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I am a fourth-generation classical musician. I began to play the piano when I was three, and the violin aged five. My first large-scale public concert took place when I was 6 in Budapest's Liszt Ferenc Music Academy, my first violin concerto with orchestra aged 7.

From a young age, I lived a very regulated daily routine. It was spent like any other schoolgirl. With the exception that I practised up to an hour before school, during school, and two hours when I got home. I became infamous for being the schoolgoer who missed the most days per annum - and my mother became famous for inventing the best excuses as to why I was not in attendance. The truth was not acceptable according to the school board - I was travelling Europe performing or taking lessons with the best teachers of their generation. Sometimes, I realise that the way school viewed my life as a musician, is analogous to how parts of society views it: something not comprehensible, not something they should embrace as part of what makes for a rich society. To those who don’t understand the discipline, resolve and commitment that comes along with being a performing artist, we are even thought of as lazy. The real secret is: if society would see music and art as part of its tapestry, fundraisers might not have a purpose...

During the time of my studies, I began to dabble in multidisciplinary projects. That’s where I first learned about fundraising. In order to commission artists with new work, I could and should reach out to the Arts Council of Ireland, which is the country where I created my first production. I conceptualised and produced a music-theater-literature-hybrid which would become part of a series I did entitled "In Search of Lost Time". It played at various theaters in Ireland, including in the Spiegeltent as part of Dublin's Fringe Festival. The script and research was funded by the Arts Council of Ireland; the music, rehearsal, artist fees, print material and so on by ticket sales and some small organisations like the Goethe Institute. Looking back, I don't know how we managed but we did.
By the time I finished my performance studies, I had been playing the violin for 21 years. During that time I had hundreds of concerts. Despite performing all over the world, often to sold-out halls, I felt a little outside of what I want to be a part of: society. So one day, in the kitchen of a friend of mine, I decided to look for community - and what better way than through chamber music? I was 25 and began GAIA, initially with a friend. Looking back, I see that I sought partnership from the very start. The first two festivals were indicative of what was to come after - in order to put it together, I worked in every free minute, and I worked for free. Naturally, already then I questioned this impulse – if my work was being done for free, was it worth anything? If there was no foundation that would pay me for my creative pre-production work, how did society expect innovation in my sector?

It seemed pretty obvious to me at the beginning of this journey that I would need to be prepared to put in a lot of work, time and effort to get places. So beyond the countless days of work I invested, I also had sleepless nights. I managed to scrape €10,000 together to fill those first editions of GAIA. I invited 12 musicians and somehow managed to convince them that the festival will be like a holiday, and the fee would be the fulfilment of performance in a beautiful part of the world. At the time, it felt nearly normal: musicians being underpaid or not paid to do what they love. I think the only reason that was accepted at the time is because musicians everywhere crave community and particularly orchestral musicians, young musicians, and ambitious musicians love to get to do the work that is not available to them every day. Having said that: not paying them was and is unacceptable – as thanks for their trust, I invited them to later iterations of the festival where they indeed did receive a fee. However, I spoke to a student of mine only last week – he wants to set up a new festival, in Ireland, and from the offset knows he will be asking his friends to come and play for free in order to get the idea off the ground.

Looking back, with the knowledge and experience I have of fundraising today, I realise how naïve, amateurish and inexperienced I was. Had I studied economics, I would have approached things differently. I would have taken time to sit down, sketch out my plans, make budgets, plan strategies, study the landscape, the competition, the funding bodies. And, potentially, I would not have started without the promise of financial support for a number of years. Paradoxically, I know a number of artists who no longer even try to raise money through institutions - the requirements and regulations are too big a hurdle for them, and they can't afford the free hours they invest in applying. From my perspective, I know that the difference between my brain doing fundraising and my brain playing Beethoven is immense.

In its second year, the festival won the Göppinger Kulturpreis. GAIA had filled houses for every concert it had done, simply by existing. We had no money for marketing, no social media, we didn’t have the time, means or energy to invite people personally by post. Frankly, I have no idea how word spread, but it did.

When GAIA began in Switzerland, I had no idea how to approach foundations or state bodies. But I understood how to approach companies. Our first festival had a budget of around 100,000 swiss francs; 5 concerts, 12 musicians, and a professional sound and recording team. As a Naxos artist, I was able to lean on my existing partners in that arena.
I spent 18 months preparing the first GAIA Music Festival in Switzerland – scouting regions, towns, villages; looking for suitable place, suitable venues. I assembled a team of volunteers, and, of course, curated the programme. I scouted the musicians, the photographers, and I warmed up the press.
What I did not scout for, in my cluelessness, was the audience.
By the time GAIA started in Switzerland, I had been performing all over Europe to audiences quite large in number. I was working with professional management since over a decade. I swanned on stage, and swanned off stage, and didn’t give a thought to what audiences wanted or where they were to be found. I had been taught to be a highly-skilled individual; a child star appearing on television from a young age, something of an athlete, but then in the arena of classical music.
So when we chose Thun and Bern as the backdrop to our painting, little did we know we had landed in a part of the world where classical music is absolutely not part of every day life. I had been spoiled until this point in my life – rewarded with applause and interest.

Founding a festival changed all that. Every illusion I had, is gone. Not only do I know every name of every individual involved, in any way, with my festival. I also make it my business to know the names of audience members, particularly returning ones. Because I now know what it means to work every single one of them in the door. And I now know that classical music is NOT something everyone understands, that everyone knows, let alone likes! That is something I never knew in the highly protected, shielded world I grew up in. I grew up insisting on highly intellectual programming; demanding pieces; an expectation that an audience knows the material and has an opinion. Here too, spearheading a festival meant a turn-about. A humbling experience. Oh, how I dislike opinionated snobs now…
When I create programmes, I’m no longer whimsical or random. Everything has purpose and much of it is framed by a set of criteria that includes:
Is this authentic? Is this relevant? Is this emotionally transformative? Can this theme, or this constellation of pieces be deserving of funding? I don’t do a programme that is “in” for the sake of it – you won’t see me play a concert about environmental change that I took a plane to in order to perform.
I have to think about the audience and what I can excite them about. When I programme, I have to imagine my audience, both the existing one and the one I wish to have. That is something I learned when I curated a series for Berne’s Casino from 2018-2023 where my remit was to extend beyond a classical music audience and involve other music genres and art forms into the mix.
I no longer have the luxury of just imagining a dream programme – I need to make any programme work on all counts. Having said that: I don’t programme in order to win the favour of a company.

The setbacks to not making it our business to create a strong bridge between arts and society was felt very recently, and very gravely for a number of people.
2020 – cue the pandemic. Within the context of the arts, the most skilled performers, the more famous they were, the more hard hit they were by the pandemic. Freelancers all over the world who proudly earn their livings from performance alone suddenly felt their own fragility – not only because they weren’t paid for years on end. Not because they weren’t applauded. Not because they weren’t able to exercise their love for music in public. No – what performers felt was their lack of co-existence, lack of community, lack of a lobby. They were in trouble, because they had never thought about anyone outside their own little eco-system.

The pandemic changed many things for many people. But my reality shift came before the pandemic. It came in 2019 when I was pregnant with our son. In that very moment of confirmation of the pregnancy, I realised I would need to find a way to circulate my concerts closer to home, and that would mean finding a way to guarantee not just the concerts, but the audience members. It would also mean having to network – something I am not confident about. I have spent most of my life cowering backstage after a concert, being in that gilded position to have people come to meet me. It wasn’t until I began GAIA that I realised I would have to go out there and shake hands, remember names, and jump over my shy shadow if I wanted to learn things about people. The first time I talked to an audience was at GAIA.

Becoming a mother threw up the question: How to retain my audience when I could no longer go out all over the world and meet them, at least not during the early years of our child’s existence? I decided to harness the opportunity and turn the situation around.
I would build my own circle of friends. And rather than relying on a middle man such as a manager or a label or an internet platform, I would manage not just the circle of friends, but I would show every donor exactly where their money went to by providing them with an overview of our events and inviting them to each. I would introduce them to one another. Gone were the days of lonely arts lovers, stuck in their four walls listening to their faourite recordings of Bruckner on vinyl! No more the bevvy of shy people at concerts, all having at least one thing in common but too shy to talk to one another. Adieu the silly queues backstage for meet and greets with favourite stars only to be met with a smile from afar and no personal conversation. Welcome to Gwendolyn’s Bridge Club! The discerning art-lovers’ preferred social platform.
The premise is simple: any artist can use GBC to present their own show – they can have my infrastructure and use it to their benefit. Any person can donate any amount – in so doing, they become a member of a club that democratises the arts. When I create events, entry fees are put in place in order to fuel the salon evenings, or mini festivals. We stay in touch with members many times a year – and write each and every one of them personal post, by mail. In its first year, we collected more than 70 donations.

GBC promotes young artists and musicians as well as established ones, we support new but also simply good ideas. When we organise an event, it is packed with details and we endeavour to bring the audience into contact with each other - a sign not only of a good art event, but also of a good host.
When I approach sponsors, donors, institutions, foundations, I don't believe that art is a product. Art is not a product. Art is a process ...

I’ll be honest – getting the money together that the festival needs, year after year, is a struggle and a huge amount of work. I could have made life a lot easier for the GAIA team if I had accepted the money offered to us by companies such as Philipp Morris and RUAG. However, I see it as our professional duty to inspect big money fully. Honesty is much more important than money. Human relationships are much more important than economic security. Choose well who you accept money from.

And if you're lucky, you can choose who you work with. I surround myself with people who I admire, who challenge me, who make me laugh, who create community and offer new perspectives. That's part of what makes GAIA my second home.

In 2026, GAIA will celebrate 20 years of existence. It has grown from a festival with 12 musicians coming together for 6 days of rehearsal and 5 concerts, to a festival averaging 30 musicians, coming together for 9 days of rehearsals and 17 events. Our budget has doubled. Our corporate sponsors have come and gone – but at least four of them have been with us since the start and are still responsible for a quarter of our budget. The foundations who supported us in the beginning, still support us now. We have welcomed more than 200 musicians and 25 artists to our festival, have performed more than 600 works by more than 400 composers. We have premiered more than 60 pieces, and have released nearly 100 concerts and outtakes of concerts on SRF Kultur and on streaming services worldwide. We have created 8 multidisciplinary productions, including 6 with Swiss and German Literature prize winners. We were the first festival on the lake of Thun to present Carnival of the Animals with circus artists, contemporary dancers and audience participation. And the first to play Swiss premieres of works by Eugène Ysaÿe, Dobrinka Tabakova, Rebecca Clarke, and amazingly, Benjamin Britten and Robert Schumann.
We have become a festival that asks probing questions, creates musical experiments, insists on the highest standards of music-making and has been named amongst the top five classical music festivals in Switzerland.
And me? What have I learned? I have learned something about my own horizon; I have learned that naivité can be idealism and that idealism is a word only spat on by the corrupt. I have learned how to fundraise, how to pretend that I’m confident and approach people to network, how to own independence, how to inspire and how to be inspired. I have learned that any occasion can be an occasion to fundraise and network.

Perhaps, even today.