No other musical genre permeates society as much as brass band music. Tyrol has more brass bands than municipalities, they are pillars of the social fabric, create identity and help shape the external image of the province. Making music in these formations is the first and most formative encounter with music for many people in the province.
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Playing styles
What brass music can be Open today:
9 a.m. – 5 p.m. Uhr
9 a.m. – 5 p.m. Uhr
- 26.9.2025 - 6.7.2026
To mark the 100th anniversary of the Tyrolean Wind Music Association, the exhibition "Spielweisen" (Ways of Playing) poses the question of when and why wind music achieved this outstanding status. This in-depth look at its history is highly interesting: the beginnings were modest and what is now considered identity-forming and "typically Tyrolean" had roots that lead back to the Ottoman Empire and Bohemia, among other places. The Ferdinandeum's music collection contains a large number of exciting, mostly previously unpublished sources on the early history and development of wind music, as well as a large number of instruments.
The exhibition also critically examines and scrutinises the military roots of brass music, which are still constitutive today, as well as its close relationship to politics and its appropriation by totalitarian systems.
Of course, the origins of the wind music association are also discussed - the idea of merging bands into associations originated in Tyrol, with the "Unterinntaler Musikbund" in 1903 being the ancestor of all associations, so to speak. A look at the present and future of the "Tyrolean brass music" phenomenon rounds off the exhibition.