Concert hall organs lead a miserable existence. At most, they are caressed and struck (toccare l'organo) a few times a year as a soloist or with orchestral accompaniment. Nevertheless, the queen of instruments is enthroned above the prestigious halls like the buffet with Rosenthal crockery and silverware in a bourgeois salon. The French also refer to the organ case as a "buffet". The old masters from Schnitger to Silbermann built their works in a closed case, usually made of solid oak, and gave it a "fermen Stand" on the rood screen. They knew why. Because the sound must first gather behind the façade before it is emitted into the nave as a mixture of pipes and stops. This is rarely the case with modern, secular organs, whose ranks of pipes stand at attention at the front like naked tin soldiers.

Photo: Maxim Schulz /Elbphilharmonie

With concert hall organs, the playable literature is limited to just under three centuries. Early music with its half-tone lower, even mean-tone tuning cannot be played on it with accompaniment. Baroque orchestras carry their own chest organs onto the podium to perform Handel's solo concertos. The large organ is condemned to a "tacet", just as when a keyboard and pedal lion like Cameron Carpenter prefers to perform his escapades on his own pre-programmed electric organ rather than on the pipe organ in the hall.

Basel's Stadtcasino and Zurich's Tonhalle will both be getting new organs in the next few years following their renovations. Their predecessors have already served their purpose after just a few decades. They will be replaced rather than preserved. Their lifespan is short, and the reverberation time in concert halls is also short compared to the seconds-long reverberation in cathedrals. A hall organ is therefore far from being able to develop its sounds from the solo register to the tutti in the same spatial manner.
 

Hamburg's new landmark, the Elbphilharmonie, has a giant organ weighing 25 tons thanks to a donation of two million euros from entrepreneur Peter Möhrle. Its pipe fronts are installed in the form of a 15 x 15 meter square on four floors in the Great Hall. Like the Fisk organ in Lausanne Cathedral, they can be played with either old or new action. High up on the console by the façade, the keys are connected to the pipes using mechanical action; below on the orchestra podium, an electrical connection is used. The mobile console is equipped with a digital control system. It allows any number of presettings for the registrations via touchscreen, which extends like a cutlery drawer.

Photo: Maxim Schulz /Elbphilharmonie

With 69 stops, everything is there to make organists' hearts beat faster at pitches from 16 to 16,000 Hertz. The mysterious names range from a Vox angelica to Principale major and minor, a fourfold Harmonia aetheria, a striking orchestral clarinet, a sixfold Nonencornett, an 8-foot Stentorgambe and the 32-foot reed stops Trompete and Posaune in the pedal.

4765 pipes set the tone. Their lengths range from 1 to 32 feet, specifically from 11 millimetres for the highest to almost 11 meters for the lowest note. The pipes are even coated for those with a nose of wonder, children's hands and blind people who want to touch them. However, the front pipes do not flaunt themselves at the front like traditional organ cases, but are veiled like a Queen of Sheba. Only when the shutter sills are opened do they shine in the dazzling light.

The four manuals are assigned to: Choir, Hauptwerk, Schwellwerk, Solowerwerk and Pedal. The builders, the Bonn-based company Klais, are particularly proud of the Fernwerk, whose four reed stops installed above the acoustic reflector send out their signals to visitors from the hall's firmament.
 

So how does it sound, the new Klais organ? This could be tested extensively during the six-hour organ night that opened the Hamburg Organ Summer 2017, after the Latvian titular organist Iveta Apkalna had already presented her queen in January.

13 male and 2 female organists played and registered the concert hall organ according to all the rules of the art in works ranging from Bach and Vivaldi to the Romantics Mendelssohn, Franck, Pierné, Widor and the modern classics David, Eben, Reda and Messiaen to a world premiere by Wolf Kerschek. The Jacobi organist Kerstin Wolf, who danced on the organ bench during the shimmering pieces by the Frenchman Thierry Escaich, the Dutchman Ad Wammes and the South African Surendran Reddy and let her feet bounce as if she wanted to dance the tango with the Queen, was original.
 

Players have different opinions of the new concert instrument. The church organists first have to get used to the electronics. The sound combinations range from soft to loud, from a whispering pianissimo to a menacing tutti with open swell stops. Everything is emphasized "pomposo"; the individual sounds are audible. There is a lack of subtle tonal mixing, which is due to the short reverberation time of 2 seconds, but also to Yasuhisa Toyota's acoustic aesthetics. The shell-shaped walls are designed to achieve even audibility in all 2100 seats up to the upper tiers of the Weinberg architecture in the 25-metre-high auditorium. The over-presence has its price. The organ radiates little tonal warmth. The coolness of the acoustic concept is projected into the room like air conditioning at the same temperature. One almost wistfully longs for the old organs from Hus to Cavaillé-Coll, on which the literature from the Renaissance to the late Romantic period comes into its own and fills the church rooms with intonationally balanced splendor.

Organ infographic (from the Elbphilharmonie press kit; see legend below)

Graphic: © bloomimages/Elbphilharmonie

Description: © Elbphilharmonie

The contributions are awarded to young music professionals by the Département de la formation, de la jeunesse et de la culture (DFJC). Support is being offered for the first time this year. There is a partnership with the Fondation romande pour la chanson et les musiques actuelles (FCMA), which can continue the support.    

Applications may be submitted by persons under the age of 35 who are Vaudois or live in the canton of Vaud, have been practicing their musical activities professionally for at least five years and operate within professional structures, i.e. have a label, a publishing house or professional management. 

The closing date for applications is August 1. Interested parties can find more information at www.vd.ch/bourses-culture
 

This time, socially disadvantaged children from Paraguay are also taking part in the benefit concert of Youth Classics, the Zurich support program for highly talented children and young people. Sonidos de la tierra (Sounds of the Earth) is the name of the initiative by composer and conductor Luis Szarán, who organizes free music education and concerts for children living in poverty in this South American country. This will also be the case on June 22 at Stadthaus Winterthur.

The idea is not new, but it works here too: Children who grow up without prospects in poverty learn to sing or play an instrument and find friends and a meaningful activity by making music together. "If you play Mozart during the day, you won't break any windows at night," says Luis Szarán, who comes from Paraguay himself. The director of the Asuncíon City Symphonic Orchestra is also active as a music researcher; indigenous Paraguayan music is very important to him.
 

With Sonidos de la tierra, Szarán has built up a social network over the last 15 years that is second to none. There are now around 200 free music schools across the country, and over 17,000 young people have been trained here. Almost two thirds of Paraguay's 6.8 million inhabitants live in rural regions, 28 percent live in absolute poverty and have less than 1.25 US dollars a day at their disposal, according to the World Bank's definition. Elementary school is guaranteed, but any further education or support is an unaffordable luxury.

55 francs is the cost of materials and labor for a new guitar; 125 francs is needed for music teacher training. These small sums make a big difference. Sonidos de la tierra is supported by donations and by the Jesuit organization worldwide. Szarán initially organized instruments in 18 villages and hired a teacher. The parents took care of building the school and collected donations, the children became proud instrument owners, they had regular lessons and a clear goal in mind. Whether in the choir or the orchestra: the community is strong.

Now the most talented of them are in Switzerland. Remo Schällibaum, President of Youth Classics, is often in Paraguay himself and initiated this joint benefit concert in the Stadthaus Winterthur. Three young people from Paraguay will be able to take part in the Youth Classics Master Class on the music island of Rheinau. Highly talented children and young people from all over the world will be meeting here from July 17 to 27 to work under the artistic direction of Philip A. Draganov to make music, improvise and exchange ideas with the instructors.
 

What the young people from Paraguay brought with them from home for the concert was a delightful program full of surprises. Under the motto "Baroque music and indigenous culture", the 21-piece orchestra played works by the Jesuit missionaries Domenico Zipoli SJ (1688-1726) and Martin Schmid SJ (1694-1772) as well as by unknown composers who worked in the "Reductions", the villages built by the Jesuits for the indigenous people.

The rhythmic precision and agility with which the young people from Paraguay played what to our ears is "traditional" baroque music was astonishing. They were joined here by a hearty and concise vocal ensemble with four female and three male voices, and there by a soft and relaxed solo flautist.

And then the change to the music of the Indian composer Julian Atirahu, who came from the Guaraní ethnic group and was educated in a Jesuit mission village in Paraguay in the 18th century: music with a shimmering sound, rhythmically vital and pulsating, skillfully arranged and played by the young people with spirited joy.
 

The harp is the national instrument in Paraguay, and 17-year-old Eva Natalia Gonzáles revealed herself to be a virtuoso with vital expressiveness. And then 14-year-old Juan Sebastían Duarte with his bandoneon: virtuoso, relaxed and with an inspiring rhythmic lightness. The spark sparked, the audience applauded heartily. And the way 63-year-old Luis Szarán, as conductor, elegantly brought the youthful spirit to bloom with sparing gestures was simply touching.

The second part of the program was performed by the Youth Classics Orchestra under the direction of Philip A. Draganov performed classical concert literature. Whether Bach, Haydn or Grieg, the soloists demonstrated their brilliant skills in selected movements. The technically tricky feats performed by eleven-year-old Swiss violinist Raphael Nussbaumer, the youngest of them all, in Wieniawski's Scherzo-Tarantella op. 16 were of a different caliber. In the final piece by Carlos Gardel (1890-1935), both youth orchestras played together - a feast for the audience too.
 

Photo: Michel Huber

The Youth Classics Orchestra under the direction of Philip A. Draganov on June 22 in Winterthur

The SRG broadcasters are extremely important for Swiss musicians, writes Suisa. The broadcasters discover their music and offer them an important platform. The fee-financed broadcasters fulfill a public service mandate, which also includes entertainment, music and culture. SRG stations in particular broadcast Swiss music in all genres and have an overall share of 20 percent Swiss music - on average more than twice as much as private stations.

Last year, the copyright society Suisa achieved the best result in its history and was able to distribute 128.9 million Swiss francs to composers, lyricists and publishers of music. After a cost deduction of 12.37 percent on the statements to the beneficiaries, Suisa distributes around 88 out of every 100 francs of its income to the composers, lyricists and publishers of music.

The Annual General Meeting elected Zurich composer and orchestrator for film and advertising film music Jonas Zellweger to the Distribution and Works Commission (VWK) in a by-election. He replaces Alexander Kirschner, who is stepping down prematurely. The VWK consists of Suisa members and is primarily concerned with issues relating to the distribution of Suisa's income.

The Bernese lyricist and composer Polo Hofer has been awarded this year's Fondation Suisa prize in the category "Text authors of musical works". The foundation honors the musician Polo Hofer for his complete works as a lyricist. The jury paid particular tribute to the perseverance with which Hofer has pursued his work for 50 years. Even at 72 and despite health setbacks, Polo Hofer's passion for writing lyrics and making music remains unbroken. Songs from his pen have become popular songs.

According to the Kyocera press release, Richard Taruskin is a musicologist and critic who "defies conventional critical paradigms and subjects contemporary perspectives on music to his historical research and essays". He argues that contemporary performances of early music do not offer true authenticity, but are rather reflections of late 20th century aesthetics.

Taruskin is the author of the Oxford History of Western Music, the most comprehensive survey of Western music history ever written by a single author. The quality and scope of his work, Kyocera continues, shows that music "requires creativity not only in composition and performance, but also in detailed discourse about the context in which music was created".

The Kyoto Prize is awarded by the Japanese Inamori Foundation, which was established in 1984 by Kazuo Inamori, the founder of the Kyocera technology group. This year's two other prize winners are the semiconductor engineer Takashi Mimura and the Australian plant physiologist Graham Farquhar.

By extending the contract by two years until the end of the 2020.21 season, the Board of Trustees is following the wishes of Stephan Märki, who was elected Artistic Director in May 2011 and first extended his contract until 2019 in 2014.

According to Marcel Brülhart, President of the Board of Trustees, the past few years have been characterized by major challenges, in particular the merger of the orchestra and theater, the renovation of the municipal theater and the pursuit of financial stability. The fact that, in addition to overcoming these challenges, the artistic quality and audience appeal in all areas have grown steadily is "an outstanding achievement by the artistic director and the entire management team". Konzert Theater Bern is now financially consolidated, has opened up and can look to the future with confidence.

Born in Brig in 1985, soprano Franziska Andrea Heinzen studied at the music academies in Zurich and Düsseldorf. In addition to opera, she also performs lieder and concert repertoire with pianist Benjamin Malcolm Mead. The duo won first prize at the 2nd International Lied Duo Competition Rhine-Ruhr in 2017 and will perform at the Schubertiade in Barcelona in March 2018.

Born in 1951, musician and video filmmaker Richard Jean lives and works in Sion. With installations, concerts and encounters with sound and image, he stages "special atmospheres to show the art of the avant-garde". He is the driving force behind the collective "L'oeil et l'oreille".

Further sponsorship awards in Valais go to the actress Mali Van Valenberg and the ensemble Courant d'Cirque. The award ceremony will take place on November 3, 2017 in Lower Valais.

It now returns every year, and one can certainly expect it to become a habit: the Swiss music industry's Equality Day, the Empowerment Day. Helvetia rockt, the Schweizer Musiksyndikat, the Rockförderverein Basel and Musikschaffende Schweiz have come together as organizers to address - as the announcement states - "the presence, status and proportion of women and men in the Swiss jazz and pop music scene". The aim is to "develop concrete, practicable solutions for the change process". This and the formats are extremely appealing: concerts by bands from Helvetia rockt's young talent promotion program, network meetings, discussions and numerous workshops, some held at the same time, complement each other perfectly; topics such as balancing work and family life, strategies against sexism on the net, reflections on the pitfalls of the empowerment concept, gender-equitable financial support and humane action in the music business involve musicians, their family and professional environment, but also media professionals and funding bodies in equal measure. A well-thought-out all-round package, balanced between music and lyrics, production and reception, work and pleasure. And a high demand on itself to want to negotiate these complex topics in a concentrated and results-oriented manner.

The two workshops attended on Empowering - clichés, pitfalls and opportunities and Gender-equitable promotion live above all through the exchange of experiences between those "directly affected" in the audience. And one is amazed (in the first workshop mentioned) at how narrow the scope for action still is for female musicians in the popular music industry: if they go to the late after-event parties where the gigs are negotiated, women get the reputation of flirting or sleeping their way into gigs. If they don't do this, partly because they don't want to be in a male rope line, it becomes difficult to get a gig at all. If they act tough and demanding in fee negotiations, they are said to be arrogant and quickly become "difficult as a person" and a "bitch". If they hide their light, supposedly beautifully feminine, under a bushel, we will probably have to organize an Equal Pay Day for a long time to come. And there is a palpable fatigue: having to repeatedly confront gender discrimination, whether spoken or unspoken, to verbalize it, to argue against it leads to frustration. Not least because the gender issues in the LGBT scene have become much broader in the meantime; because we believe we know that discrimination is not only based on the gender other, but that several factors always interact. Together, we are somewhat perplexed by the gap between reports of experiences that seem to point back to the beginnings of the women's movement: a man's world and macho alliances; and the knowledge of how things should actually and legally be.

At the workshop on gender-equitable funding, a fundamentally different problem arose: while there are now statistics on gender distribution in the Swiss concert and festival scene (according to organizer Yvonne Meyer, the proportion of women on stage is 10 to 20 percent), it is completely unclear what proportion of women receive funding for their pop projects in Switzerland. The aforementioned demands for a time-limited gender quota in funding, for family-friendly submission deadlines for applications, for ethical guidelines for the composition and term of office in commissions, for funding that is not exclusively results-oriented, including for "time-outs", hovered in a vacuum. As urgent as they may be, their actual relevance is difficult to prove. There was even disagreement as to whether specific means of promoting women already exist or should exist in Switzerland - whereas in the state-supported promotion of science, these vessels, statistics and measures have been in place for some time.

What remains? A rich basis for discussion on what empowerment could look like without perpetuating gender stereotypes; many urgent fields of work, including theoretical ones; and the need for networking beyond one's own sphere of activity. Material for the coming years, which could perhaps have a more concrete impact with a narrower focus. It is sorely needed.

Of the 338 projects to date, 256, or 76%, have been successfully funded. The average contribution awarded is CHF 143, which is above average in an international comparison.

The music projects realized in this way include a music system for the Kaschemmen club. The campaign with the highest contribution was an album production by the band Bianca Story, which raised 91,662 euros from 625 supporters.

Crowdfunding is particularly effective in areas that do not meet traditional or classic funding criteria. Since June 2012, the Department of Culture has been providing additional funding for cultural projects from the Basel region through Switzerland's first regional crowdfunding platform, a subdomain of the nationwide Wemakeit platform, without using its own direct funding.

Crowdfunding requires a high level of commitment from the project initiators. In addition to a good presentation and attractive rewards, personal networking is the most important factor for the successful implementation of a campaign.

Website: basel.wemakeit.ch

Priority jazz promotion" includes support for international tours, coaching offers and recording productions. The aim of "Priority Jazz Promotion" is to sustainably strengthen the presence of Swiss jazz on an international level.

The bands are established in the current Swiss jazz scene, perform regularly in the various language regions of Switzerland and have successfully toured internationally. They also have a repertoire of original compositions, professional booking and management structures and international distribution of their recordings.

Pro Helvetia accepts applications, including a detailed career plan (tours, recordings), exclusively online via www.myprohelvetia.ch against.
 

What is Ticino Musica? What is so special about this festival? To find out, you should take two weeks in the summer to experience the special atmosphere at the Conservatory of Italian Switzerland, to feel the spirit that spreads between a singing lesson here and a viola lesson there. Anyone who immerses themselves in this atmosphere realizes that Ticino Musica is one thing above all: dynamism and movement. The festival, led by Gabor Meszaros as artistic director since 2009, is taking place for the 21st time this year.

Slovenian composer Vito Žuraj, for example, gained his first experience abroad with Ticino Musica. The encounters he had with other musicians at that time are essential elements in what is now a great career for this artist. He is now a lecturer in instrumentation, music informatics, instrumentology, Gregorian chant and notation for contemporary music at the University of Music in Karlsruhe and has also been a professor of composition and music theory at the Academy of Music in Ljubljana since 2016, just like Michael Jarrel, whom Žuraj once met at a Ticino Musica master class.

Vito Žuraj remembers: "Ticino Musica was the first master class I attended; it was my first contact with the music world outside Slovenia. The encounter and exchange with composers outside my home country was the discovery of a new world for me, became a turning point in my work and set many things in motion: From then on, I began to develop my own musical language."

Žuraj subsequently took part in Ticino Musica three more times (2001 to 2003). Each time he worked together with other musicians. He is still in contact with them. His experience of Ticino Musica was always characterized by feverish activity, but also by contemplative calm. "The whole atmosphere is extremely inspiring for composers. You have time to work intensively and have the opportunity to do so with different teachers."
 

For pianist Gloria Campaner, the festival was once a summer highlight, the most important musical event in the summer months. "Ticino Musica meant a lot to me as I was growing up. I already took advantage of it in my early high school days. I came from a small tourist town on the Adriatic. The summer months there were hardly characterized by music. There was a lack of musical stimulation. Ticino Musica was a stroke of luck for me. I found the atmosphere beautiful and enriching. The contact with my teacher, colleagues, friends and other musicians was something precious. The atmosphere touched me deeply and led me not only to make music my profession, but also to see it as the meaning of life. The chamber music experiences at Ticino Musica were extremely important for me. They made me more and more curious to share music with others." Making music together, improving together: that is the secret of Ticino Musica's master classes. They are not just a school for music, they are also a school for life. "The encounters at Ticino Musica were also important for me. They often led to good and lasting friendships that still exist today. They often led to wonderful musical collaborations, as in the case of cellist Johannes Moser, whom I met for the first time 14 years ago at Ticino Musica."

The world-famous clarinettist Julian Bliss finds it important to make contacts and cultivate relationships at Ticino Musica. He particularly appreciated the fact that the learning experiences from the masterclasses were immediately put into practice at concerts organized by Ticino Musica in the centers of Lugano, Bellinzona and Locarno, but also in very remote locations. "It's so important to be able to perform. I thought the places where the concerts took place were simply beautiful. Playing Schubert or Sheperd on a mountain is something unique, an experience that I carry with me to this day." Even today, the clarinettist would advise any young musician to enrol in a Ticino Musica master class. Why? "You learn. You learn all the time. You also learn when you talk to another musician about why they play a certain piece in a certain way, what their secrets are."

Tuba virtuoso Ries Schellekens also considers attending a master class to be an essential experience, despite the fact that YouTube and social networks have become so important for musicians of the younger generation. "It's something completely different," he says. "I attended Rex Martin's master class: an unforgettable experience. The way he talked about his approach to the instrument really opened my eyes. It's still useful to me today for playing the instrument and also for teaching." According to Ries Schellekens, a young musician needs three things: ambition, perseverance and modesty. In his opinion, these three qualities are in line with the philosophy of Ticino Musica.

Daria Zappa from Minusio in Ticino knows that Ticino Musica is also a great opportunity for local musicians. "Ticino Musica made it possible for me to deepen my studies where I grew up." She had studied violin in Germany and in Freiburg i. Br. in particular. "At Ticino Musica, I worked with Franco Gulli: he was already over 70 at the time and his playing was excellent. The master class with him only lasted two weeks, but it was extremely intensive. I benefited a lot."

"Sometimes you learn more at these masterclasses and festivals through the combination of individual and group lessons than in a whole year," says Schellekens. "But one week is not enough, especially if you learn a completely new way of playing, as I did with Rex Martin. You need much more time to internalize what you've learned and put it into practice. Thanks to Ticino Musica, I made amazing progress and got one of the ten tuba positions in the Netherlands."

They are success stories as well as stories of friendships and encounters; above all, they are stories of a great love: the love of music. Ticino Musica nurtures this love and makes it blossom anew every summer.
 

While Arthur Honegger has just disappeared from our wallets (lucky the Swiss, who have been able to carry their artists on their banknotes for so long!), he is still on the program north of the Rhine - currently at the Frankfurt Opera with a brilliant production of his dramatic oratorio Joan of Arc au bûcher (1935). This is the third time, after 1949 and 1968, that this entirely solitary work has been staged in the Main metropolis. Of course, it is neither associated with nor proclaimed as a special performance tradition - and yet the work in the production by Àlex Ollé and his internationally successful Spanish-Catalan collective La Fura dels Baus can also be seen and heard as a reflection of reality (at least in parts of the world): power-political intrigues, show trials and the decline of a civil society once founded on solidarity.

Grandiose between the genres

The proven team under the direction of Philip A. Draganov will be joined by two new teachers: Konstantin Lifschitz, piano (Kharkov/USSR) and Joseph Hasten, cello (USA/Germany). Louise Hopkins from London, Nora Chastain from the USA, Thomas Grossenbacher and Andreas Jahnke from Switzerland, Matthias Buchholz from Germany, Jose J. Flores from Texas and Tim Kliphuis. Over 80 participants from Switzerland, Europe, the USA and Asia are expected to attend. The master classes are a highlight of the annual Youth Classics program.

Concert series
Part of the masterclasses are the public concerts, which also prepare the young talents for examinations and competitions. They will take place on July 24 and 25, 2017 in the Rathauslaube in Schaffhausen. The final concert will be held on 26 July at the Zurich Conservatory of Music and a Sunday matinee will take place on 23 July at Hofgut Albführen in Dettinghofen (Germany). The annual highlight of the concert series is the gala concert on September 15 at the Zurich University of the Arts in the Toni-Areal.

Every day, Raphael Immoos, Professor of Choral Conducting at the Basel Music Academy and Director of the Basel Madrigalists, enters the Rudolf Moser House at Steinengraben 21, where his conducting room is located. Until recently, he was not familiar with the work of the Basel composer (born in 1892), who grew up in this house. Immoos contacted the Rudolf Moser Foundation, which is looking after the composer's estate. To his astonishment, he found only 120 a cappella pieces, many of them for women's choir, men's choir and mixed choir. Moser, like Othmar Schoeck before him, had studied with Max Reger in Leipzig and later gained further inspiration from Hans Huber and Hermann Suter in Basel. Felix Weingartner, then director of the Basel Conservatory, brought Moser to his institute in 1928 to teach composition and theory. Moser's students included Walter Müller von Kulm, Paul Sacher and the violinist Yehudi Menuhin.

Starting with Moser, Immoos discovered a whole series of other Swiss composers - most of them with a connection to Basel - who had devoted themselves intensively to choral singing. In 1930, the "Zürcher Liederbuchanstalt" published the volume New songs for mixed choir a cappella. The 62 pieces bear witness to an extraordinarily rich choral oeuvre in the first half of the 20th century, which is predominantly indebted to the late Romantic style, long reviled as kitschy and epigonal.

In the second chapter of this volume, Rudolf Moser and his two contemporaries and friends Albert Moeschinger and Conrad Beck are assigned to the composers' group "Young Switzerland".

The Madrigalists performed on June 14, 2017 at the Museum Altes Klingental as a chamber choir with three sopranos, altos, tenors and basses. The program opened with two songs by Hermann Suter (Winter's end, Evening blessing), in which the choir was able to call up the entire dynamic range between full choral sound and fine pianos. This was followed by Joseph Lauber - also a teacher of Moser's A day in May with cleanly executed harmonic frictions. With Hans Huber's Come to the source (1886), the song to which the program owes its title, was a first highlight with three quartets divided in space.

The Moser block with the four songs The source (Novalis), Lost (Theodor Storm), The current and Hunter's song (Eduard Mörike) made it clear why this composer was placed at the heart of the program. The folk song style is combined here with dense harmonies and artfully applied modulations. Conrad Beck's songs ranged between Romanticism (Solution1923) and already more progressive sounds in the Evensong (1932). Albert Moeschinger, who came to terms with many influences in his long life as a composer, goes into detail in Transience (1930, text: Martin Opitz) was just as creative with the Romantic tonal language as Othmar Schoeck. After Schoeck's traditional A little bird sings in the forest (1906/07) is available at 's song from the year 1931.

Benno Ammann is by far the most progressive of all the composers to be heard this evening. The difficult but gripping songs Firnelight, Wedding song (both by Conrad Ferdinand Meyer) and Night in the village (Gian Bundi) foreshadowed Ammann's intensive involvement with New Music in the 1950s with surprising whole tone steps and the abandonment of the conciliatory tonic at the end of the songs. Three folk songs (1932) based on Swiss-German texts by Meinrad Lienert provided a humorous conclusion.

The Basel vocal institution "Madrigalisten" was under the direction of its founder Fritz Näf until four years ago and will be celebrating its fortieth anniversary next year. Plans include an anniversary CD with the enchanting Swiss song treasures discussed above, the rediscovery of which can be highly credited to the chamber ensemble and its conductor. The vocal culture of the Basler Madrigalisten is characterized by good text comprehensibility, a wide dynamic range and convincing intonation. The ensemble thus did full justice to the demanding works on this evening.

Where did the inspiration for your piece "The Key to Songs" come from?
That was more than 30 years ago; at that time, from the late '70s until the '80s, ballet companies were doing my music. Every piece I wrote that was recorded was done by ballet companies all over the world. I loved seeing them, and I wanted to write a piece for ballet, but they never commissioned any, because they just took my music after I wrote it and danced to it. So I decided that I would write an imaginary ballet. I got a book by Max Ernst, one of the collage books, Une Semaine de Bonté (1933) and I took pictures from it. It was like photographs of a dancer flying through the air.
It was a surreal book, so there were very strange, surreal poems underneath each of the pictures.

I imagined what the ballet would have been like before and after he was up in the air and I made the music and my own choreography.

One of the pictures in Ernst's book was called The Key to Songsand it had nothing but little dots, no words. To me "The Key to Songs" was Schubert. So I picked a fragment by a Schubert song, you hear it, the strings play it often, and it gradually turns into something else. And I used that for the title The Key to Songs.
The funny thing is that once recorded it became a ballet! (smiling). 3 or 4 companies were dancing to that. I eventually wrote 3 imaginary ballets and they all got choreographed!