Music Council presents Music Dictionary of Switzerland
The Swiss Music Council, in collaboration with the University of Bern and the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences (SAGW), has launched the beta version of a new music lexicon of Switzerland.
The online lexicon is the result of an initiative by musicologist Irène Minder-Jeanneret. She found partners in the Swiss Music Research Society (SMG) and the Swiss Music Council (SMR). The project was initially hampered by a lack of legal foundations and financial resources.
Under the direction of Cristina Urchueguía (University of Bern), Marco Jorio (former director of the Historical Dictionary of Switzerland HLS), Irène Minder-Jeanneret, Pio Pellizzari (former director of the Swiss National Sound Archives), Stefanie Stadler (University of Zurich) and Stefano Kunz (responsible project manager at the Swiss Music Council) worked on a voluntary basis to develop the foundations for the new Swiss Music Dictionary (MLS).
The beta version of the MLS currently comprises the older biographical articles on 6800 people that have appeared in the music encyclopaedias published to date. They form the basis for the second phase: the development of new articles on musicians' biographies, on the history of music in the cantons and larger municipalities, and on music-historical subject articles.
The MLS is published online, is freely accessible free of charge and will be interactive, multilingual and multimedia in the future. An additional benefit compared to the sources used is the dense linking of the articles to freely accessible online lexicons and bibliographic standard data.
As Cristina Urchueguía explained at a media conference on the project, one of the main challenges of the MLS will be to give visibility to the institutions that have shaped Swiss musical life: clubs, societies, foundations, venues and so on, in addition to the traditional articles on individuals.
Beta version of the MLS: https://mls.0807.dasch.swiss/home
