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Switzerland, report 1995-1996

The Annual Meeting 1995 of the Swiss Branch took place in Basle on May 12. In the morning the members visited the Collection of Musical Instruments of the Historical Museum, directed by Veronika Gutmann, the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, and the Library of the High School of Music in Basle (Musik-Akademie der Stadt Basel). In the afternoon the formal annual meeting was held in the University Library followed by three presentations concerning the final re port of the Minimal Standard Working Group, the “Frauenmusik-Forum”, and the future activities of RIdIM in Switzerland.

On October 20 a symposium on music documentation in Switzerland was held in Bern. The event was organized by the Swiss Music Council, the Swiss Musicological Society, and the Swiss Association of Music Collections (containing the Swiss Branch of IAML) and was attended by more than fifty participants. One of the goals of the meeting was the promotion of RISM in Switzerland. Harald Heckmann, Klaus Keil, Gertraut Haberkamp, and Kurt Dorfmüller had kindly accepted an invitation to present papers on RISM in general and the RISM Center at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek. As a result of this meeting, early this year an Association “Arbeitsstelle Schweiz des RISM” was founded.

A group of local organizers also met several times in 1995 in preparation for the 1997 IAML Conference in Geneva.

In 1996 preparations for the 1997 conference took on more and more importance. A local organizing committee was formed in Geneva and met more or less regularly every month. The annual meeting of the branch took place in Locarno and Bellinzona on May 10 and 11. There were presentations about the Leoncavallo Collection in the Biblioteca regionale in Locarno, the publication program of the Swiss National Sound Archive in Lugano, and the development of a music module for the Virginia Technologies Library System (VTLS) by Stefano Cavaglieri, a staff member of the Swiss National Sound Archive. The next day we visited the workshop for paper restoration of Andrea Giovannini in Bellinzona. Finally our branch had to state with regret that there was no possibility in Switzerland of housing the archival holdings of the European Frauenmusikarchiv of Wuppertal in Germany.

Membership: 34 institutional, 17 individual

Kurt Deggeller, President