The Hundwil Convolute: A Wind Band of the First Half of the Nineteenth Century

The Klingendes Museum houses a still unexplored source on wind band music in Switzerland in the early nineteenth century: a collection consisting of 20 instruments and 49 music books with 460 pieces. A research project is reconstructing from this basis the genesis of a military and civilian wind band tradition in Switzerland in the instrumentation of a ‘Turkish band’. Some of the instruments are from the late eighteenth century, thus they were already old when they came into use in this wind band. Others are valve instruments that were added to it towards the middle of the nineteenth century. This can be traced in the music books, as well as the fact that at that time the playing pitch was raised by one tone.