A higher musical culture did not just begin in Switzerland in the 20th century. In earlier centuries, with the exception of Ludwig Senfl, who was active at the court of Emperor Maximilian, there were not many prominent composers, but there was a lively musical life. The legend that the Reformation of Zwingli and Calvin put a white frost over the musical life of the Reformed towns must also be emphatically refuted. The opposite is the case. Huldrych Zwingli sang excellently and, according to the testimony of a contemporary, played the following instruments: "lutes, harps, violins, pipes, rabögli, schwäglen, trummscheit, dulcimer, zinken, French horn". (1) He composed elaborate polyphonic songs and met regularly in private with other music lovers, for example with the priest Leo Jud, to sing together in the evenings.
Psalm books from Basel and Constance circulated in Zurich for private use and were soon joined by hymnbooks from the local Froschauer printing works. Music colleges were formed in which people sang, played instruments and rehearsed for the so-called "quarterly bötter". There were three in Zurich, whose founding year is unknown. They joined together in 1812 to form the General Music Society of Zurich, which performed concerts with varied programs, oratorios, operas and musical comedies.
Schoolmasters, parish priests, composers
What does all this have to do with the freelance music teacher? A great deal, because such a zealous cultivation of music requires training, which was usually in the hands of schoolmasters, occasionally also music-loving parish priests, whereby the line between professional musicians and amateurs is difficult to draw. Zwingli founded the first music school in Zurich as early as 1528 and appointed a musician named Hans Vogler as its director. Heinrich Bullinger's school regulations for the Latin school of 1532 called for the singing of carmina three days a week. Choral and instrumental interludes in school and popular dramas are attested for Zwingli, among others. (2) Two textbooks for singing lessons by Johannes Frisius were printed by Froschauer in 1552 and 1554.
But what happened in the church service? Winterthur and Stein am Rhein reintroduced church singing without instrumental accompaniment as early as 1559; the city council of Zurich hesitated longer until it passed the corresponding resolution in 1598. In addition to psalm singing, whose 125 melodies were written by Guillaume Franc, Loys Bourgeois and Pierre Davantès, the first official Zurich hymnal from 1598, the later so-called Lobwasserthe "Gebräuchliche Psalmen" (the psalm songs printed in Zurich for decades). This was followed by more and more sacred hymns, initially set for one voice, but soon for four voices, whereby Bourgeois placed the cantus firmus in the tenor, as was customary at the time, but the chorale melody was later moved upwards by swapping the soprano and tenor. This four-part homophonic setting can be found in the third edition of the Zurich hymnal from 1641. This type of church singing has survived tenaciously as a substitute for instrumental accompaniment, and remains to this day. Some of the songs are still printed in four-part harmony in Swiss church hymnals. Four-part singing was practiced regularly in all schools and in church lessons.
The repertoire that was cultivated in the three music colleges of the city of Zurich can be deduced from preserved music collections for at least the 18th century. It was thoroughly contemporary and sophisticated. In addition to much Handel, Graun's passion music, Hiller, Naumann, Rolle and, early on, symphonies and masses by Joseph Haydn should be mentioned. There were also Swiss composers: Johann Caspar Bachofen (1695-1753) was theologically trained up to the level of Verbi Divini Minister, but never practiced the pastoral profession, instead devoting himself to music as an autodidact and leaving behind memorable, simple one- to three-part songs with basso continuo. The pastor Johannes Schmidlin (1722-1772) founded and directed the music college in Wetzikon, Zurich Oberland. He taught Johann Heinrich Egli (1742-1810), who was born in Seegräben and worked as a sought-after piano and singing teacher in Zurich from 1760 onwards, composing soulful songs. His pupil Johann Jakob Walder, who was eight years younger, worked in the same spirit and set uplifting sacred texts by Christian Fürchtegott Gellert, which were published in 1791 and became very popular.
Music teachers and traveling virtuosos
Of course, there were plenty of music teachers. The aforementioned, who emerged as composers, are only the tip of the iceberg. One non-composer should be mentioned, namely Goethe's friend Philipp Christoph Kayser, known as "Kunscht-Kayser" from Stäfa on Lake Zurich, born in 1755, who earned his living giving piano lessons as a 15-year-old in Frankfurt am Main and then five years later in Zurich. In addition to the established music teachers, there were also the traveling virtuosos; for example, the Mozart family came to Zurich in 1766, where the ten-year-old Wolfgangerl wrote down a march on the back of a menu card at the Hotel Storchen. Virtuosos appeared like shooting stars in the Zurich musical sky and occasionally settled there, such as Anton Liste, born in Hildesheim in 1772. In 1804, he was appointed by the Musikkollegien to conduct their orchestra in Zurich, where he gave Zurich's musical life an unprecedented boost until 1834 and significantly raised the standard of the orchestra, which was mainly made up of amateurs. He founded the Liste Singing Society, which competed with Hans Georg Nägeli's choirs and performed Haydn's Creation and Seasons as well as Handel's Messiah and other oratorios on several occasions. Liste was also regarded as an important piano virtuoso whose piano works remained highly regarded for a long time.
Nägeli (1773-1836) was the most important representative of music teachers. He grew up in music-loving Wetzikon and was already in charge of its music college at the age of ten. He was particularly interested in choral music. In 1805, he founded the music institute with its mixed choir, men's choir and children's choir. In 1810 his Teaching singing according to Pestalozzian principles, 1821 his Choir singing school. It is thanks to him that the Swiss choral scene flourished both quantitatively and qualitatively for a whole century, so that he is rightly called the "father of singers".
Conservatories, choirs and brass bands
There were salaried orchestral and choral conductors, known as music directors, and single teachers at grammar schools, but no other salaried music teachers before the founding of conservatories. From 1858, Friedrich Hegar promoted Zurich's musical life in a sustainable way. Initially he was concertmaster of the Orchesterverein, but after three years he was already chief conductor. He made a significant contribution to the founding of the Tonhalle Society in 1868, brought international luminaries such as Brahms, Liszt, Joseph Joachim, Klara Schumann, Hans von Bülow and many others to Zurich for guest appearances, left behind remarkable compositions in 1927 and founded the conservatory in 1876, which offered a professional department and a general department from the very beginning and for a very long time. However, Zurich's conservatory was by no means the first in Switzerland. Geneva was the first in 1835, followed by Bern in 1858, the Institut de Musique de Lausanne in 1861, Basel in 1867 and Winterthur in 1873. The Lucerne Conservatory was not added until 1942. Nothing of the kind existed in other cities or in the countryside. This meant that there were publicly accessible music schools in some cities, but they were privately organized and depended on subsidies from the municipalities and their music teachers were employees. But the freelancers were vastly outnumbered. They formed a proliferation of all possible quality levels, whereby the line between professionals and enthusiasts was again impossible to draw. The pedagogical work of music lovers was not always bad. Talented primary school teachers, in particular, led the thousands of male, female and mixed choirs that measured their skills against each other in periodic music festivals, judged by a panel of experts. The numerous brass music associations also took care of the instruction of their young musicians themselves. And in folk music, parents passed on their skills and knowledge to their children, usually without any knowledge of sheet music. The latter still exists today.
Concern for the pedagogical quality of music education ultimately led to the founding of the Swiss Music Teachers' Association in 1893, then called the "Schweizerischer Gesang- und Musiklehrerverein". The name indicates the focus of its efforts. The purpose article in the articles of association also states: "To raise and promote singing and music in schools, churches, homes and clubs". By the way: "Singing and music", this strange name remained in use for a long time. The sign at the top of the spiral staircase to the organ in the Predigerkirche in Zurich still reads: "Access for singers and musicians only". The sign is left hanging out of reverence. Membership of the association, which was renamed in 1911 to its current name, abbreviated to SMPV, was also open to people who did not work in the music profession. Further training courses were offered for choirmasters, school musicians and organists. The new name was introduced in 1911 with the "introduction of examinations for music teachers who do not hold certificates of academic musical education". In 1913, the first announcement of such examinations was made, to which over sixty interested candidates responded, although only five of them took the examination. The requirements of the unfortunately lost regulations were obviously high. This was the beginning of the SMPV's professional training program, which still exists today as a special case throughout Europe, continued by the Swiss Academy of Music and Music Education, which is integrated into the Kalaidos University of Applied Sciences Switzerland as the Department of Music. Diploma examinations for music teachers were only gradually introduced at conservatoires in the course of the 20th century, which makes the pioneering work of the SMPV understandable.
Freelance music teachers today
The wave of music schools founded in the 1960s and 1970s, initially mainly youth music schools, led to a nationwide network of around 440 music schools affiliated to the Swiss Music Schools Association. For a while, it was believed that this upheaval would lead to the extinction of the freelance music teacher. Even though many former youth music schools now also offer adult lessons, the opposite is the case. This is because many professionals either cannot find employment or only work a small part-time job at a music school and teach privately on the side. The same applies to those who do not play full-time in an orchestra or who have ended their singing career. Further niches of increasing importance are opening up in the highly important promotion of young children in parent-child singing courses, elementary music education at pre-school and early school age and music geragogy.
What is the conclusion of this historical walk? In addition to the necessary professionalization of music teachers, we must not lose sight of the broad impact of musical activity and education, the enhancement of which in schools and clubs is inconceivable without amateurs. However, this does not preclude the promotion of the social security of freelance music teachers.
Proof
The text is based on a presentation at the 43rd D-A-CH conference in Würzburg.
The full paper is published in: Elisabeth Herzog-Schaffner and Dirk Hewig (eds.), The freelance music teacher - a profession with a future? Report on the 43rd D-A-CH Conference 2012 in Würzburg, ISBN 978-3-926906-21-2, available from the office of the Deutscher Tonkünstlerverband: info@dtkv. org
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