The Field of Folk Music prior to the Founding of the Department

The mdw’s Department of Folk Music Research and Ethnomusicology, which is Austria’s largest place of research and teaching in its field, has existed at the mdw for 60 years. It’s hence no wonder that the department’s history is commonly viewed as having begun in 1965. However, folk music as well as research on folk music had been present here long before. And just like in the initial decades following the department’s establishment, it had been the case beforehand that music-making, teaching, and research revolved around Austrian Alpine folk music—under political auspices, it should be noted, that changed over time.

The role played by research on, teaching about, and actual practice of folk music at our institution during the National Socialist era has so far received insufficient attention. Even prior to 1938, folk music and folk dance had been taught here—such as in the courses Jugend und Volksmusik [Youth and Folk Music] held by Oskar Fitz and Volkstanz [Folk Dance] held by Raimund Zoder. Upon the Nazis’ rise to power in Austria, both of them stopped teaching. Zoder was fired, though this important folk dance researcher’s name does reappear after 1945. Fitz, as a prominent member of the NSDAP, left the then-Reichshochschule in 1938 to help found the Musikschule der Stadt Wien [Music School of the City of Vienna]—an institution funded with expropriated assets from the Neues Wiener Konservatorium [New Vienna Conservatory], which had employed numerous Jewish teachers.

Up to 1938, training in folk music and folk dance had been within the purview of the State Academy’s Music Education Seminar. In that year, however, the training of school music teachers was transferred to the newly founded Musikschule der Stadt Wien mentioned above. This may also be why August 1938 witnessed a proposal at our institution to establish a department for the cultivation of folk music: “By whom?” reads a handwritten comment on this document—a question with no answer noted. The author of this proposal argued that “National Socialism seeks to return music to the people, seeks to lead broad circles back to active cultivation of music” (Figure 1). The institution, however, which was still known as the State Academy at that time, thought differently. Rector Franz Schütz stated that the Academy, “which, after all, exists mainly to provide training to concertising musicians”, was not responsible for the cultivation of folk music. Viktor Junk, as well, who headed the folk music association Ostmärkisches Volksliedunternehmen (pre-1938: Österreichisches Volkslied-Unternehmen, today: Österreichisches Volksliedwerk [Austrian Folk Song Society]), deemed the proposal to found a department “misguided”: Junk stated that “folk music, as an artistic expression of the community idea, can really only be cultivated within said community and not in classes at the State Academy” (Figure 2 and 3). Such argumentation, by the way, can still be heard today at numerous tertiary-level institutions of musical training around the world.

Under National Socialism, folk music and folk dance maintained a strong presence at the Reichshochschule even without their own department, a circumstance to which the following examples testify. From 1932 to 1946, Eugenie Cloeter taught the course Volksliedpflege [The Cultivation of Folk Songs]. From 1938 to 1945, Walter Goebl taught Volkstanz und Folklore [Folk Dance and Folklore] at the newly founded Department of Dance. From 1942 to 1945, Richard Wolfram’s Volksliedkunde und Brauchtumskunde [Studies in Folk Songs and Traditions] was part of the course offerings. Wolfram was a member of not only the NSDAP but also the Forschungsgemeinschaft Ahnenerbe, an SS research unit that spread the racist doctrine of Aryan supremacy. Even though 1945 saw Wolfram fired by the University of Vienna, where he had been a professor of German language and literature, he began teaching there again in 1954 and went on to become a full professor as well as a member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences—a typical example of the academic careers enjoyed by fascists of the National Socialist persuasion in post-war Austria. The specific content of Wolfram’s course must remain a matter of speculation, but his political orientation is clearly documented and permits the strong assumption that he instrumentalised folk music and folk traditions for political purposes.

Following the end of the National Socialist regime in 1945, Raimund Zoder returned to our institution—holding various contracts to teach courses entitled Brauchtum, Folklore und Volkslieder [Traditions, Folklore, and Folk Songs], Brauchtums- und Volkstumskunde [Studies in Tradition and Folklore], and Volksbräuche [Folk Customs] until 1953. That year saw Zoder replaced by Herbert Lager (who taught Brauchtums- und Volksliedkunde [Studies in Traditions and Folk Songs] and Musikfolklore [Musical Folklore]). Both Zoder and Lager are central figures in the history of Austrian folk music research.

Particularly relevant in the context of this field’s institutionalisation at our university was the creation of a Volkslied-Seminar [Folk Song Seminar]—with “seminar” here denoting an established subject area—in 1949 under the leadership of the pianist and composer Felix Petyrek. Petyrek urgently called for the founding of a department focussed on comparative folk song research. It was thus that in the overall understanding of the field, the nationalist approach gave way to a comparative perspective. Petyrek emphasised the relevance of “foreign and even exotic folk music” to the “musical developments of recent decades”, from which students had been cut off during the National Socialist era. His proposal quite generally reads like a plea to repair the damage entailed by the National Socialists’ impact on musical and artistic training. “Our youth stands perplexed before […] numerous artworks of recent years,” wrote Petyrek, who sought to introduce “especially music educators and composers” to comparative folk song research (Figure 4). The ideas presented by Petyrek do indeed seem visionary: he mentioned the creation of an audio archive as a “most urgent task” and emphasised his proposed department’s artistic and practical orientation, thereby anticipating several of the developments that would only gradually emerge at the department that was ultimately founded here in 1965.