Historical Wiesn Sounds

The typical background noise contributes in particular to the folk festival atmosphere at the Oktoberfest. In between the loud sounds of the many rides, which mingle with the snatches of conversation among joyously drunken festival-goers, the sounds of the music bands also resound over the Theresienwiese again and again. The most interesting thing about the Oktoberfest is the musical mix on offer: brass bands mostly play music in the festival tents until late afternoon. In the evening, the mood is then cranked up by party bands. The City of Munich has stipulated that no "rousing music" may be played before 6 p.m. Since the beginning of the 1980s, the song played most often in the festival tents has been unofficially chosen as the so-called "Wiesn hit" every year.

Together with the archive for folk music and regional literature at the District of Upper Bavaria’s Zentrum für Volksmusik, Literatur und Popularmusik, bavarikon invites you on an acoustic journey through the historic Oktoberfest in this chapter of the exhibition. For this, eleven shellac recordings were selected from the archive’s extensive collection of historical audio documents. These acoustic treasures date from the period 1906 to 1938.

The historical recordings presented here offer an insight into the history of recording technology. The procedure for a sound recording was that the performers played or spoke into a sound funnel leading to a membrane. This was connected to a cutting stylus, which engraved the recording into a wax matrix. In the factory, this master was finally transferred to any number of shellac records – a huge advance, considering that the earliest sound recordings on wax cylinders in the late 19th century had to be sung one at a time. With regard to the fluctuating sound quality of the recordings: the older shellac records were still produced using acoustic-mechanical recording technology and are therefore much more superimposed with static noises than the records produced using electrical recording technology from the end of the 1920s onwards. Each record offers a unique listening experience: when playing the gramophone, steel needles were usually used which, due to their material hardness, caused damage to the delicate grooves containing the audio information. If a record, as a normal medium of its time, was played for regular listening, sound information was irretrievably lost.

Julia Misamer, Theresia Schusser

To chapter: Nostalgia in Pictures