The "Rainer Family" - Tirolean national singers in the U.S.A.

The herein described project, entitled The "Rainer Family" - Tirolean national singers in the U.S.A., analyses a chapter of Austrian music history which has not ever been researched before: the national singer groups. The international success of these singing familiy groups in the nineteenth century has been negated nearly to the present day by music researchers as a qualitatively dubious wave of fashion and "inferior folklore". The national singers, however, not only exercised a huge influence in spreading the world famous Christmas carol "Silent Night"; their creation of what might be called "folkloric hits" has an impact still today. In recent American research on the development of popular music in that country, it is clear that the "Tyrolese Minstrels" have enjoyed a high degree of attention for a long time, particularly the most famous of them, the Rainer Family of Fügen in Ziller Valley. They celebrated enormous success in the U.S. and became an influential, exemplary force to all the American "singing families" of the era. American music ethnologists and music historians such as Gage Averill, Scott Gac, William J. Mahar, among others (Averill 2003, Gac 2007, Mahar 1999) even go so far as to claim that the success of "Ethnopop" (Widmaier 2006: p. 65) as rendered by the Rainer national singers set the trend and gave the direction to the development of early American popular music. Beyond that, the phenomenon of national singers in general has long been anchored in the collective American memory, not least because of the movie The Sound of Music. The project herein described is intended to lay the groundwork so that even from an international point of view, this scientifically important and to date unresearched alpine phenemenon of national singers (1) will be newly evaluated by national researchers and lead to further studies; and (2) will be made available and accessible to international researchers. The project will lean methodically on the new edition concept of the Historisch-kritischen Liederlexikon and place great value on the international utility of the study results. The monograph entitled Die Zillertaler Nationalsänger im 19. Jahrhundert by Martin Reiter (Reiter 1989) will serve as point of departure for the project, being the one and only comprehensive publication on the national singer phenomenon, and will be musicologically examined, analysed and extended. Following the depiction and analysis of the national singer phenomenon in its entirety, the story of the Rainer siblings can be completed in detail to illustrate the international success of national singers. A particular focal point will be (1) the evolving repertoire of the Rainers in the U.S.; and (2) the example the Rainers set for American popular music ensembles and styles. Together with a scientific publication, the research will also present a CD production to the general public. Ideally, this project will thus provoke an interaction between science, art and society, thereby making a contribution to cultural development.

The Rainer siblings of Fügen in the Ziller Valley formed the very first Tirolean group of singers who became an international success. In an era of surging nationalism and national consciousness, in which Tirol reaped benefit from its proferred image as a freedom-loving people, in which alpine fashions and Tirolean clothing enjoyed enormous popularity, these singers toured throughout Germany and Great Britain between 1823 and 1838 and were welcome guests at the Royal Court in London. Many of their Tirolean Songs which were subsequently taken over and adapted by later singing families from Tirol and today are considerated folk songs were initially published between 1827 and 1829 by Ignaz Moscheles in his collection entitled Tyrolese Melodies (in two languages, Tirolean dialect and an English translation/freely adapted version). Without doubt this group generated large audiences, attracting both a bourgeois and an aristocratic public, throughout the German- speaking and English-speaking regions of Europe. The so-called Rainer Family under the aegis of 18-year old group leader Ludwig Rainer who followed in the wake of the Rainer siblings were cast for this role by an American businessman who as impresario craved commercial success through this Tirolean choral ensemble. Their performance activity concentrated on the music-loving centers of the United States between 1839 and 1843, where they celebrated not only high-flying triumphs in their performances, but also left as a legacy an abiding influence on the development of popular music culture, particularly on the minstrel show genre and four-part barbershop-quartets. This project is devoted to research on the inception, growth and development of the song repertoire of the Rainer siblings and the Rainer Family between 1822 and 1843, coupled with the social, image-creating and artistic functions of the songs themselves. The numerous examples of Tirolean vs. English versions of the selfsame songs reveal the talent of earlier Tirolean national choral groups to make their music comprehensible and enjoyable to a public far beyond their local borders. The Rainer choral groups and their later descendants who performed in concerts far distant from Tirol nonetheless had deep and lasting impact on the image of Tirol across the world.