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- VAN is an independent weekly online magazine published monthly in German and English and devoted to classical music. It launched as a bilingual publication in January 2016, styling itself as "a fanzine for music lovers, music professionals and followers of the arts." Its name comes from Ludwig van Beethoven. Unlike many other classical music publications, such as Gramophone, Opera News, and , VAN caters to a younger audience of classical music fans and professionals. Its focus on news and stories that center on non-mainstream voices, perspectives, and stories within classical music has earned it comparisons to Pitchfork Magazine for its respective musical genre. VAN first received international attention in February, 2016, when its interview with Austrian composer Georg Friedrich Haas was written about in The New York Times. It was the first time that Haas had, in his words, "come out" as the dominant in a BDSM relationship with his wife. The Haas interview was also referenced in a Quartz article on BDSM and creativity. Later that year, New Yorker music critic Alex Ross wrote that the magazine had "rapidly established itself as a venue for unfettered music writing." Other VAN interviews and reported pieces have informed pieces in the New York Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post, Forbes, the New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, Slate, and Pitchfork. Several pieces written for VAN are listed as sources in the textbook Classical Concert Studies: A Companion to Contemporary Research and Performance. The popular literary website Longreads cited two of the magazine's essays as explorations that allow readers to "hear the music, and think of [classical music's] culture, differently, too." In 2018, VAN partnered with music publisher Ricordi for the Ricordilab program for emerging composers, a three-year mentorship and career program. In 2020, VAN announced the inaugural Berlin Prize for Young Artists, a competition for early-career musicians that judged based on both artistic vision/curation and performing talent and technique. The magazine would curate the prize in partnership with Swiss bank Julius Baer. A documentary featuring five of the six finalists, filmed at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, was released in the summer of 2020. (en)
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