Data for Research on Music in Austria

The research platform DEMOS offers a collection of source materials related to Austrian music history, strongly (yet not exclusively) dedicated to biographical data, and with a particular focus on musical life in Vienna in the 19th and the first half of the 20th century. It consists of several sub-databases which have been made publicly available since 2013 (some of them with documentation of the pertinant primary sources in PDF format). Originating from activities of the former Commission for Music Research, the project received continuous funding by the City of Vienna since 1979. Complementary to the indexing of (primarily Viennese) music and theatre journals, DEMOS now also includes resources such as Constant von Wurzbach’s Biographisches Lexikon des Kaiserthums Oesterreich (1856 ff), 19th-century teacher schematisms, and lists of musicology students on the basis of the University of Vienna’s “Nationalien”, among others. An expansion of the database is in the planning stage.

Special mention should be made of the complete inventory of the musical repertoire of the former Männergesangverein Schwechat via the sub-database “MGV Schwechat” (2014, funded by the province of Lower Austria). Based on the extensive collection of programmes and the association’s commemorative books, it was possible to compile an almost complete performance chronology for the period between 1851 and 1944, hence resulting in a representative overview of the development and focus of male singing in Austria. Among the numerous research projects of the Department of Musicology which benefit from DEMOS, the Austrian Encyclopedia of Music should be mentioned.