Westphalian Wandering Musicians

The West Palatine travelling music tradition (German: Westpfälzer Wandermusikantentum) were part of a tradition established by travelling musicians from a region of West Palatinate in Germany that is now called Musikantenland ("Musicians' Land"). The tradition started around 1830 and had its heyday between 1850 and the First World War. During this time, several thousand musicians travelled through the world and a livelihood for themselves and their families.

The West Palatinate has always been one of the poorest agricultural regions of Germany. In the 19th century, transport links to industrial centres did not exist and harvests, such as those of 1816/17 or 1831, were poor, regularly resulting in famine. The region was also badly impacted by the decline in mining on the Königsberg and Potzberg. For many families, the way out of this misery was either to emigrate or to work as migrant workers in the better-off regions of Europe. The economic boom in France during the reign of Napoleon, for example, attracted many Germans to southern France, where they found work in the ports. At the same time, migrant trades developed in various professions that sold home-made products abroad, such as brushes and brooms from Ramberg or shoes from the Pirmasens area.

The reasons why the inhabitants of the region that later became the Musikantenland, betweenKusel, Kaiserslautern, Rockenhausen and Meisenheim devoted themselves to the presentation of music are not exactly known. It is assumed that the significance of Electoral court in Mannheim as the music centre of Europe in the 18th century played an important role in this development. Miners who had been recruited from Saxony, Thuringia or the Alsace to extract the mineral resources at Königsberg and Potzberg and who played the folk music of their homeland in their free time, are also said to have contributed to the musicality of the inhabitants of the Musikantenland. The names of the first musicians to travel around, and who could thus be regarded as role models, are unknown, nor is it known when the first journeys were undertaken. Thecode civil introduced during the French period, which among other things brought commercial freedom, led to the fact that, from 1800 onwards, the secondary job title of "musician" is to be found more and more often.

...
Wikipedia