Page - 474 - in WeXel oder Die Musik einer Landschaft - Das Geistliche Lied, Volume 1

474 Summary documents. A classification of their specific genres elucidates the origins of the multi-layered songs at the bier. Function, origin and geographical range of their hand-written or printed text as well as melodic transcriptions are added. The compilation offers a fund of almost unknown variations of well-known melodic types. Special attention is given to the melodic variations, which document an im- pressive musicality of the – mainly female – singers in the Wechsel region. Words and music of these songs were linked with pious tradition as well as religious acts. Losing their clerical ties, these songs stayed alive in the corpse-watch until around 1965, when the law obliged the deceased to be moved to the newly-constructed death-chapels. Yet echoes of these songs resounded in the voices of elder and younger singers until 2013. 192 songs of different categories (ballad, danse macabre song, evening or morning song, pilgrimage song, petitionary song, prayer song, songs to Holy Mary, Jesus or local Saints, etc.) are documented with all their local variations. Three compact disks (signal processing and mastering by the Phono- gramm Archiv, Austrian Academy of Sciences) complete the written compilation with 175 acoustic examples of 102 songs (1951 to 2013). Not all the recordings confer the atmosphere of the two-night corpse-watch at the bier. Johannes Leopold Mayer’s personal thoughts on “Irdische Lieder für’s ewige Leben gesungen ‘sub pietatis austriacae’ – Earthly songs for eternal life sung ‘sub pietatis austriacae’ ” and a melodic register with the songs’ incipits by Sabine Scheybal conclude this documentation. Isolde Hausner’s critical edition of the local dialect, the alphabetic list of song-titles and a detailed register give access to the traditions in the Styrian–Lower Austrian region of the Wechsel. Erika Sieder, Mariensee am Wechsel, Lower Austria and Vienna.