Phil Martin began the Wisconsin Swiss Traditional Music Project under his research organization, the Wisconsin Folklife Center, which was then based at Folklore Village Farm in Dodgeville where he was Vice-President of the Board of Directors. By the end of the project, Martin had folded the Center into a new non-profit, the Wisconsin Folk Museum, where he was Executive Director. The new Folklife Center grew from Martin's Old-Time Traditional Music in Wisconsin research and productions.
After featuring traditional Norwegian-American and German-American musical traditions in the Folklife Center's “Ethnic Music Series,” Martin turned to Wisconsin's Swiss-American musical traditions. He focused the new project especially on Green County, home to a concentration of Swiss emigrants mostly from the mountainous cantons of Glarus and Bern. The 1986-1988 field and studio recordings made for the project emphasized the public-oriented performance style often heard in community-produced concerts, recordings, and festivals. Assisted by Rudy Burkhalter, a well known Swiss-American musician, the researchers contacted area musicians and arranged recording sessions and interviews. Leary formally interviewed eight Swiss-American musicians: Rudy Burkhalter, Leo and Anna Gempler, Roger Bright, and Al Mueller with sound recordings, and Martha Bernet, Betty Vetterli, and Trudy Brandli with handwritten notes. The interviews focused on personal and family history, musical selections that were recorded, and the role of music in south-central Wisconsin tradition. Lewis Koch photographed the performers, their home interiors, historic personal photos, and farm and town landscapes in the area. Leary also located historic musical recordings of Swiss-American and European-Swiss artists from the Upper Midwest region and across the country.
The resulting cassette production, Swissconsin: My Homeland, published in 1988 by the Wisconsin Folklife Center, included accordion and alphorn playing, yodeling and choral singing, and alpine-style dance bands. Contemporary recordings of Rudy Burkhalter, Martha Bernet, Anna Gempler, Bob and Scott Lorenz, Alfred and Martha Stucki, Betty Vetterli, the Edelweiss Stars, the Monroe Swiss Singers, and the New Glarus Alphorn Trio, were interspersed with historic reissues of recordings by influential Swiss and Swiss-American performers (Rudy Burkhalter, Louis Alder and his Mountaineers, the Moser Brothers, and the Swiss Family Frauenfelder). Subsequently, in 1991 the Folk Museum published James P. Leary's related Yodeling in Dairyland: A History of Swiss Music in Wisconsin. One essay in the book provides an overview of Swiss music in Wisconsin, the other focuses on Rudy Burkhalter, an influential performer whose varied career, in the Old World and the New, epitomizes the Swiss-American musical experience. Swissconsin was included in the American Folklife Center's American Folk Music and Folklore Recordings 1988: A Selected List (Washington, DC: Library of Congress). In 2004, the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures re-released Swissconsin in CD format.
Martin obtained National Endowment for the Arts (Folk Arts) funding for the project, with Folklore Village Farm as the sponsoring non-profit organization, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Folklore Program contributed to production costs. Under the Wisconsin Folk Museum, Martin applied grants to the project from the Webcrafters-Frautschi Foundation, the Wisconsin Arts Board, and the Dane County Cultural Affairs Commission.
At Mills Music Library, Box 4 of the Wisconsin Folk Museum Collection contains a folder entitled “Swiss Music Project,” 1986-1989, which includes biographical sketches of the musicians, letters, musical scores, press releases, notes, and the final report to the NEA. Other related materials are interspersed throughout the Collection.
The “Wisconsin Folk Museum Records” (call number M98-044) at the Wisconsin Historical Society Library-Archives Division contain 12 artist files related to the Swiss project, formerly maintained by the Wisconsin Folk Museum. These files include tape indexes, field notes, flyers, copies of newspaper articles, letters, and some release forms.
There are three folders at the UW-Madison Folklore Program. The first, the official NEA grant file, contains original NEA grant proposals, a copy of the final report to NEA, official grant correspondence from and to NEA and UW-Madison, as well as handwritten budget accounting notes. A second contains invoices, correspondence, the audiocassette insert, and handwritten notes detailing the production of Swissconsin. A third file for Yodeling in Dairyland contains invoices, newspaper clippings, and a listing of Swiss photographs, a description of the photographs and an indication of who provided them, and a copy of the publication. Negatives and contact sheets in Folklore Program custody were made primarily in Monroe and New Glarus and are images of buildings, dancing, people in ethnic dress, and historical photographs.
In his personal collection, Jim Leary has six audiocassettes and four folders related to the project. The audiocassettes contain Swiss music and interviews with Swiss musicians by Leary. The “Swiss Project: Sources” folder contains Leary's background research materials--brochures, bibliographies, reference material, newspapers, letters, and handwritten notes--on the history of Swiss music in the United States and Wisconsin. The correspondence folder includes correspondence with other scholars on the topic of Swiss music. Chief correspondents are Brigitte Bachmann-Geiser of the Swiss Museum and Institute for Folkmusic and Musical Instruments, Bern, Switzerland and folklorist Regina Bendix, then of Lewis and Clark College, Portland, Oregon. The “Various Artists” folder contains a range of items including newspaper clippings; biographical notes on artists, including Martha Bernet, Betty Vetterli, Trudy Brandli and the Monroe Swiss Singers; and sound recording logs by Leary on the interviews with Rudy Burkhalter, Roger Bright, Leo and Anna Gempler, and Albert Mueller. Typed versions of the sound recording logs, in paper and on a computer diskette, completed by student assistant Jocelyne Bodden, are in the fourth folder.
Contact individual repositories for access information.
Wisconsin Music Archives at Mills Music Library
University of Wisconsin-Madison
B162 Memorial Library
728 State St.
Madison, WI 53706-1494
Email: askmusic@library.wisc.edu
Phone: (608) 263-1884
Web site: http://music.library.wisc.edu
Wisconsin Historical Society
Library-Archives Division
Reference Services, Archives
816 State St.
Madison, WI 53706
Email: askarchives@wisconsinhistory.org
Phone: (608) 264-6460
Web site: http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/libraryarchives/
UW-Madison Folklore Program
Prof. James P. Leary
2315 Sterling Hall
475 N. Charter Street
Madison, WI 53706
Email: jpleary@wisc.edu
Phone: (608) 262-8107
Web site: http://folklore.wisc.edu/
Prof. James P. Leary
209 S. 4th St.
Mount Horeb, WI 53572
Email: jpleary@wisc.edu
Phone: (608) 437-4816
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