With a joint online project during the corona pandemic, the music school of the Hanseatic City of Lüneburg and the C.O.M. Hermanos Berzosa Cáceres/Spain have further deepened their partnership, which has existed since 2004.

The core of the project was the awarding of a composition commission to Carlos Cotallo, a young composer from Cáceres who now lives in Philadelphia/USA. Carlos is an alumnus of the first exchange projects between the two schools. The new work was initially created between May and September 2021. It was then rehearsed by a project ensemble consisting of 20 students from both institutes. Included in the rehearsal process were joint workshops with the composer. Ultimately the piece was recorded in the studios of both music schools, and a video was also produced to document the project. For this part of the project, we involved the design and video department of the Cáceres School of Fine Arts (Escuela de Bellas Artes), under the direction of design professor and visual artist Lourdes Germain. The video was released in December 2021.

The music school of the Hanseatic City of Lüneburg was accepted as an associate member of the UNESCO Associated Schools (UPS) Network on November 16, 2012. At the end of September/beginning of October 2013, the UPS network organized the first European- African Youth Academy in Kisangara, Tanzania (Mwanga district, Kilimanjaro region) in cooperation with the local "One World Secondary School Kilimanjaro". This school which was founded in 2012 is built in a beautiful landscape on the slopes of the Kindoroko Mountains.

The founder and first principal is Dr. Karl-Heinz Köhler, former UPS Federal Coordinator. The project was sponsored by the German UNESCO Commission. The academy involved 20 young people from Tanzania, 3 from Kenya and 22 pupils from Schleswig- Holstein, Bavaria and Lueneburg. The academy was led by Dr. Köhler and Heinz-Jürgen Rickert, who was then the State coordinator for the UNESCO Project Schools. In addition, 10 teachers and workshop leaders from Tanzania, Kenya and Germany took part, including Kathi Kelsh-Nierenz from the Music School of the Hanseatic City of Lüneburg. Guest of honor at the academy was Prof. Elizabeth Kiondo, Secretary General of the National UNESCO Commission of Tanzania.

Over the past 30 years the Music School of the Hanseatic City of Lueneburg has been involved In bilateral cultural exchanges with three music schools and conservatories in Clamart/ France, Cáceres/Spain and Hammarö/Sweden.

The instructors of these institutions expressed the desire to develop a performance project which would bring the four partner schools together, thus adding a new dynamic to their exchange and intensifying the long-year contact between them. The project series bearing the title MOSAIK was created. The core idea was to work every other year on a performance based on a common theme. So far, there have been three Mosaik-Performances:

• 2015 MOSAIK.odyssey in Lueneburg
• 2017 MOSAIK.quijote in Cáceres [on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-oSlruTIyQ&t=10s]
• 2019 MOSAIK.city in Clamart

I was involved in the first two.