{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.03809950694755715, 'fraction_numerical': 0.022411474675033616, 'mean_word_length': 5.702702702702703, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 1, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 1, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Further Studies from the Paul Sacher Stiftung

The second issue dedicated to the studies from the Paul Sacher Stiftung (PSS) explores eight of the archive’s rich and growing collections. The archive was founded in Basel, Switzerland in 1973 by Paul Sacher, a prominent Swiss conductor, performer, patron, and promoter of contemporary music. Sacher commissioned over 300 pieces from many notable twentieth-century composers, which he performed with his Basler Kammerorchester. While the initial purpose of the archive was to preserve Sacher’s musical library, including the commissioned scores, today the PSS serves a different function. With its expansion to over 115 collections and estates, the archive has become an international research centre, an avid supporter and a leader of scholarly research on twentieth and twenty-first-century music. The current special issue of Contemporary Music Review, ‘Further Studies from the Paul Sacher Stiftung’, features eight essays by scholars who have spent a significant amount of time working with the original documents at the archive. Each essay highlights a different collection at the PSS, and the authors incorporate a variety of methodologies and materials housed at the archive: sketches, (unpublished) drafts and fair copies, withdrawn compositions, transcriptions, correspondence, text documents, photographs, electronic files, unpublished material from the Foundation’s audiovisual holdings, and historic recordings. In the first essay, ‘“Élan vital ... and how to fake it”: Morton Feldman and Merle Marsicano’s Vernacular Metaphysics’, Ryan Dohoney approaches Bergson’s vitalist philosophy comparatively as part of Feldman’s community of friends and collaborators. Through his examination of Feldman’s sketches and unpublished lectures, Dohoney scrutinises the composer’s borrowing of vitalist vocabulary for his piece titles (Extensions and Durations), his notes for Intermission 6 describing open-form as ‘an outline of becoming’, and further extends Feldman’s connection to vitalism through his collaborations on Figure of Memory with choreographer Merle Marsicano, Contemporary Music Review, 2019 Vol. 38, Nos. 3–4, 225–228, https://doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2019.1596631