Music history of Switzerland

Angelo Garovi - organist, historian, musicologist, long-time radio editor, state archivist and university professor - regretted the lack of a recent history of Swiss music for years until he set about writing it himself. Initially, he planned an anthology similar to the Swiss music bookwhich Willi Schuh published in 1939 together with twelve collaborators. However, the more the author delved into the subject in all its breadth, from the late Roman water organ in Avenches to Mathias Spohr's recently published anthology Swiss film music the clearer the intention became to model the manuscript on Antoine-Elisée Cherbuliez's standard work Switzerland in the history of German music (1932) as a single publication. An invitation from the University of Greifswald in north-eastern Germany to spend two semesters as a guest student allowed Garovi to test his concept for a history of music in Switzerland and then to condense the lecture text for the paperback requested by the publisher.

A 160-page booklet was recently published, which provides information in 30 concise chapters about Switzerland's astonishingly diverse contribution to music. An appendix lists around three hundred names of musicians - including hitherto little-known women composers from convents and foreign composers who were inspired to write music by motifs from Swiss folk music or by their stays in Switzerland. In this context, it should be added that Bohuslav Martinů spent the last three years of his life in Switzerland and composed the opera The Greek Passion has written.

The selection of further reading testifies to the author's literacy and originality. Arnold Geering's individual publications and essays, which have unjustly fallen into oblivion, are presented in the right light, while Max Peter Baumann's authoritative dissertation Music folklore and music folklorismthe first scholarly examination of yodeling culture, is missing. These flaws, which also include small, very isolated inaccuracies - the St. Gallen composer and innovator of the alphorn tradition Ferdinand Fürchtegott Huber is listed as Johann Fürchtegott, for example - can be rectified in a further edition of this easily readable and useful book and do not detract from the gratitude or recognition for a publication that is second to none.

It shows that new forms of vocal church music were cultivated and promoted in the monastery of St. Gall in the 10th century with the sequence (monophonic setting of the alleluia verse) and tropus (syllabic text arrangement of melismatic chants). The importance of the Council of Basel for polyphonic a cappella music becomes clear to the attentive reader, as works by Dunstable, Dufay and other living composers were performed in the 15th century.

The author, a historian well versed in the sources, is able to fan out the music of everyday citizens from Lucerne account books of the 14th and 15th centuries, while the military music of the time is reflected in the pictorial chronicles of the old Confederates. The reference to the Frenchman Antoine Brumel, musician from Ferrara and organist in Geneva from 1486-1490, is also surprising. The success story of the Geneva Psalter, which was set to music by various church musicians and translated into German in 1573, is also revealed for the first time, as this first Reformed hymnal served as a common house book until the 19th century and is still used today by conservative Old Order Amish in the Midwest of North America.

Among the Baroque composers, Nicolaus Scherrer, the Geneva violinist Gaspard Fritz, who was admired by Handel, and the Lucerne chorister Franz Joseph Leonti Meyer von Schauensee, whose works Leopold Mozart performed in Salzburg, deserve more attention. As a Swiss musical genre of the 19th and 20th centuries, the festival play is mentioned right up to Arthur Honegger, Frank Martin and the compositions of the Fête des vignerons in Vevey, which were created anew from time to time.

Garovi, the son of a composer committed to twelve-tone music, was familiar with contemporary music by nature and also deepened his knowledge of this genre as a radio editor. The chapters on the music of the 20th and 21st centuries - which make up a quarter of the publication - are particularly informative and document that Switzerland is making an important contribution to the music of our time with world-famous composers such as Klaus Huber, Heinz Holliger, but also Jürg Wyttenbach, Roland Moser, Hans Ulrich Lehmann, Alfred Schweizer, Balz Trümpy, Beat Furrer and many others.

Angelo Garovis Music history of Switzerland deserves wide distribution and, translated into English, would be suitable as compulsory reading for the many foreign music students at Swiss music academies.

Angelo Garovi, Music History of Switzerland, 160 p., Fr. 19.90, Stämpfli, Bern 2015, ISBN 978-3-7272-1448-6