The Forschungsstelle für fränkische Volksmusik

The Forschungsstelle für fränkische Volksmusik (Research Centre for Franconian Folk Music) in Uffenheim (Neustadt a.d. Aisch-Bad Windsheim) was founded in 1981. The facility of the district of Central Franconia is supported by the districts of Upper Franconia and Lower Franconia. With extensive, constantly growing holdings in the fields of song, music and dance, it is a documentation and information centre for utility music in Franconia. The research centre is dedicated to the collecting and research of traditional folk music in Franconia.

Its research approach conceives the term "folk music" broadly and also includes parts of popular utility music. Influences from other regions and music genres are of course taken into account. Forms of musical activity, even when they are not necessarily musically motivated, have the priority. The focus lies not on the understanding of "folk music" as presented by changing ideologies, but rather on the lines of tradition of historical utility music. The aim is to collect and to preserve all kinds of popular sheet music according to tradition and not to anticipate a scientific evaluation of the material through a narrow definition of folk music.

The first head of the research unit, the teacher, musician and musicologist Dr Horst Steinmetz (1936-1994), was able to create extensive collections in the 1980s, which since then have been continuously expanded. The music archive contains tens of thousands exemplars of sheet music, of music books and of part books with dance, concert and popular music from around 1790 to the present day. Since the early twentieth century, thousands of shellac and vinyl records as well as of magnetic tapes have attested to Franconian music. A collection of instruments also documents the use of selected musical instruments in folk music. The publicly accessible special library contains c.30,000 volumes dedicated to the study of musical instruments, of songs and of dances as well as of relevant fields of musical history and of European ethnology.

• The objects of the "Forschungsstelle für fränkische Volksmusik" available in bavarikon

Collections owend by the "Forschungsstelle für fränkische Volksmusik" available in bavarikon

• Early Recordings of Traditional and Popular Dance and Light Music
  
• Manuscripts of Traditional and Popular Dance and Light Music from Franconia
  
• Pictorial documents of Traditional and Popular Dance and Light Music