Caspar Zollikofer von Altenklingen

Caspar Zollikofer von Altenklingen (St Gallen, July 1707 – St Gallen, 12 August 1779) was a Swiss composer whose work straddles sacred music and teaching. He came from a St Gallen family documented since the fifteenth century. Trained in theology, he was ordained for the ministry, and his name is associated above all with the renewal of Protestant congregational singing in his city.

After completing his theological studies in 1728, he served the Church and the school in St Gallen, although his relations with the ecclesiastical authorities were strained. In 1746 he was Latin tutor at the Gymnasium, and in 1773 he obtained one of the five regular pastoral posts in the city, becoming fourth town pastor in 1778.

His most significant work was the Gebät-Music (St Gallen, 1738), a domestic songbook for private meditation containing a thousand texts and three hundred and thirty melodies for two, three, four or five voices and basso continuo. Its dedication expresses the aim of reforming the sacred repertoire by replacing the Lobwasser psalms with more modern songs. The initiative probably had little success, since no further St Gallen songbook appeared until 1797. Much of the melodies derive from other collections, and Zollikofer's authorship of some of them, as well as of texts without documented attribution, is presumed but cannot be confirmed.

He also published the Wohlriechendes musicalisches Rauch-Werk (St Gallen, 1740), with three hundred hymns and twenty-two melodies for solo voice and continuo, and edited the last two editions of Heinrich Müller's Geistliche Seelen-Musik.

His legacy is today understood as evidence of attempts to renew congregational singing in eighteenth-century Swiss Protestantism, though its real reach is difficult to determine.