Paul Sacher Stiftung

From 3 to 12 November 2004 the «Trans-it» International Music Festival of the ISCM mounted concerts in various cities of Switzerland. Delegates from all over the world, members of the Swiss chapter of the ISCM, and interested concert-goers were transported between the venues by a "sound train." One carriage on the train carried an exhibition entitled «From Point A to Point B ...: Connections and Passages in Music, with a Trailer on Musical Traffic.» The exhibition consisted of color reproductions of manuscripts selected from the rich holdings of the Paul Sacher Foundation. The theme of the festival was reflected in examples of the many ways that composers have confronted the subject of transportation, including Arthur Honegger's Pacific 231 (1923) and György Kurtág's «Scene at the Station» from his Kafka Fragments (1985-7). Other groups of documents reveal aspects of overt or covert ties to historical models or starting points, such as the allusions to Beethoven in Richard Strauss and Mauricio Kagel, tributes to Schoenberg and Webern by Luigi Nono and Henri Pousseur, or approaches to the classical string quartet in the music of Béla Bartók, György Ligeti, and Heinz Holliger. The exhibition was open to visitors on location during its stopovers in Lugano, Winterthur, Basle, La Chaux-de-Fonds, Biel, Lausanne, Geneva, and Aarau.