commissioner for Education, Culture, Youth and Sport. “The EUYO is remarkable - both for the outstanding quality of its performances and for its exemplary function … it inspires us”.
And finally, the EU’s number one foreign policy politician Federica Mogherini: “This is Europe at its best … In hard times like the ones we are living, the EUYO sends a powerful message to all the young people of our continent: your time is now.” "
See them perform:
European Union Youth Orchestra - EUYO - Flashmob - Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam - 23.08.2014
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOs72u5FjCE
EUYO Tchaikovsky, Symphony No. 6, 'Pathétique', Movt I
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lft2isVp0kk
SHOSTAKOVICH 4th Symphony mov-1 (part 1/3) Vladimir Ashkenazi (BBC Proms 2006)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YVGZy2nsWA
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Email: [email protected]
Or send a letter or postcard to:
Tibor Navracsics, Commissioner, Education, Culture, Youth and Sport, European Commission, Rue de la Loi / Wetstraat 200, 1049 1049 Brussels, Belgium
