Kurt Schindler’s Project: Culture Heritage and Technologies: reconstructing an epistolary as a main source for researching in Musicology

Abstract

[En] The German musician Kurt Schindler (1887-1935) was a very interesting personality: cosmopolitan, poliglota, Composer, conductor, performer, coaching singers, musicologist… He was also a famous photographer who worked for several newspapers in Spain and in the United States. Because his experience recollecting folk songs in Russia and Hungary, he was also commissioned by American and Spanish research institutions in 1920 to do fieldwork on popular folksongs in all over the Iberian peninsula (Spain and Portugal) until his earlier death in the 30s. He was pioneer presenting European repertories of French, Russian, Finish and Spanish music to American audiences through the his choir Schola Cantorum of 300 mixed voices. For unknown reasons, Schindler has been an anonymous musician for several years. Because of several Spanish research projects I+D+I directed by Dr. Olarte and several international researchers from Spain, Germany and Bulgaria, in the last thirteen years this composer and all his activities are been presented for the scientist community as Kurt Schindler’s Project. In repositories and museums of Europe and United States we have been found a large number and variety of materials and documents about him. The Kurt Schindler’s epistolary is an amount of almost one thousand letters with different musical and artistic personalities, since the last decade of the nineteenth century until weeks before his death in 1935. These letters, distributed between several international archives and libraries (as the New York Public Library, the Hispanic Institute at Columbia University, the Hispanic Society of America, Fundación Juan March of Madrid, the Archivo Manuel de Falla in Granada, the Orfeó Catalá Archive and the Biblioteca de Catalunya in Barcelona or the Biblioteca Valenciana). The finding aid of several internet catalogues as the one of the Lincoln Center of the NYPL has been a great help in this big research project. All Schindler’s correspondence gives us an idea of the many personal and musical interests that motivated Schindler for his artistic life, as far as the variety of cultural and social environments he used to frequent, leaving a deep impression on many of the people who dealed him and wrote to him, showing him in high esteem; in these letters we can also see his enigmatic personality as a complex person with many possible readings, which could cause the time of his death count with few friends, and that his memory has been only in the minds of those close friends. The variety of the correspondents who find this correspondence becomes a really interesting and interdisciplinary musical source. Although it has been a hard work the classification, analysing and archiving material; we think that nowadays this project will provide a basis for studying of the reception and internationalism of the musical taste of the first three decades of the 20th Century.