How is music functionalized to urban symbolic politics in the City of Vienna after 1945 until today? To address this question, we present a novel visualization for interactive analysis of multiple biographical timelines connected to Austrian music history. Instead of simply comparing the biographies of over 200 composers, musicians, and conductors in a linear fashion, we connect them with the urban processes that constituted the topos 'Music City Vienna', such as street-naming, awards, anniversaries, and exhibitions. The proposed approach intertwines people, events, and locations, allowing the interactive analysis of multi-modal data. Our main goal is to explore continuities and discontinuities, to find underlying trends and different narratives. Ultimately, this work is intended to stimulate the discussion on the challenges of performing visual analytics of historical data.
Vienna is associated with music more than any other
European city. The Austrian capital is not only related to
iconic composers, among others the First Viennese School
of the Classical period (Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus
Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven) and in the 20th century
to the Second Viennese School (Arnold Schönberg, Alban
Berg, Anton Webern), but it is also well known for the
Wiener Walzer and the Wiener Operette as well as for the
Wiener Opernball and the Wiener Philharmoniker. The
Austrian capital has a strong defined and longstanding
identity constructed by means of music. Therefore, Vienna
successfully claims since the 19th century to be named
Music City of Vienna
In the joint FWF-Peek-project “Interactive Music Mapping
Vienna: Exploring a city. 1945 up to the present day”
(IMMV) we explore how music acts in the urban context
of Vienna as a social identification instrument and how
music is functionalized to urban symbolic politics. IMMV
aims to unravel the narrative of the Music City of Vienna
topos in its entirety, by analyzing the basic types of music
utilization (city tourism, city politics, image creation)
In this interdisciplinary project we explore how
Visual Analytics (VA) approaches can be used to embed
large amounts of historical and musicological data in space
and time. VA is defined as the science of analytical
reasoning facilitated by interactive visual interfaces
Related work falls mainly into two categories: the
representation of temporal linearity, and of urban spatiality.
Visually comparing timelines and time-oriented data is
a well discussed topic within VA
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In this section we describe the data model that we employ in our research and visualization, give an overview of the objects we have along with examples illustrating their structure and connectivity, provide details on how we process the data to arrive to the final dataset that is used, and explain what sources were used to collect and structure the data.
Events or festivities play a central ontological role in our project. They comprise our main data object and relate all other objects. For this reason it is the only object type that can be connected to objects of other different types. Other entities have to be related to each other through an event. This approach simplifies the topology of our semantic network, and enforces scope. Events are considered to be public happenings in the City of Vienna, such as: festivals, celebrations, awards, and open-air concerts. Events are defined by a start and end date, a name, a description, a location, and connected to people that have contributed to it, other events, historic events, themes and sources. Historic Events are events of historical importance that are not directly related to music, but provide context, such as the end of World War II or the period of the Second Republic. Historic events are defined by a start and end date, a description, a list of references, relations to other historic events and a list of important dates that have occurred during the timespan of the historic event as well as a list of references and further literature.
Themes serve as descriptors for events and characterize them based on the topics they are associated with, such as “Musikalisierung der Topographie”, “Wienerlied”, or “Austropop”. They have a similar function to keywords and provide meta-information to augment our semantic topology. Themes are associated with a name, a list of references, a set of categories (theme types), and relationships to other themes.
Sources are the different primary and secondary sources that are gathered about an event. They are an encapsulation of multimedia data, including visual sources (photographs, posters, videos), audio sources (recordings, musical pieces), and textual sources (press articles, publications). Sources are comprised of a name, a list of references, along with media attachments, provenance data and copyright information, a description, and details about the creator(s), contributor(s), or publisher(s) along with relationships to other sources.
Locations describe particular places in the City of Vienna that are of musicological and historical relevance. Locations are defined by their current name along with a list of alternative names (reflecting the change over the course of history), location types (e.g., park, monument, official building, etc.), a list of references, geospatial data, and relationships to other locations.
People/Organizations constitute the set of people that have had a particular impact on the music history of the City of Vienna. We differentiate between people and organizations but use an abstract model for both types. People and organizations are comprised of the following properties: a name along with a list of alternative names, a list of references, a description, and relationships to other people or organizations. The main difference between the two is that people have roles and functions (e.g., composer, conductor, director, musician, etc.) associated with them, whereas organizations have a set of organization types (e.g., NGO, political party, cultural organisation, music band, etc.).
In the scope of this paper we chose to work with a subset of data, specifically focused on musicians exiled between 1938 and 1945 in order to find out which musicians the City of Vienna chose to recognize and commemorate after World War II. In addition we compare the timelines of the exiled musicians with over 200 musicians who were honored in the same time period by the City of Vienna. As a first step our selection criteria was to find all people related to the theme “Musikalisierung der Topographie” (translated from German: musicalization of the topography). In our data model people are not directly related to the aforementioned themes, but via the event that honors a musician an association is established. For this purpose we aggregate all people that are related to events belonging to the aforementioned theme, which initially resulted in many people that were not of relevance to our subject of research (e.g., curators of an exhibition, vocalists singing at an exhibition opening, politicians participating in an award ceremony). As a second step we proceeded to filter people based on their roles, since we are only interested in composers, musicians, and conductors. Finally, we separate those musicians, composers, and conductors that have been exiled, in order to compare them later with the rest of the people in the dataset.
We further processed the dataset and applied a categorization of the events. The events can belong to one of the following five categories: street-namings, anniversaries, exhibitions, awards/prizes, and memorials.
The historical sources used for this paper were either related to the biographies of the musicians or to the events. Regarding the biographies of the musicians, the quantitative collection of names and biographical data was based on existing databases (Lexikon verfolgter Musiker und Musikerinnen der NS-Zeit, University of Hamburg), secondary literature (mainly the publications of the Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance, DÖW), and online bibliographical lexica (Wikipedia, Wien Geschichte Wiki, Österreichisches Musiklexikon). We are aware that such sources often provide little more than a snapshot of a person’s life. Therefore, we refer to further relevant bibliography containing secondary sources, (auto-)biographies, or published correspondence.
Regarding the events, each type has different sources
of information that were used. Street-names and awards
were announced in the official gazette (Amtsblatt der
Stadt Wien) as well as in Wien Geschichte Wiki. Street
(re)namings during 1938-1945 and after 1945 were
published and visualized in a map by the aforementioned
commission of historians
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We used the prototype to explore the narrative of musicians
and exiles after 1945 and to examine its effectiveness in
conveying patterns and trends to our domain experts.
After the annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany
on 12 March 1938 approximately 130,000 people fled
into exile
The gap in the cultural life and institutions of Vienna (orchestras, music academies, universities, etc.) left by the exiled musicians, composers, and conductors could never be filled again, it is thus essential for the understanding of the Music City Vienna after 1945. But how to visualize this “brain drain” or gap of musicians, who did not return to Vienna after 1945? With the existing IMMV restriction on events, we were unable to make those visible, who were not present. Both the departure and the re-migration, were very personal for the exiled musician, seldom recognized by the public and not officially celebrated. As a consequence, we decided to treat street-namings, awards, anniversaries, and exhibitions as particular events. This allowed us to integrate the exiled musicians that were referenced by such events (even if they were not initially present), into our database and visualization.
Street-naming is a particularly powerful and
“timeless” instrument for perpetuating public memory. The
monopoly on the toponyms of a city is claimed by the
governing authorities. Therefore, street-naming is connected
to the ruling regime, which is using streets to inscribe its
ideologies and to assert symbolic power and ideological
hegemony
Awards are an official act of how the city and its mayor are honoring a person for her/his outstanding achievements. The most important and prestigious awards for musicians in Vienna were: awards, rings and medals (Ehrenring, Ehrenmedaille, Ehrenzeichen), the prize of the City of Vienna (Preis der Stadt Wien), and the honorary citizenship (Ehrenbürger and Bürger der Stadt Wien).
Anniversaries or commemoration days, especially after one or two centenaries of the musicians birth or death, were celebrated in Vienna from the 1920s until today. After 1945 the years of Johann Strauß Jr. (1975), Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1991, 2006), Joseph Haydn (2009), and Gustav Mahler (2010) were celebrated with extensive effort, including exhibitions, concerts, and conferences.
Exhibitions are a form of presenting a musician or a group of musicians to the public by using visual sources, handwritten notes, or other objects connected to the exhibitions’ topic. Most of the music related exhibitions took place either in several Viennese museums, libraries and archives or in the apartments and houses of Beethoven, Strauß, Mozart, Haydn, and Schubert administered by the Wien Museum. We gathered 110 exhibitions directly connected to Viennese musicians. The exhibitions Die Vertreibung des Geistigen aus Österreich(1982) at the University of Applied Arts and the series Musik des Aufbruchs (2004-2009) by the Jewish Museum directly refer to the topic of exiled musicians. The series Musik des Aufbruchs presented the life and work of Hans Gál, Egon Wellez, Franz Schrecker, Eric Zeiss, Erich Wolfgang and Julius Korngold and Hanns Eisler to the Viennese public.
Our visualization consists of different elements, as depicted in Figure 2. On the left side (A), a short menu allows filtering, searching for a specific person, and changing the ordering and grouping criteria of the data. On the right side (B), the list of all people can be seen, with the count of their associated events. This list is updated when a temporal selection is made and reflects only those people who have been active in the time span selected. It can also be used to show additional information about the selected individual, such as dates of birth, death, exile, and events. The core component, however, is the radial timeline (C) where the multiple timelines and associated events are displayed. The prototype also includes a timeline at the bottom (G), which visualizes the events as a dotplot that are color-coded according to their category and allows the user(s) to select and interact with individual items. We multiple design iterations with different component configurations, including a line-chart, and came to the realization that for the tasks of displaying, counting, and interacting with the individual events in the timeline the dotplot performed better as a solution. The prototype is made available to the general public and research communities 3 In the visualization time radiates outwards from the center, with the innermost circle being the birth of Vivaldi at 1678, and the outermost being the present date. The date of 1945 is highlighted (E) due to its importance in the scope of our subject, providing a key temporal reference for the visualization. A time period is mapped to a ring in this mode of viewing, and can be selected through clicking and dragging for filtering a specific time range. In 3https://immv-app.cvast.tuwien.ac.at/biographical
Every line radiating from the circle is the timeline of a person, with their life span highlighted in green with circles indicating birth and death. People who have been exiled also feature an extra dark green timeline that is superimposed over their life lines. This extra timeline indicates the time of exile, from the point of their departure from Austria to their return. It is important to note that estimating the exact duration of exile is difficult, as we seldom know the exact date, when the border was crossed. Most exiled people left Austria after the 12th of March 1938, some even during the authoritarian regime of Dollfuß-Schuschnigg. But when did the exile end? Was it on the 27th of April 1945, when the provisional government announced that the exiled were legally allowed to leave the host country (e.g., in the U. S. after spring 1946)? What if the exiled did return just for a short period of time? Such is the case of Erich Wolfgang Korngold, who came back in 1949 for two years and left again disappointed. In order to make the musicians decision not to return visible, we decided to visualize as ’exile’ the period from crossing the Austrian border until the person’s return. If a musician died without returning to Austria this period after 1945 was also marked as exile leading up to their death.
The focus of the visualization itself isn’t on the achievements of a person within their lifespan, but rather on their superimposition with posthumous events‘ that happened in the City of Vienna. For this purpose we chose to classify the events based on the following categories: street-namings, memorials, awards/prizes, anniversaries, and exhibitions. Due to the importance of these events we chose to highlight them with a different colors as to contrast them to the person’s life and draw attention to the patterns that they create when using certain ordering strategies, such as the date of homage (see Figure 4 C, D, E).
On the outer rim of the circle we encode the categorical information about each person (see Figure 2 F). In this specific use case we encode the profession (role) of the person. The prototype also allows the users to choose a different categorization and grouping of the dataset, including exiled musicians, those that were born after 1945, and those that died before 1938 as these two dates play an important role in our subject of research, with 1938 marking the starting point of exile and 1945 denoting the end of World War II. This element can be used to detect patterns in any sort of categorical attribute of the selected musicians, according to the grouping criteria used. Our color encoding reflects our efforts in balancing the comparison between timelines, events, and displaying categories.
At the bottom (see Figure 2 D) we have augmented the prototype with a timeline that contains only the events that are belonging to one of the five categories described in Section 3. The advantage of this timeline is that it easily shows temporal trends, such as in which decade the most street-namings or exhibitions happened. Furthermore, the timeline displays each event as a circle that is color-coded depending on its category as to remain consistent with the rest of the visualization. The circles allow the user to interact with individual events as well as count events belonging to the same category in a given time interval in a more straight-forward fashion compared to other visualization techniques. Both the radial and timeline visualizations are linked, meaning that mouseovering an event in the timeline will highlight the corresponding person’s lifeline and event in the radial part of the visualization and vice versa. During our discussions with the domain experts (historians and musicologists) we realized the need for analytic tools to interact with the data in detail. To support them we have added filtering features such as visualizing only exiled musicians (see Figure 3), and the selection of time rings, which also provide a list of the people that have been active during this period sorted by the amount of events they are related to. Furthermore, upon selecting any person the visualization reorients itself and highlights the selected person displaying her/his details in a side panel. This allows the users to also explore a person’s information and links to external resources, as well as, the details about the events of her/his homage by the City of Vienna. The visualization is developed to provide the domain experts with a tool to interact with the data in detail but also gain an overview and realize patterns or trends in how the City of Vienna recognized and commemorated it’s musicians. The intent of the visualization is to also provide casual users that are not acquainted with the musical, political, and cultural history of Vienna with a tool to explore and investigate. The goal is to provide both the domain experts and casual users with an interactive exploration environment to unravel the narrative of the Music City of Vienna.
Considering all possible combinations of representation
proposed in “Timelines Revisited”
One of the questions that this visualization was designed to answer is: which musicians came back after the exiled were officially allowed to return to Vienna? For this reason we decided to represent time differently than the aforementioned approaches. As we are interested in having a visualization where it is more obvious to notice certain trends and patterns occurring at different decades throughout Vienna’s history (with a special focus on the years after 1945).
Figure 4 show three different ways to order the timelines of people, and how they affect the visual subject. In each case, different trends stand out. In Figure 4A the biographical timelines are ordered by the birth date of the person and grouped by their role (composer, conductor, musician), which is the first event on its timeline, marked as a green circle. A clear spiral forms growing outward, which is complementary to that of Figure 4B, where timelines are ordered by death date and grouped by role. In this case, the spiral signifies a ceiling, the limit of one’s life. It is much easier to identify musicians that are alive in the second case, as all timelines with no death date will form a contiguous arc.
It is important to note that the data and individual timelines remain the same in all cases. By simply reordering and grouping them according to different criteria it is possible to obtain unique patterns that can tell us something about the underlying behavior of the data. This is used in Figures 4C, D, and E to explore the subject of when musicians are recognized and commemorated by the City of Vienna. Each person is ordered according to the date of homage given by the city, resulting in a spiral, that can be clearly seen, formed by the events in a contrasting color.
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By exploring the data using the proposed overview
visualizations certain interests and questions arise, leading to the
main question of how the City of Vienna chose to
remember it’s musicians by embedding them in the city’s
topography and collective memory
Furthermore, our database is also in a continuous process of expansion and refinement. As new sources come to light, they are added to the database and are automatically included in the visualization. This entails a cyclic process of research, where both new information and new means to visualize it brings us closer to developing our questions in a nonlinear fashion.
In the future of IMMV the presented visualization will be connected with a map of the City of Vienna. Thereby the spatial dimension of the data, the distribution of streets and events between the center and periphery of the city can be made immediately visible to the user. Zooming in place and time will enable the user to analyze a certain time period or location more detailed than the rest. The users have the possibility to create their own story depending on their research question. The possibility of comparing people by selecting multiple timelines and highlighting differences or commonalities is another direction for future work. Research questions regarding differences in periods of government could be answered by inspecting and comparing multiple timelines, and exploring different ways of encoding event data (moving from color coding to glyphs or shapes representing the category of the events). 6
We introduce a radial visualization supporting our domain experts in investigating the biographical data of musicians exiled from the Vienna along means to find out how and when they were honored or commemorated by the City of Vienna in terms of street-naming, exhibitions, awards, and anniversaries. In the interdisciplinary collaboration of the IMMV-team the visualization helped to validate and verify the correctness of the data in the database. Those exiled musicians, who neither received an award, nor had a street named after them fall through the cracks. Furthermore, the importance of a musician or the quality of their music cannot be implied from the fact that the City of Vienna chose to honor them or not. Other elements such as the concerts that happened in the Vienna Opera, the Musikverein or the Konzerthaus, as well as record sales figures or their popularity, were not part of our research. Furthermore, the research case exiled musicians, enabled us to concentrate on a small selection of persons, to see patterns, prove our hypotheses, and open new research questions and directions for future work. Focusing on temporally anchored events, will allow us to extract salient events or periods of time which can be further used to identify other elements in a person’s timeline. Further academic research also has to find traces of musicians in Vienna before 1938 in order to recognize continuities or discontinuities before and after the periods of exile.
A central statement of this project is the relativity of history and the plural forms of understanding and interpreting historical facts. We show in this paper how VA approaches can support experts in the domain of historical and musicological research to gain a chronological overview and to combine music with political history and the City of Vienna with its musicians. Historical research helped to define the events, people and to collect the information that was needed to perform research on the subject. The lack of potential interactions had to be tracked in advance as spatial and temporal data extracted from texts can be ambiguous or uncertain. By using visualization as a tool for data presentation we can recognize potential patterns, overlaps, and trends and offer new methods of research. Furthermore, the interactive elements of the visualization help the user to open additional information and sources about the selected event and person or about neighbouring events and people. This offers on the one hand a selective, subjective reading and interpretation, which can be on the other hand combined with combinatorial and interactive reading, offering new ways for interpreting historical data. The multimediality and complexity of historical data with various sources and media connected to events and biographies can be diversified and concretized via VA. This opens up new elements of narration, substituting the existing methods by a new and unique visual narrative. By remembering the exiled musicians via several commemorative events, the City of Vienna in a way re-emigrated those who left Vienna after March 1938. Today they are again a part of the city’s memory. Of course ambiguities and ambivalences of each fortune and the complexity of each biography cannot be simplified via visualization. Their collective displacement thus bequeathed a gap, which we tried to fill at least visually.
This work was conducted within the framework of the project "Interactive Music Mapping Vienna" (AR384-G24) funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and lead by Susana Zapke (Music and Art, University of the City of Vienna). We also thank our cooperation partner Vienna City Library for providing us important sources.
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