WORLD PITCH was a one-year training series for young world music professionals under the Music Moves Europe framework programme, between 2019 and 2020. World Pitch offered a unique one-semester-long training course series for 10 young professionals who were already active in the field of world music.
The training offered profound insight into all relevant aspects of the world music scene (management, agency work, programming, organisation, PR, journalism, academic work, policies) featuring personal one-on-one trainings with Europe’s most recognised professionals. As part of the programme 5 candidates were selected for paid fellowships placements at various market leading organisations in the world music scene across Europe.
Programme partners:
- BOZAR – a well-known venue within the world music genre with a strong focus on policymaking,
- Earth Beat – an Amsterdam-based promoter representing artists from every continent,
- Maetka – a Finnish agency representing Finnish artists abroad and bringing foreign artist to Finland,
- Glitterbeat – an independent record label of “vibrant global sounds”, headed by Chris Eckman,
- DEX – an international songwriting expo held in Budapest.
ACHIEVEMENTS
In spite of the challenging circumstances we managed to reach all of the programme objectives.
We organised and implemented three workshops, two of them were in person, while the last one was held online due to the novel coronavirus pandemic. The first workshop was an in-person meeting administered at Tampere, Finland, combined with a visit of WOMEX 2019. The second workshop was organised in Veszprém, Hungary, European Capital of Culture , alongside with the second meet-up of mentors. The third workshop, as mentioned above, was originally organised to be held in Brussels, later rescheduled to Budapest, and then finally implemented online due to the coronavirus pandemic. The online workshop involved a videography training and an online pitching session where participants could present their project pitch videos.
Alongside the three workshops, all five fellowships have been implemented, in part in person, before the pandemic, and then in part transferred online. Every fellowship host worked with a fellow, who was not necessarily the same as their mentee.
ABOUT THE FORUM FOUNDATION
The Forum Foundation was set up by artists and professionals with the aim of actively supporting a wide range of initiatives in the field of folk music. Today, Forum is the partner non-profit organisation of Hangveto, organising international training programmes on the field of folk music and folk art from the Balkans to Visegrad countries, and beyond.
We are leaders of and partners in several international projects: among others we set up World Pitch in Hungary, a music educational pilot project (in Music Moves Europe) with the support of the European Union Creative Europe Programmes; we have been organising a new training course, the Music as Heritage Summer School at the Central European University in 2021.
