Back in late April, Department of Folk Music Research and Ethnomusicology head Marko Kölbl explained to me the redundance of the department’s name: “When you trace each word etymologically, it’s folk/ethno, music/music, research/ology.”1 Yet despite this apparent superfluousness, continued Kölbl, the department has retained both names because each word has its own history, its own lineage—and keeping both words is an acknowledgement of such.
The Department of Folk Music Research was founded in 1965, and its initial decades saw it focus primarily on Austrian music with some small digressions into music of other groups. This was in the tradition of Volksmusikforschung, which had historically been concerned with the “peasant music of the nation” and was a product of romantic notions of the “folk” (Volk) as developed in the late 19th century. In such a research paradigm, minorities were typically ignored or even framed as potential “corrupters” of the “purity” of a national musical heritage.2 The IVE’s archival holdings from this period are accordingly reflective of a focus on the majority culture. Such field recordings were made primarily by the department’s founder and director Walter Deutsch and by Gerlinde Haid, who led the department later on. These recordings document a rich assortment of music from all over Austria and slightly beyond, as well (such as from the alpine regions of Italy and Slovenia), in numerous different varieties, instrumentations, styles, and dialects.
In the mid-1980s Ursula Hemetek, then writing her dissertation on the wedding music of the Burgenland Croatian community in Stinatz, came into contact with Deutsch—who offered valuable input on her research project, introducing a perspective that differed greatly from that of the Institute of Musicology at the University of Vienna, where Hemetek was studying. Deutsch’s expertise in wider regional styles was particularly valuable for understanding the relationship between the music of the minority group and the broader majority culture. After finishing her dissertation, Hemetek began to work at the Department of Folk Music Research, where she applied for and received the first third party-funded project at what was then the Hochschule für Musik und darstellende Kunst: “Traditionelle Musik ethnischer Gruppen in Österreich mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der musikalischen Akkulturation” [Traditional Music of Ethnic Groups in Austria with Particular Consideration of Musical Acculturation] (1990). This research project was the department’s first to explicitly address the music of minorities, focusing on Burgenland Croatian and Roma communities.
This area of research, along with its encouragement and development, was deeply tied to broader political and societal changes in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was an extremely dynamic time, with the end of the Iron Curtain, wars in Yugoslavia, changes in immigration, and the development of the European Union. It was also a period during which right-wing political forces in Austria were gaining in strength—as evidenced by the 1986 election of Kurt Waldheim as Federal President and the rise of Jörg Haider and the FPÖ. In response to the rise of the right, leftist political spaces experienced a degree of coalescence. An example is the NGO Initiative Minderheiten, founded in 1991 as a central platform for creating a wider minoritarian alliance that would push for minority rights and legal protections. Ursula Hemetek was a founding member of this NGO and views her research during this period as having been what we now call applied ethnomusicology. In other words, she used her research to advocate for the communities with whom she worked.
I mention this because I believe that Deutsch’s and (from 1994) department chair Gerlinde Haid’s sustained support for research on minority communities was tied to the broader political moment. Folk music of the majority culture had often been celebrated and exploited to serve nationalist and right-wing agendas. Deutsch and Haid were keenly aware of this fact, and supporting research into minority communities can be interpreted in part as a political response aimed at countering the ascent of right-wing politics. From 1990 to 1999, the department hosted six such projects. While Hemetek was the driving force behind these, it was unwavering support from Deutsch—and, later on, from Haid—that made such research possible in the first place.
The recordings from these projects, now held by the IVE’s archive, are exceptionally well documented and encompass over 800 hours of material that speak to a significant shift in the department’s character and research focus as a whole. These recordings are of interviews, concerts, workshops, and lectures, and they are often accompanied by rich visual materials such as concert programmes, invitations, photographs, and occasionally video footage. The groups represented are diverse, reflecting not only officially recognised Austrian Volksgruppen [ethnic groups] but also immigrants from Turkey and former Yugoslavia (so-called guest workers), refugees from the Balkan wars of the 1990s, and many other immigrant and religious minorities. This research material formed the basis of Hemetek’s 2001 habilitation thesis Mosaik der Klänge [Mosaic of Sounds].
This period saw Hemetek begin serving as an advisor for master’s theses, primarily those on subjects that fit into the music and minorities frame. “Dig where you stand!” (Grabe wo du stehst!) is what Walter Deutsch advised students looking for a research topic. But as the mdw became increasingly international, this charge came to mean something different, encouraging students to examine musical practices outside the frame of folk music research. Examples of such subjects include Japanese children’s songs in Vienna as well as Armenian, Greek, and Central African musics as practiced in Vienna—all themes that fit into the field of ethnomusicology as well as the then-emerging areas of music and minorities and urban ethnomusicology.
During the 1990s, the role of music and minorities research and ethnomusicology more broadly became central to the research, archiving, and teaching that took place at the department. Following Hemetek’s habilitation in ethnomusicology at the University of Vienna, it was clear that the department’s expertise had expanded beyond the frame of folk music research and into the field of ethnomusicology. And with the subsequent restructuring of the Hochschule into a university in 2002 and concurrent advocacy by then-department chair Gerlinde Haid, the Department of Folk Music Research was renamed the Department of Folk Music Research and Ethnomusicology. This act, while perhaps linguistically redundant, signalled a significant broadening of the department’s field of research. And over the 23 years since then, the department has demonstrated the extremely fruitful nature of this broadening, firmly establishing the IVE as a central node in European and worldwide ethnomusicology networks with particular expertise in music and minorities research.
