Barrio Mix Tapes

The composition project Barrio Mix Tapes – A Neighborhood Chooses Its Neighborhood Composer brings together young people from the socially disadvantaged Bremen neighborhood of Osterholz-Tenever and professional musicians from the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen. Despite sometimes significant differences in background and living environments, the project enables a shared, accessible, and experimental experience of creating music through cleverly designed formats.

At the heart of the Barrio Mix Tapes project is the shared exploration of instruments and sounds—without any pressure to perform, but with plenty of room for creativity. To this end, the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie opens its doors and invites school classes and youth groups to get to know the orchestra. Throughout 2026, participants will develop their own approach to making music and composition in regular workshops.

A key component is the collaboration with familiar institutions such as the Gesamtschule Bremen-Ost, the Mütterzentrum, and the Walliser Straße Elementary School. Through these partnerships, the young people find familiar figures in the project via teachers or group leaders. This forms the basis for the work of the Zukunftslabor initiative: to build trust with a group of people who have little access to classical music and who, due to classism, racism, and poverty, do not easily find their way into German society.

In the first half of the year, the focus is on getting to know one another, exchange, and sonic discoveries. The young people experiment with instruments and participate in sound workshops—sometimes with instruments, sometimes without. Under the guidance of Sabine Kuhnert, the educational and artistic director of the Zukunftslabor program, their musical ideas are collected and compiled so that composers who align with the young people’s ideas can be found.

The composers then work with the young people’s ideas and present their work in the second half of the year. The young people then decide for themselves with whom they want to collaborate on developing their own Barrio Mix Tapes compositions—based on their ideas, their sounds, and their voices.

The project is made possible by the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation.

Further information:
zukunftslabor.com