Vernacular culture and musical life in suburban Vienna, 1870-1914

This thesis argues for a recentring of musicological narratives on the subject of 'Vienna 1900' and offers four case studies that examine the transformation of vernacular culture alongside the expansion of the city from 1870 to the outbreak of the First World War. I propose an alternative set of paradigms for understanding Vienna during this period by exploring musical life in the suburbs and the impact of urban planning on street music and noise. The main themes covered in my four chapters are: a study of sound and noise abatement campaigns in relation to political theatre and social crisis, moving from the voices of working-class communities to the musical experimentation of suburban enclaves; an extended biography of the Schrammelmusik phenomenon, its position on the threshold of two musical worlds, and its urban-rural networks that contributed to a blurring of boundaries between mythology and reality; an analysis of Wienerlied texts which provide sharply etched commentaries on metropolitan life at the edge of liberal bourgeois experience and their role in tracing the shifting subjectivities of suburban dwellers; and a portrait of clocks and barrel organs that channels the familiar image of the organ grinder through the idea of fractured temporalities, as revealed in different approaches to time synchronisation and urban rhythms. Throughout my four chapters, I emphasise the materiality of music-making at street level and the social fabric of suburban musical establishments. I aim to reposition narratives that stress fin-de-siècle Vienna as a place apart by adopting an expanded conception of centre and periphery relationships which reaches beyond the city and borderlands of neighbouring empires. I argue that by offering a more pluralistic notion of the vernacular, refracted through a study of acoustic and temporal environments, one can begin to understand more fully how the changing identities of Vienna's population were intimately connected with the accelerated reconfiguration of the city towards the end of the nineteenth century.