Ways of Playing

No other musical genre permeates society as deeply as brass music. Tyrol has more music bands than municipalities. They are pillars of the social fabric, foster identity, and shape the state's image beyond its borders. For many people in the region, making music in these ensembles is their first and most formative encounter with music.

On the occasion of the anniversary "100 Jahre Tiroler Blasmusikverband" (100 Years of the Tyrolean Brass Music Association), the exhibition "Spielweisen" asks when and why brass music attained this outstanding significance. This sharply focused look at its history is highly engaging. Its beginnings were modest, and what is today considered identity-forming and "typically Tyrolean" has roots that lead, among other places, to the Ottoman Empire and to Bohemia. The music collection of the Ferdinandeum holds a large number of sources on the early history and development of brass music, most of them still unpublished and fascinating, as well as a considerable number of instruments.

The exhibition also critically examines and questions the military roots of brass music, which remain constitutive to this day, as well as its close relationship with politics and its appropriation by totalitarian systems.

Of course, the founding of the brass music association is also addressed. The idea of uniting bands into associations originated in Tyrol, and the "Unterinntaler Musikbund" of 1903 is, in a sense, the ancestor of all such associations. A look at the present and future of the phenomenon "Tyrolean brass music" rounds off the show.