Do you know the traditional Austrian folk song “Edelweiss”? Of course you do. Here is what is interesting: It is not a traditional Austrian folk song. It is an original composition by Richard Rodgers with lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein, written in 1959 for the play and movie “The Sound of Music.”
It’s a remarkable case of reverse engineering a tradition. In my view, there is nothing wrong with that. It’s a tribute to compositional marketing genius, a specialty of American culture.
I just heard the song this past weekend. The crowd sang along. It was, of course, at an Oktoberfest event. Just when you think the world is falling apart, Oktoberfest comes along to remind us that not all is lost. Here in thousands of communities across America, you will find living examples of what Alexis de Tocqueville celebrated about this wonderful country. You will find gatherings of people who are seeking a better life and finding it within their own communities through the efforts of small business people and organizers from all walks of life.
Parking the car and strolling up a grassy hill, I could hear the sounds of the euphonium quartet playing the classic tunes that one associates with a brass German band. It’s a tradition that began in Bavaria in 1810 as a celebration of the Oct. 17 wedding of Crown Prince Ludwig (later King Ludwig I) of Bavaria and Princess Therese of Saxe-Hildburghausen.
The reason is forgotten today, of course, but the celebration sustains itself throughout the United States, revived annually as a celebration of German culture, real or imagined.
The small folk festival has been revived in the United States since the advent of local breweries, deployed as a marketing technique that also serves as a community-building event, complete with children running everywhere and dogs wandering the grounds looking for pretzels and popcorn.
The sounds of the music brought back a memory for me. It must have been when I was 10 that Dad, a lifelong musician and scholar, came to me and said we would be playing in a German band. He suited me up in silly clothing and a funny hat. I grabbed my trombone—I had already been playing for three years and was unusually proficient for my age—and off we went.
I cannot recall the details, even whether it was indoors or outdoors. I only recall sight reading unfamiliar songs from tiny music sheets and wondering what the heck I was doing and why. The music was easy, fun, and truly a blast to play, alongside some other players including a trumpet and tuba. I cannot recall precisely how many, but I do recall that we played the part.
None of us in this band had grown up with this culture, and none of us dressed this silly way in real life, but there we were. Everyone present was recreating and celebrating a culture that was not really theirs, but such events thrive in the United States, where everyone is from somewhere and generally happy to cheer on various national traditions in a land where the very idea of “tradition” is unusually fluid and in a constant state of recreation.
The persistence of Oktoberfest is particularly charming in a country that was in a major war with Germany twice in the 20th century. During the Great War, the Kaiser was demonized as a national enemy, and all things German were put down as awful and threatening. The war propaganda of World War II went far beyond raging against Hitler to demonize the whole of Germany and all that it stood for.
The hatred of the nation is forgotten today as these festivals spring up seemingly out of nowhere and the whole of Bavarian culture gets filtered into gigantic pretzels and beer steins, as children play and the sounds of the brass band fill the park grounds.
Thinking back on those little sheets of music that balanced so carefully on my music stand when I was a child trombonist, one has to marvel at the capacity of music to port traditions over many centuries, with no more than dots and lines on a page. We don’t usually think this way, but written music is a technology, an invention of the 11th century by a humble German monk named Guido d’Arezzo.
Before this time and for thousands of years, musical traditions were carried forth by oral tradition. A master of song or instruments taught others from one generation to the next. Two features of this system annoyed Guido. He disliked the imposing presence of the choirmaster himself, whom everyone feared but on whom everyone depended. Second, the choirmaster dragged monks out of prayer to learn hundreds and thousands of chants for liturgy. He thought they could use their time better doing other things.
So the monk set out to create a way to render sounds on vellum. He came up with four lines and marked one line with a clamp to signal either the note Do or the note Fa, below which the half step in the scale would land. The rest followed according to the various modes of the scale, which were also marked on the music. Using this technique, he wrote out the Psalms for the monks.
For his efforts, Guido was tossed out of the monastery by the elite choir teachers who saw printed music as a threat to their monopoly. But Guido persisted and brought his book to Church authorities including the Pope himself, who heartily approved of the innovation. An entire generation of musicians was enraptured by Guido’s alteration thereafter. Fast forward another 100 years and most of the liturgical chants of the faith had been written.
That innovation created new possibilities for music. No longer did one generation have to directly teach another but instead the music itself could be ported over time and space and recreated without ever having been heard. The unfolding of ever more complicated renderings of music continued century after century, from Bach to Beethoven to the Beatles and beyond.
I’ve noticed websites where composers will render any song into instrumental arrangements of your choosing, paying less than $100 for the score. Want Taylor Swift arranged for string quartet? It’s yours.
That day when I played as a kid, I directly benefited from the innovation of musical notation. I had never heard these songs before, but I was able to create them on the spot thanks to this printing and the system of notation invented 1,000 years before.
Music is key to preserving tradition. What do you think when you hear a Gregorian chant? You think of holy spaces and calming spirituality. What do you think when you hear a military march? You think of wartime heroics and patriotism. What about rap and pop? You think of an ebullient lifestyle. Love songs conjure up deep feelings of affection. It’s the same with movie soundtracks. We love them because they help us recall the movie itself.
All of these genres are made from the same building blocks, and they are ported from person to person, place to place, and generation to generation, using the very technology of notation invented 1,000 years ago, without which we would be reduced to oral traditions alone. With printed music, we can recreate traditions on the spot, which we do every Oktoberfest thanks in part to the music we hear.
The music, the beer, the sausage, the pretzels, the cheeses, the silly outfits, and the smiles on every face: It all goes together to form a beautiful community event. I find these particularly appealing because the joy is so contained within a small and humane scale, not a grand extravaganza but rather normal people seeking out community experiences on fall weekends, the very essence of what makes life in the United States so beautiful.
Oktoberfest kicks off a succession of holiday events from Halloween through New Year’s, nearly a third of the year marked by music, food, family, and community, the celebration of all that is wonderful about life itself. We have grown accustomed to seeking answers to national problems on a national level. The truth is that the answers to what we seek might be much closer to home, in the festivals and celebrations in our own communities right where we live.
And this is why so many joined in the song that day on the park grounds: “Blossom of snow, may you bloom and grow, bloom and grow forever. Edelweiss, Edelweiss, Bless my homeland forever.”
