Entering Les Délices, at the end of a conference devoted to the acoustic signature of an era of radical change, one could not help but wonder about the sound of this place. Here, in the heart of Geneva, in the parlour of the hôtel particulier where Voltaire lived from 1755 to 1760, it is the muffled sound of traffic through the open windows, the creaking of the parquet floor, the comings and goings of technicians – the room is filled with microphones and cameras – the murmurs of the audience and the rustling of programme notes that can be heard as the summer sky slowly turns a deeper blue. The eye has only a moment to rest on the earth-coloured bust that Jean-Antoine Houdon made of the best-known occupant of these premises before students of the baroque violin class at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis enter and start playing. Their sparkling interpretation of pieces by Gaspard Fritz, Antonio Caldara and Jean-Baptiste Senaillé – among others – makes one feel less transported to the past than connected to the place. This musical moment blends with the sounds of the city, as such performances already did for Voltaire, who heard music by some of the same composers here. What echoed off the walls was not only a selected repertoire but also the murmur of the town’s climate, of its inhabitants and of the guests it welcomed – or the outcasts it expelled. Surely, there is something we now know about this place, having listened to and within it, which fits in with the concept of acoustemology, introduced by ethnomusicologist Steven Feld. All we are left wondering is whether the delights after which a French philosophe named his house could have been those of disruption.

Voltaire, in any case, remained in the background during the conference itself, as most of the ‘big names’ that are usually summoned when addressing the topic of eighteenth-century musical sociability were similarly omitted. Instead, participants in the conference brought to light a full range of figures – diverse, ordinary, atypical, sometimes enigmatic – that allowed attendees to think afresh about the aesthetic and social dynamics of the pre-romantic, revolutionary and Napoleonic periods. With a remarkable consistency from one paper to another, this ‘repopulation’ of late eighteenth-century musical circles deepened the question of what – and who – it took to hear, to listen and, therefore, to live during those times.

Among these reconsidered actors, the most-discussed one was the Basel-based silk manufacturer and bourgeois Lukas Sarasin (1730–1802). Sarasin’s extensive music collection and numerous efforts to promote contemporary musicians and composers were, from August 2023 to July 2025, the object of a research project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. Three members of this project discussed the work done during these two years of research. Claudio Bacciagaluppi (Hochschule der Künste Bern) provided an insightful overview of the music collection, of which only a third of the 1,350 items are still preserved in their Basel location. Thanks to the meticulous inventory made by Sarasin himself, it was nevertheless possible to investigate the whole corpus, even though a portion of the musical works remains unidentified to this day. As Bacciagaluppi demonstrated, this collection proves to be both a reflection of its owner’s personality and a window onto the musical production and circulation of his time. In that regard, the significant proportion of opera arias contained in the collection is noteworthy. This was addressed by Roberto Scoccimarro (Hochschule der Künste Bern), who linked this specific repertoire with the types of listening that were experienced in Sarasin’s home. In line with the tradition of collegia musica, the musical practices that developed there, in a private setting, combined aesthetic considerations with the everyday concerns of an urban audience that included magistrates, students, merchants and soldiers. Contacts were made with foreign performers stopping over in the city, who were invited to sing at Sarasin’s salon. As no Swiss source is known to have reviewed local opera performances at this time, Scoccimarro compared entries from the collection’s inventory with the repertoire sung by widely renowned voices, whose reception is well documented by European writers. Through the writings of Richard Edgcumbe, Frances Burney, Wilhelm Heinse and Julie de Lespinasse, among others, the aim was to understand the criteria used to evaluate arias sung in a domestic context. For example, the use of the term ‘sublime’ by some of these authors suggests that a comparison between this type of writing and the concepts discussed by Edmund Burke could lead to a better grasp of their use in music criticism at the time.

Historical perceptions of music were discussed in a different way by Irena Müller-Brozović (Hochschule der Künste Bern) – in her own words, in a playful way. Her paper described the development of a cultural-mediation workshop which involved external participants – in this case, school students from the Basel area – in the Sarasin project. Following the idea, grounded in the work of authors such as Hartmut Rosa, of knowledge gained through collaboration, Müller-Brozović designed an interactive, game-like scenario in which participants play the role of Sarasin’s house musician, Jacob Christoph Kachel (1728–1795). Through various ludic challenges, players are led to discover not only the musical aspects of Kachel’s career but also the entangled position of his employer and the industry he worked in. Part of a global commercial network – which connected, most notably, to the slave trade – Sarasin and his music collection are integrated into a contextualized picture of Basel.

Careers and their contexts constituted an essential part of the conference, and several papers aimed at situating the Swiss Confederacy amid the fluctuations of European politics. In his presentation, Christoph Riedo (Université de Genève) demonstrated how the circulation of performers and listeners shaped a musical listening culture in Switzerland around 1800. This stressed the importance of itinerant theatre troupes for the dissemination of lyrical works and other kinds of audiovisual entertainments for a wider audience. Coming from Italy, France, England, Germany or Austria, these groups of showpeople had, however, to face the reservations of Reformed authorities, strict regulations and occasional prohibition. On another social level, exiled aristocrats, such as the Frenchman Louis-Joseph Lalive d’Epinay (1746–1813), brought important music collections with them, which helped local elites to gain knowledge – notably about opera. Such collections complemented the vibrant memories of those who had been on a Grand Tour and had attended theatrical spectacles that were yet to be introduced in the Swiss Confederacy. For Swiss people, then, building a musical – and, especially, operatic – culture that aligned with that of the rest of the Continent relied on several indirect means.

Music cemented the status of the living but also of the dead, as was shown by Yannick Wey (Hochschule der Künste Bern). In his study of the Collegium Musicum Rorschach, founded in 1767, he detailed the functioning of an institution created to provide care for the afterlife of its members by dedicating the performance of requiems and masses to them after their deaths. Since musicians and non-musicians, clerics and laypeople alike could be members, the kind of contribution requested from each of them, in exchange for exequies, differed accordingly – either by playing with the ensemble, performing rituals or providing funding. Relying on the Collegium’s statutes and account book, Wey convincingly argued that its establishment in Rorschach – a town on Lake Constance, connected with various territories – did not happen by chance and relied on the wealth of local families involved in the textile trade. As a result, the Collegium emerges as an operation that mixed financial, religious and musical interests, with different sorts of engagement leading to the same goal. The composite nature of the setting-up of requiems sung there is consequently fundamental when trying to imagine what they might have sounded like for people at the time.

Miryam Giger (Hochschule der Künste Bern) looked into a similar problem but addressed different kinds of sources. Investigating the sound of ‘Turkish musics’ in Switzerland around 1800, she based her study on a bundle of partbooks and instruments known as the ‘Hundwil-Konvolut’. These materials were used by two Swiss military bands loosely inspired by their Janissary equivalents. Giger investigated them in an original way, by playing the preserved music with the instruments available. This approach, relying on the materiality of the research subject, provided some answers to the questions raised by iconography. For example, the fact that cymbal players were depicted in pairs in some period illustrations would surprise any person familiar with the volume level reached by these instruments today. Trying the Konvolut’s cymbals proved that these early models had a much weaker sound, if indeed they could be heard at all. Finally, additional reflections on the repertoire suggest that the music contained in the partbooks was not necessarily chosen to reinforce any ‘exotic’ effect produced by the instruments. Adrian von Steiger (Hochschule der Künste Bern) provided additional insight into the availability and use of wind instruments in Switzerland. Noting the limited production in the country – fewer than twenty wind-instrument makers are recorded between 1750 and 1815 – von Steiger emphasized the role of military institutions in the development of wind sections, particularly after the French Revolution. Owing to the ban on organs that had been declared during the Reformation, churches were another possible place to hear trombones, serpents or cornetts. Instruments of worship or discipline, woodwinds and brass instruments were part of a soundscape that closely linked acoustic transmission and control over bodies and ideas.

Helen Gebhart (Universität Basel) gave conference attendees a glimpse of the implementation of such control. In her research on nocturnal authority in Basel, she examined the role of watchmen and tower guards hired by the city to announce the time during the night, to monitor the activities of the population and to watch out for fires. A detailed presentation of the objectives, tools and working conditions of these municipal officers – whether they were at the top of the cathedral tower or patrolling the streets – offered an understanding of the practical challenges posed by this state apparatus. The ‘sound of public order’ was also at the core of a paper given by Scott Edwards (Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien). Although Edwards’s work focused on Vienna and on the period directly preceding that which was addressed by other speakers, his analysis of both the complex system of administrative oversight in the imperial capital and the fragile status of entertainers provided a compelling counterpart to the Swiss state of affairs.

Regarding the very notion of a Swiss situation, Cla Mathieu (Paris-Lodron-Universität Salzburg) demonstrated that it was far from being an initially given reality and that it needed the strong involvement and convictions of multiple actors in order to be realized. This was particularly true during the series of political upheavals that characterized the short-lived Helvetic Republic (1798–1803). The emergence of new civic realities was made possible partly through sonic and performative acts. Among such acts, the oath to the Republic that every Swiss citizen was forced to take, by decree of the new authorities backed by the French occupying forces, is emblematic. The documents presented by Mathieu bear witness to the extent to which the sonic aspect of the oath ceremonies was carefully defined by the Directory, which explicitly required the use of drums, military music, patriotic songs and cannon fire. However, this obligation led to rebellion in several cantons, a resistance movement that was also sustained by songs, notably about William Tell.

The figure of Tell was undoubtedly a major trigger for sound and meaning during the revolutionary period. Meaning, none the less, was subject to change, and Marc H. Lerner (University of Mississippi) shed light on some of the reasons that led to the use of such a symbol. This, for instance, put the brutal repression of the insurrection in central Switzerland by French troops into perspective, as four years before these events, in May 1794, Parisian audiences could attend a revised version of Antoine-Marin Lemierre’s play Guillaume Tell (1766), then renamed Les Sans-Culottes suisses. Michel-Jean Sedaine and André Grétry’s eponymous comic opera (1791), as well as Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian’s Guillaume Tell ou la Suisse libre (published posthumously in 1801), also illustrated the many intricate details that must be examined to distinguish between the promotion of a universal ideal and the appropriation of a strong figure to serve one’s particular interests.

Other figures and other genres require similar interpretative efforts: among them, the many songs printed during the tense period that the Basel region experienced in 1792, after France had declared war on Austria. Inspecting and comparing these works, Jan-Friedrich Missfelder (Universität Basel) brought their generic nature to our attention, as many of these songs tell the story of the departure of a volunteer soldier from his home canton in order to go to the aid of Basel. Being directly adjacent to a potential war zone, the city had indeed requested assistance from other members of the Confederation. The repertoire produced for the occasion gives a good idea of the values invoked in the texts in order to generate cohesion between cantons, namely freedom and neutrality – which remained the real issues at stake in the mobilization. Delving into these songs revealed both the ambivalent attitude of Swiss authors towards the symbols of freedom generated by the French Revolution and the musical continuity resulting from the reuse of extremely famous tunes of the time, such as Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart’s Kaplied.

Disruption, therefore, was to be found in the shifting evaluations and understandings of music over time as much as in changes of regime. In her keynote lecture, Inga Mai Groote (Universität Zürich) discussed the ways in which various forms of engagement and participation in musical life contributed to redefining the political landscape and, in particular, the emergence of public opinion. Taking the example of the Allgemeine Musik-Gesellschaft Zürich, founded in 1812, she proposed treating music societies – which stemmed from collegia musica – as laboratories of social life. Events organized by such institutions offer an insight into active and passive forms of engagement with music and into the dissemination of musical knowledge – in so far as the experience of these events was recorded and preserved. The chronicle kept from 1798 to 1837 by Hans Conrad Keller is one such record, reporting how everyday life and its sounds – in Zurich, in this case – were affected by demonstrations and the formalization of authority. From the erection of a liberty pole, accompanied by the distribution of music books, to the interruption of a musical performance of the Passion by French soldiers, Keller recorded numerous events that his community went through. In view of this, his writings are of great help for studying how a communal experience is both conceived and built by means of sound.

As Groote posited, the somewhat provocative concept of historical acoustemology calls for a variety of sources and interdisciplinary exchanges, which, as James Mansell (University of Nottingham) remarked in his closing commentary, were put into use throughout the conference. Noting that one of the fundamental questions pertaining to historical acoustemology is ‘what is allowed to sound?’, Mansell observed that one often follows this methodological track without even knowing it. When looking back through history for active tools for social change, resources for the development of new forms of citizenship and itinerant skills that generate feelings and social belonging, music stands out as a privileged subject. However, Mansell also stressed that the non-musical, audible world might be further investigated. Alongside music, he suggested taking into account how, for example, nature, speech or silence were perceived. The kind of ‘disruptive listening’ he advocated can thus enable us to distinguish between what was designed to be heard – according to political agendas that need to be questioned – and the actual way inhabitants of a noisy world, always far vaster than the traces that remain of it, experience it. Many topics, indeed, lend themselves well to practising such ‘counter-listening’, and in this regard, the conference laid important groundwork for tackling old issues in fresh ways.

I wish to thank Anna Stoll Knecht and Nicholas Rogers for their comments on the draft of this report and their help in correcting my English.