Gender and music in Luxembourg

Looking back at 25 years of archival work and music mediation

Abstract

In 1996 and 1998, I came across music of female composers thought to be lost: first, orchestral and piano music, orchestral songs and the performance material of a feminist operetta by Lou Koster (1889-1973) and two years later, the entire musical estate of Helen Buchholtz (1877-1953).

In contrast to Lou Koster, Buchholtz had been completely forgotten at the time. In 1999, the heir to Buchholtz's estate decided to make the manuscripts, which he had kept in his cellar for around 50 years, available to the public. Thanks to his decision, I was able to found and manage the Helen Buchholtz Archive at the feminist documentation center CID |Fraen an Gender. The Lou Koster Archive was opened three years later. Collections on contemporary female composers from Luxembourg were added in the following years.

The aim of these new archives was not only to make the music accessible again, but also to research it, promote it through educational projects, edit it and have it performed again in concerts, as well as recorded on CDs. Since Buchholtz’s music was completely forgotten and there were no recordings of it, the history of interpretation of her music was a blank slate. To bring the works back to life, I worked together with various interpreters: pianists, singers, and orchestras. Due to these projects, the two composers have become better known and their music is now being performed again in Luxembourg as well as abroad.

An important aspect of my work with the historical music was to bring it into dialogue with contemporary music. I therefore invited female composers to write new music inspired by Buchholtz and Koster. The commissioned compositions were premiered in concerts and most of them were recorded.

In 2022, a new research project titled MuGi.lu (Music and Gender in Luxembourg) was launched at the University of Luxembourg, in collaboration with MUGI (Musik und Gender im Internet, a joint research project of the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg and the Hochschule für Musik Franz Liszt Weimar). Thus, the archival, research and music mediation work that has been carried out at the CID |Fraen an Gender for the last 25 years is now being continued at the University of Luxembourg in a new form: with the development of digital archives, an emphasis on oral history film interviews and the project's own homepage, which focuses on sources of different materiality (https://mugi.lu).