At the Interface between Entertainment Music and Regimental Music

Encounters and Exchanges

The focus of the Dance Signals 2023 will be on the context in which music for entertainment was developed and mediated in the urban area of Vienna and its environs. We will examine how this type of music has evolved over the last 250 years, from Mozart to the Strauss dynasty to the present day, when there are also ironical and satirical elements to be detected.

This music has been performed both by private orchestras, such as the Strauss Orchestra during the seventy-three years of its existence, and by regimental bands. All of them played not just dance music and marches. They also brought to their listeners – free of charge or at affordable prices – ‘classical repertoire’ from orchestral music, opera and other genres, and of course also ‘dance music of a superior quality’.

It was not only the Strausses, but also many other bandmasters, including the Fahrbachs (father and son), Pfleger, Wacek and Ziehrer, in most cases with careers as conductors of both private orchestras and regimental bands, who left an enormous amount of knowledge – now lost – of the interpretation of both the ‘serious’ and ‘light’ music of their day, now mostly lost. Musical elements from the multicultural sources of their time can be detected in the compositions of the Strausses and their competitors – they sound exotic to audiences nowadays, as can be of course the way in which over the centuries classical, folk and military music have had an enriching influence on one another.

Whether cooperating or competing, private orchestras and regimental bands can look back on a long tradition of making an important contribution to popular culture, as well as to new music composed in the recent past and present that makes use of old material, also including elements taken from jazz and other musical styles.  

Within in the framework of a Vienna Strauss Colloquium, which will deal with this topic in both a musical and an artistic way, with a one-and-half-day symposium and a ‘musicological concert’, and conclude with a round-table conference, knowledge which has been lost will be rediscovered, discussed and connected to present-day musical practice. As always, all this will include samples of the music itself.

Norbert Rubey

English translation: Leigh Bailey

IMPRESSUM: Für den Inhalt verantwortlich: Wiener Institut für Strauss-Forschung (ZVR 799160879), Obmann: Prof. Dr. Eduard Strauss, www.johann-straus.at – Tanz-Signale, Walzer, op. 218, von Johann Strauss (Vater) – Layout: Barbara Ebeling, www.ebeling.at – Druck: digitaledruckwerkstatt – Illustration: Ausschnitt des renovierten Festsaals im Casino Zögernitz, © Haryot Singh.

Mit freundlicher Unterstützung der Wissenschafts- und Forschungsförderung der Stadt Wien, MA 7; in Kooperation mit (in alphabetischer Reihenfolge) dem Casino Zögernitz / House of Strauss, dem „Ensemble Wiener Charme“ der Gardemusik Wien, dem Mozarthaus Vienna, der Musik und Kunst Privatuniversität der Stadt Wien (MUK).