Hans Oesch

Hans Rolf Oesch was born in 1926 in Wolfhalden, Switzerland. From 1946 to 1951 he studied musicology at the University of Basel under Jacques Handschin, the influential scholar of medieval and Renaissance music. In 1959 he earned the advanced post-doctoral qualification that allowed him to teach as a professor at the University of Zurich. He worked as a music critic for the National-Zeitung and as a lecturer before his appointment in 1967 as professor and director of the Musikwissenschaftliches Institut in Basel, succeeding Leo Schrade. Oesch remained in this position until 1991, guiding the institute through a period of expansion that included historical musicology and ethnomusicology, and carrying out field research in Southeast Asia, where he collected instruments and documented local traditions that were later added to the institute’s holdings. From 1986 he also served as scientific director of the Paul Sacher Foundation, the Basel archive dedicated to twentieth-century composers including Stravinsky, Boulez, and Ligeti.

Oesch first established himself through his editorial work on the music of Arcangelo Corelli, contributing to the complete edition of the seventeenth-century composer’s works and advancing Baroque scholarship. From this foundation in early European music, he moved toward non-European traditions. His recordings of the Senoi of Malaya were published in 1965 on a Gravesaner Blätter supplement alongside Max Mathews’ Computer Music from Bell Labs, a pairing that placed ethnographic sound in dialogue with the emerging language of electronic synthesis through Hermann Scherchen’s experimental journal. By bringing indigenous music into the same frame as computer composition, Oesch showed how wide the field of music research could reach. Through his teaching, writing, and curatorial work he shaped a generation of Swiss musicologists and helped anchor the discipline in a global perspective. He passed away in 1992.