Voices from the archive

"Dear Doctor, you have no idea what you have done with your letter of 8.1.55 - for which I thank you nonetheless [sic!]: to expect a Basel resident to give a lecture in Berne on Carnival Monday! Joking aside: if all else failed, I would even come to Bern on February 28, because I'm really looking forward to it. [...]" This is the first paragraph of Hans Ehinger's reply to Kurt von Fischer, then President of the SMG Bern section, to his invitation to give a lecture. A humorous letter like this is only a small part of the SMG archive, which consists of minutes, membership lists, correspondence, event programs and many other documents. For some years now, the SMG has been asking itself how these documents from the history of the SMG can be stored properly. On the initiative of Central President Cristina Urchueguía, a contract was concluded in December 2022 with the Basel University Library, where the holdings of the Basel chapter are already stored, so that the SMG archives can be transferred to its holdings and made accessible for research. While the holdings of the Svizzera italiana section are already stored in the State Archives of the Canton of Ticino, the remaining holdings were distributed among the various sections in Switzerland. The SMG archive material was mostly stored in folders, boxes and envelopes and had to be sorted and repackaged for archiving. 

Never again Bostitch: the materiality of the archive 

In response to the SMG's call, a spirited five-person archive team came together, consisting of Cristina Urchueguía, Tim Bösiger, Dominic Studer, Gabrielle Favre and Helen Gebhart. In July, the team accepted an invitation from Iris Lindenmann (music specialist) and Lorenz Heiligensetzer (archives collection manager) to the University Library Basel, where they were given an introduction to the art of archiving. To the great delight of the archive team, white lab coats were also provided. It soon became clear that decisions have to be made constantly in archiving work: Which documents need to be archived and which can safely be thrown away? Should an oversized page be packed in a special format or should it be archived folded? What is the best way to pack papers so that the original order can be recognized by researchers? After the workshop, the team set to work sifting through and repackaging the archives of the Basel, Zurich, Bern and Head Office sections. In the weeks that followed, the team battled intensively against rusty staples, glued-together pages and a lot of dust from several centuries. Dominic Studer, who found the work rather monotonous at first, recounts his experiences: "There was hardly anything as tedious as removing thin carbon paper from the sometimes rusty Bostitch staples. It was all the nicer when you found a relatively "metal-free" folder for archiving. The long-term effect of adhesive tape on paper was also quite astonishing. I think these are things that you hardly ever think about when archiving your own files. I haven't used a Bostitch since the internship!". 

Many exciting documents came to light during the archiving process: calligraphically designed membership cards, handwritten letters on a wide variety of paper,  The program of events included a lecture-concert at the Zurich Section by Wanda Landwoska "Harpsichord and Clavichord with J.S. Bach" from 1922. It was particularly exciting to discover which well-known musicologists had already given lectures at the SMG in the past. 

On the trail of the family 

In addition to the history of the SMG, personal traces can also be traced in the SMG archive, as Gabrielle Favre explains: "My parents were both musicologists and members of the SMG; my father was also involved on the board of the Bern section, and my mother worked for several years as an auditor in the same section. Naturally, both of them often took part in the events offered by the SMG, and I often accompanied them. That's where my historical interest in archiving SMG documents came from, and I was particularly pleased during the project work when we in the team came across documents that contained "traces of my parents"."