Fiddler, Allyson (2014) Performing Austria : protesting the musical nation. IASPM@Journal, 4 (1). pp. 5-20.
Allyson_Fiddler_Performing_Austria_.pdf - Published Version
Available under License Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike.
Download (131kB)
Abstract
The Austrian national elections of 1999 and the subsequent coalition government formation in 2000 sparked a wave of protests, both at home and abroad. This article examines a body of protest music (ranging from heavy metal, rock and punk to mock-choral and microtonal) that came about as a direct response to the turn in Austrian politics towards the extreme-right. In interrogating this protest music we see an important facet of identity-(de)construction in the state’s artistic self-expression and suggest a highly politicised counter-image to the usual, musically-inspired representations of Austria, the land more readily associated abroad with Mozart and Haydn, the Vienna boys’ choir, waltzing and yodelling. The music here is interrogated for the textual and musical strategies it deploys, and the spaces and icons of protest performance are probed for their efficacy and for the political interventions that they engender.