Swissmedmusica was founded in 1997 in Bern as the «Swiss Society for Music Medicine». The founding members were the musician Pia Bucher, the dentist Joachim Lahme and the entrepreneur Beat Vollmar.
The founding of the society was triggered by the ever-increasing number of musicians with injuries or challenges that limited their playing ability or even the threat of professional disability, who were unable to find a contact point for their concerns. Many of those affected did not talk about their worries and fears. Even today, the subject seems to be taboo.
The society has been presided over by Pia Bucher (musician and qualified kinesiologist, 1997 to 2011); Martina Berchtold-Neumann (qualified psychologist FSP, 2011 to 2020) and Wolfgang Böhler (music philosopher, choir conductor, journalist, since 2020).
A central offer of the Society was and is (with financial support from the Swiss Performers Foundation, SIS) an independent, low-threshold counselling centre throughout Switzerland. The consultations were conducted by Pia Bucher until 2017, by Peter Schönenberger MD from 2017 to 2019, by Felicitas Sigrist MD from 2020 to 2021 and 2022 by Daniela Gut MD . The music physiotherapist Marjan Steenbeek has been conducting the consultations since 2023. The Society also cooperates with local interdisciplinary musician’s consultations in Bern, Lucerne, Locarno, Zurich, Geneva and Basel.
From 1998 onwards, the SMM was involved with cooperations and lectures on musician’s medicine at musician’s associations, music academies and music schools. In the same year and until 2003, it held continuing education seminars in Italy and at the Hindemith Centre in Blonay (CH). In 2001, specialist lectures and workshops on health in the orchestra were also held in all professional and symphony orchestras in Switzerland. The research activities emphasised interdisciplinary cooperation.
As a result, the Society now has a network of experts mainly from the fields of medicine, psychology, therapy, pedagogy and music.
The topics of the symposia so far have been:
2003 The Musician’s Back (Zurich)
2004 The Musician’s Hands (Zurich)
2005 Psychological stress in the music profession (Zurich)
2005 Troubles auditifs et corporels chez les musiciens (Lausanne)
2006 Medical aspects of music education (Zurich)
2007 Health in the music profession (Berne)
2008 Psychosomatic aspects in music medicine (Basel)
2009 Malattie professionali specifiche dei musicisti e la loro preventione (Lugano)
2009 Hearing-eye-voice and their coordination in music making (Lucerne)
2010 La santé du musicien (Geneva)
2011 Ergonomic aspects of music performance (Bern)
2012 Music in the head – a neuroscientific view of music making (Lucerne)
2013 Healthy music making in childhood and adolescence (Zurich)
2014 Making Music in Old Age (Berne)
2015 Stress and Making Music (Basel)
2016 The Amateur Musician (Berne)
2017 Mental Training for Musicians (Zurich)
2018 Warning Signal Pain (Lucerne)
2019 From Digital to Body – Resource Orientation in the Everyday Life of Musicians (Basel)
2022 One goal – many paths (Berne)