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This article investigates the role played by the physician and violin maker Franz / Franjo / Francesco Kresnik in the discourse on violin making in the first half of the twentieth century. It also considers the effect of his presence at the "Bicentenario stradivariano," the 200th anniversary of the death of Antonio Stradivari in Cremona in 1937, during the "Ventennio"—the two decades of fascist rule. Art and music had at that time become central for the construction of national identity and the mobilization of the population by means of elaborate public events and media discourses. The Vienna-born Kresnik grew up in Fiume / Rijeka in present-day Croatia. After studying medicine in Vienna, Graz, and Innsbruck, he worked as a physician in Fiume / Rijeka and made violins in his spare time. He was always interested in the theory of violin making, and his visits to the collector Theodor Hämmerle in Vienna gave him the opportunity to examine several Cremonese violins from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His knowledge made him popular in fascist Cremona; the young Cremonese violin maker Carlo Schiavi traveled to Fiume in order to study with him. Schiavi later taught at the violin making school founded in 1938, a year after the "Bicentenario stradivariano." Stradivari became both a national figure and a reference point for Cremona’s reentry into the world market for new stringed instruments. On the basis of press and archival material, it will be shown how the multicultural Kresnik was received by the fascist press and to what extent the "Italian" violin making tradition can be understood as an invented one.

The abundancy of audio-visual sources surrounding us calls for well-argumented criteria of what to collect, and even more urgent: what to archive, what to study, and why? There are different methods in vogue in (e)valuating the cultural heritage of an object. This is also the case when we discuss specific types of musical heritage such as audio-visual recordings. Frequently used is the Australian Significance 2.0 method which scrutinizes historical value in addition to scientific, aesthetical and/or social values. In regard to audio-visual sources, the last two of these categories are not always easy to grasp. The „cultural biography“ of any particular relevant artifact is of the essence here. Who was the „owner“, who do we hear performing, from which performative tradition, for what reason was the source produced and disseminated, etc.? With these questions, we leave the material realm of the artefacts, and enter their immaterial world. This domain extends beyond the contours of emotional and/or social content; yet by posing such questions, we must remain aware of the fact that we may drift away from the original intentions of any specific reproduction technique, consequently incorporating them as part of our strategy for preservation and sourcing knowledge. In this contribution, basic concepts taken from the Viennese Telling Sounds project will be problematized and the fluidity between those concepts will be addressed, including those of materiality and canonisation, as well as the so-called „generational lost“ between primary recorded source and its reproduction(s).

This short contribution shows the relevance of audiovisual sources for the history of 20th century music. It traces the role played by the violinist Fritz Kreisler (1875–1962) in shaping the widespread cliché of the “Viennese sound” via an examination of audiovisual sources. The sources stored in different online archives or social media portals play a key role, but the traceability of a given agent is not guaranteed. For this reason, controlled vocabularies and a digital tool which enable the addition of new metadata to already existing sources should be developed in the near future. This would enable researchers to trace agents, such as institutions and artists, and to connect them with places, repertoires and cultural topoi.

In diesem Band wird die Verankerung der Musikgeschichte des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts in der Hochschuldidaktik umfassend dargestellt. Neben einer Analyse von Vorlesungsverzeichnissen deutschsprachiger Musikhochschulen und Universitäten präsentieren 21 internationale Beiträge die Situation in verschiedenen Ländern weltweit. Der Rezensionsteil fokussiert die Darstellung der Musikgeschichte der letzten 120 Jahre in gängigen allgemeinen Musikgeschichtsbüchern, die seit dem Jahr 2000 erschienen sind und als potentielle Literaturempfehlungen für Studierende in Frage kommen: Welche Geschichtsbilder werden vermittelt, welche Selektionen getroffen, welche Schwerpunkte sind gesetzt und was wird ausgespart? Mit Beiträgen von José L. Besada & Belén Pérez Castillo | David Blake | Megan Burslem & Cat Hope | María Paula Cannova | Carmen Chelaru, Florinela Popa & Elena Maria Șorban | Pablo Cuevas | Anna Dalos | Hong Ding | Michael Fjeldsøe | Juri Giannini | Thomas Glaser | Þorbjörg Daphne Hall | Julia Heimerdinger | Frank Hentschel | Andreas Holzer | Priscille Lachat-Sarette | Heekyung Lee | Iwona Lindstedt | Wolfgang Marx | Philippe Poisson | Ingrid Pustijanac | Matej Santi | Mike Searby | Assaf Shelleg | Danae Stefanou | Mareli Stolp | Oğuz Usman & Ozan Baysal | Elizaveta E. Willert