Performing musical Swissness? Traditional popular music between "Stubete" and studio

Musical practices, institutional contexts, and the reception of traditional popular music: this project examined the acoustic construction of Swissness on the Radio.

Brief information

School:

Music

Status:

Completed

Period:

11.12.2012 - 30.11.2019

Overview

The research project “Broadcasting Swissness” investigated the construction and distribution of “Swissness” by means of traditional and popular music. At the core of the research project was the “Dür collection” – a convolute of approximately 8,000 audio tapes with “Swiss popular music” collected by the musicologist Fritz Dür on behalf of Swiss Radio International (SRI) between 1957 and 1967 as a musical Swiss visiting card. The collection was taken up into the Swiss National Library in 1987. The central question of the whole project was how and under what social and institutional circumstances popular music together with the institution radio did emerge as a powerful voice in the construction of – an acoustic – Swissness. – The project was interdisciplinary and examined the acoustic dimension of popular culture from the immediate post-war period to the present from the perspectives of music studies, ethnomusicology, and cultural anthropology. The joint analytical approach of all sub-projects towards the material was based on the question of the nature of the acoustic construction of a “Stimme der Schweiz” (Voice of Switzerland) by means of its fixation on a recording medium, which had its own influence as a form of media. The collection had a canonising function and stimulated the formation of an integrated ideal of acoustic Swissness. The sub-project based at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts/Department of Music examined the popular music scene in the 1950s and 1960s and the audio-musical side of the archived repertoire from a music studies and sound-artistic research perspective.

Facts

Type of project

Forschung

Internal organisations involved
  • CC Music Education Research MER
External project partner
External project funder
Funding
  • Private / Stiftungen
  • Öffentliche Hand
  • Forschungsfinanzierung allgemein

Links

Persons involved: internal

Project manager
  • Marc-Antoine Camp
Member of project team

Publications