We are delighted to announce the grant support of Erasmus+ for the new Medinea Programme 2021-2023.

The programme will be coordinated by the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence, and brings together a consortium of 6 leading musical and cultural institutions from six countries from the Mediterranean basin:

• Festival d'Aix-en-Provence (France)
• Ente Musicale di Nuoro (Italy)
• ARC Research and Consultancy (Malta)
• Escola Superior de Música de Lisboa (Portugal)
• University of Ljubljana - Academy of Music (Slovenia)
• Istanbul Technical University - MIAM (Turkey)

This new programme adapts to the current health context through hybrid means of combining virtual and face-to-face activities for young artists (instrumentalists, conductors and composers) from the Euro-Mediterranean region:

Medinea on Air

Through this innovative online training programme, Medinea intends to fight against the obstacles to mobility suffered by young Euro-Mediterranean artists in the current pandemic context. Designed using the most advanced educational resources in the Mediterranean basin, it will enable young artists to train with high-level speakers from the Medinea network (teachers of a musical discipline, coaches, experienced artists, experts in the field of artistic promotion and career development, etc.). This programme will be available from January 2022.

This programme will be available from January 2022.

Mediterranean Youth Orchestra (MYO)

A symphonic session will be a great opportunity for the 90 young musicians selected to experience orchestral life in the stimulating setting of the 2022 edition of the Festival d'Aix. They will benefit from the coaching of experienced artists in order to understand the great pieces of the symphonic repertoire presented to the public during concerts under the direction of the young conductor Duncan Ward, who dedicates his energy and focus on the transmission and dialogue between the music of different cultures.

Four Medinea sessions: Led by Fabrizio Cassol, composer and saxophonist: every training session includes a dozen young artists from various backgrounds, including jazz and traditional music of the Mediterranean. These various “constellations” compose works together, that they must then organise into a musical programme and present in concert form at the end of each residency. Here, memorisation and oral transmission reign supreme, musical notation is absent, and creativity becomes a resolutely collective act, in the spirit of centuries-old musical traditions of the Mediterranean.

The sessions will take place between January 2022 and July 2023, in Valletta (Malta), Aix-en-Provence (France), Nuoro (Italy) and Ljubljana (Slovenia).

Working within a tense geopolitical context which is now aggravated by the pandemic crisis, the Medinea network is convinced that culture, artistic education, and creation is the way to approach dialogue and intercultural relations between different peoples. With this new programme, Medinea intends to contribute to meeting the needs of the Mediterranean cultural and creative sectors: to energise and nourish the dialogue between the countries of the Mediterranean basin and to strengthen the role of the sectors in favour of social inclusion and professional integration of young artists. Erasmus + is supporting this project of 515 000 euros with a funding of 240,000 euros. This is the third Medinea programme to receive support from the European Union since 2018.