ABOUT THE BAMC (MMO) ONLINE MUSIC LIBRARY
The Milwaukee Mandolin Orchestra was established in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on December 6th of 1900. As stated in the Board of Directors minutes shown below, the organization was initially known as the Bonne Amie Musical Circle (BAMC).
Early members of the BAMC studied and purchased music as a collective. For a few months in 1900, they paid for a professional conductor. Soon they turned to their own founder, a Gas Company employee named Otto Strey as their Music Director.
The earliest picture of the Bonne Amie Musical Circle was taken fourteen years after the formation of the orchestra.
The next director of the Bonne Amies was Adolph Waech. He was another member of the group who joined in 1919, became the director by 1921 and led the group for nearly 40 years.
Adolph was a private music teacher and brought many of his students into the orchestras he led. Being the leader of mandolin orchestras and a music teacher was not all that he did to make money, Waech also sold musical instruments and Harley-Davidson motorcycles.
Among the musicians that Adolph Waech brought into the Circle was a player who would stay with the group for 68 years and lead the group on and off for a dozen years.
His name was Jake Skocir. He joined the group in 1938 and took time off from the Bonne Amies to be an aerial photographer for the US Army during WWII. Jake rejoined the ensemble after the war ended.
Twenty years after Adolph Waech left the BAMC, MMO members John Stropes and Paul Ruppa saw a risk in the group using antique sheet music at public performances. Stropes, who was teaching guitar at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music at the time, began the MMO’s library preservation process by photocopying regular repertoire pieces. That led to an end of damage to the MMO’s rare sheet music.
After John left the mandolin orchestra, Ruppa and a music librarian named Jane Koenig developed a database program designed specifically to catalog mandolin orchestra music.
As computer technology changed and became more affordable, Paul expanded the scope of the project. He converted the database to a spreadsheet and began scanning the BAMC’s sheet music, photographs and historic items that are now in the Milwaukee Mandolin Orchestra Archives.
For five years, from 2020 to 2025, MMO member Pat Schaller worked with Paul on the Library Preservation and Digitization Project. She scanned and catalogued much of the historic music that is now in the BAMC online Library.
Currently, further construction of the BAMC online library is being done in a collaboration of the MMO Archives team and a website developer at Northwoods Web Solutions in Shorewood, Wisconsin.
The music in our online library is within the range of public domain. One goal of the Milwaukee Mandolin Orchestra is to advance the objectives of the musicians who participated in the mandolin craze of the late 1800s and early 1900s. That goal was to share with the American public the musicality and importance of American mandolin music.