Tablature, Salon and Cathedral

Swiss keyboard playing first becomes legible in tablature, which sets the treble in staff notation and gives the lower parts as letters with rhythm signs. Hans Kotter, trained by Hofhaimer and organist at Fribourg from 1514, copied three such books for the Basel jurist Bonifacius Amerbach; they gather preludes, dances and intabulated chansons, and passed with the Amerbach collection into the city's keeping. Fridolin Sicher, a pupil of Hans Buchner at Konstanz, assembled at St Gallen a volume of 176 pieces after Hofhaimer, Obrecht and Josquin, while Buchner's Fundamentum set out fingering and the elaboration of plainchant.

By the nineteenth century the Swiss keyboard is domestic and civic rather than liturgical. Charles Samuel Bovy-Lysberg, born near Geneva in 1821, studied in Paris with Chopin from 1835, settled again near Geneva in 1848 and taught at the Geneva conservatory; his short character pieces were written for the drawing rooms and pupils of the city. Joachim Raff, born at Lachen on Lake Zurich in 1822, went the other way, into Germany, to Liszt at Weimar and finally to the direction of the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt; his piano writing is denser, more contrapuntal, and aimed at the concert room.

Otto Barblan, born in the Engadine in 1860, came to Geneva in 1887 as organist of the cathedral of Saint-Pierre and held the post for fifty-five years, teaching organ and composition at the conservatory from 1888 and directing the Société de chant sacré from 1892. His organ music is deliberately retrospective, built on Bachian counterpoint and on passacaglia thinking, and coloured by Romansh melody. Against that Geneva school stands Arthur Honegger — Swiss by parentage though born at Le Havre in 1892 — who studied at Zurich before Paris and Les Six, and whose terse, linear keyboard writing owes nothing to the organ loft.