1. ESTETICKÝ BLOK 

I. PhDr. Peter Michalovič, CSc.: Interpretačné rámce interpretácie umeleckého diela

 Abstrakt: Príspevok s názvom Interpretácia: teórie umenia, paradigmy, rámce sa zaoberá vzťahom teórií umenia a interpretácií umenia. Kriticky preveruje, či je možné aplikovať Kuhnov koncept paradigmy na oblasť umenia a autor dospieva k záveru, že nie, okrem iného aj preto, že paradigma v prírodných vedách umožňuje predvídať nové javy, ale teória umenia nie. Aj preto sa zdá byť koncept teoretického rámca vhodnejší, a príspevok je vlastne pokusom zdôvodnenia, prečo je tento koncept produktívnejší a presnejší.

Abstract: The paper entitled Interpretation: Art Theories, Paradigms, Frameworks deals with the relationship between art theories and art interpretations. It critically examines whether Kuhn’s concept of paradigm can be applied to the field of art, and the author concludes that it cannot, among other reasons because paradigms in the natural sciences allow us to predict new phenomena, but theories of art do not. This is another reason why the concept of a theoretical framework seems more appropriate, and the paper is an attempt to justify why this concept is more productive and accurate.

II.  Mgr. Sára Jeleňová, doktorandka: Vznešené a problém interpretácie

Vznešené a problém interpretácie 

Príspevok sa zaoberá koncepciou vznešeného v estetike Immanuela Kanta a jej reinterpretáciou u Jeana-Françoisa Lyotarda. Kant chápe vznešené ako skúsenosť mysle, ktorá naráža na hranice vlastného poznania, zatiaľ čo Lyotard túto skúsenosť prenáša z prírody do oblasti umenia, ktoré sa snaží zobraziť nezobraziteľné. Umenie sa tak stáva priestorom otvorenosti, kde dielo nie je uzavretým významom, ale impulzom k interpretácii. 

The Sublime and the Problem of Interpretation

The presentation examines the concept of the sublime in the aesthetics of Immanuel Kant and its reinterpretation by Jean-François Lyotard. Kant understands the sublime as an experience of the mind confronting the limits of its own cognition, while Lyotard transfers this experience from nature to the realm of art, which seeks to represent the unrepresentable. Art thus becomes a space of openness, where the work is not a closed meaning but an impulse for interpretation.

III.  Mgr. Nina Podmanická, doktorandka: Problém interpretácie dramatických textov

Problém interpretácie dramatických textov

Referát sa venuje problematike interpretácie dramatických textov. Vychádza z predpokladu, že dráma je umelecký druh, ktorý sa realizuje v dvoch rovinách: ako literárne dielo určené na čítanie a ako predloha pre scénické uskutočnenie. Text vyzdvihuje význam inscenačného potenciálu ako interpretačného kľúča, otázku otvorenosti dramatického diela a ambivalentný vzťah medzi literárnou a javiskovou podobou drámy. Cieľom referátu je poukázať na napätie, ktoré do analýzy a interpretácie drámy vnáša nerozriešenosť tohto vzťahu.

Kľúčové slová: dramatický text, dráma, divadlo, inscenácia

The problem of interpreting dramatic texts

The paper focuses on the issue of interpreting dramatic texts. It starts from the assumption that drama is an artistic form that is realised on two levels: as a work of literature intended for reading and as a blueprint for scenic realisation. The paper points out the role of scenic potencial as a kind of interpretive key, as well as the question of openness of a work of drama and, lastly, the ambivalent relationship between the literary and the scenic form of drama. The aim of the paper is to bring attention to the tension that results from this ambivalence.

Key words: drama text, drama, theatre, scenic realisation

2. MUZIKOLOGICKÝ BLOK 

I.   Prof. Yvetta Kajanová, CSc.: Paradigmatická, syntagmická a pragmatická interpretácia hudobného diela

Paradigmatická, syntagmatická a pragmatická interpretácia hudobného diela

Tri úrovne interpretácie hudobného diela načrtávajú komplexný prístup k jeho interpretácii z pohľadu esteticko-filozofického, analytického, historického a kvantitatívneho. Pokým paradigmatická interpretácia hudobného diela je náročná, muzikológovia sa jej vyhýbajú, pretože pracuje s termínmi a metódami, ktoré sú pre hudbu atypické. Naopak, najrozpracovanejšia je syntagmatická interpretácia hudobného diela, kde teoretici operujú s historickými metódami (heuristika) a riemanovskou alebo schenkerovskou analýzou. Historické a analytické prístupy Huga Riemanna a Heinricha Schenkera však môžu byť obmedzujúce pri ich aplikácii na vysvetlenie fungovania súčasného diela. Pragmatické-štatistické údaje o hudobnom diele (napr. počet klikov na streamovacích platformách, predaj CD, rotácia v rádiu, kumulovaný finančný zisk, počet repríz hudobného diela v live koncertoch a pod.) sú dôležitou súčasťou jeho interpretácie.    

Paradigmatic, Syntagmatic, and Pragmatic Interpretation of a Musical Work

The three levels of interpretation of a musical work outline a comprehensive approach to its understanding from aesthetic-philosophical, analytical, historical, and quantitative perspectives. While the paradigmatic interpretation of a musical work is demanding, musicologists tend to avoid it because it employs terms and methods that are atypical for music. In contrast, the syntagmatic interpretation of a musical work is the most developed, as theorists operate with historical methods (heuristics) and Riemannian or Schenkerian analysis. However, the historical and analytical approaches of Hugo Riemann and Heinrich Schenker can be limiting when applied to explaining how a contemporary work functions. Pragmatic–statistical data about a musical work (for example, the number of clicks on streaming platforms, CD sales, radio rotation, cumulative financial profit, the number of live concert performances, etc.) form an important part of its interpretation.

II.  Mgr. Zuzana Petrovičová Bystrická, doktorandka: Etnomuzikologická interpretácia hudby z pohľadu Európana na perzskú hudbu

Etnomuzikologická interpretácia hudby z pohľadu Európana na perzskú hudbu

Etnomuzikologická interpretácia perzskej hudby z európskeho pohľadu vychádza z koncepcie Alana Merriama a Bruna Nettla, podľa ktorých je hudba kultúrne podmienený jav chápaný ako zvuk, správanie a systém významov. Analýza systému radif–dastgāh, jadra tradičnej perzskej hudby, ukazuje, že európske kategórie ako harmónia, tonalita či forma nemožno priamo aplikovať na odlišné hudobné kultúry. Z toho vyplýva potreba participatívneho počúvania, bimuzikality a modálno-motivickej analýzy, ktorá presnejšie vystihuje vnútornú logiku perzskej hudby. Takýto prístup umožňuje priblížiť sa významu hudby v jej pôvodnom kultúrnom kontexte a prekonať eurocentrické estetické hodnotenie, pričom etnomuzikológia sa ukazuje ako dialóg medzi kultúrami a spôsob porozumenia hudbe „iných“ prostredníctvom „kultúrnej empatie “. Téma zároveň odkrýva transkultúrny rozmer súčasnej hudby, v ktorej sa perzské a európske prvky prelínajú v nových hybridných formách.

Kľúčové slová: etnomuzikológia, perzská hudba, radif–dastgāh, interpretácia, transkultúrnosť

An Ethnomusicological Interpretation of Music: A European Perspective on Persian Music

The ethnomusicological interpretation of Persian music from a European perspective builds on the concepts of Alan Merriam and Bruno Nettl, who view music as a culturally conditioned phenomenon understood as sound, behavior, and a system of meanings. An analysis of the radif–dastgāh system, the core of traditional Persian music, shows that European analytical categories such as harmony, tonality, and form cannot be directly applied to other musical cultures. This reveals the need for participatory listening, bimusicality, and modal-motivical analysis, which more accurately captures the internal logic of Persian music. Such an approach makes it possible to approximate the meaning of music within its original cultural context and to overcome Eurocentric aesthetic judgment, with ethnomusicology emerging as a dialogue between cultures and a means of understanding the music of “others” through “cultural empathy.” The topic also highlights the transcultural dimension of contemporary music, in which Persian and European elements merge into new hybrid forms.

Keywords: ethnomusicology, Persian music, radif–dastgāh, interpretation, transculturality

III.  Mgr. Martin Kelemen, doktorand: Historická interpretácia sakrálnej hudby

Historická interpretácia sakrálnej hudby

Abstrakt:

Príspevok ponúka historicko-teologický pohľad na vývoj sakrálnej hudby a na to, ako sa menil jej duchovný, liturgický a estetický význam. Sleduje premenu od ranokresťanskej jednoty rituálu, slova a spevu cez stredoveké zjednotenie krásy a posvätnosti až po moderné rozvrstvenie medzi liturgickou a koncertnou praxou. Ukazuje, že „autenticita“ v historicky poučenej interpretácii nie je len štýlová, ale aj duchovná a kultúrna. Zdôrazňuje, že sakrálna hudba si zachováva identitu vtedy, keď sprostredkúva posvätné – či už v kostole, alebo na koncertnom pódiu.

 Historical interpretation of sacred music

 Abstract:

The paper offers a historical-theological perspective on the development of sacred music and the ways in which its spiritual, liturgical, and aesthetic meanings have evolved. It traces the shift from the early Christian unity of ritual, word, and chant through the medieval integration of beauty and the sacred to the modern divergence between liturgical and concert practice. It argues that “authenticity” in historically informed performance is not only stylistic but also spiritual and cultural. The paper emphasizes that sacred music retains its identity insofar as it mediates the sacred – whether in the church or in the concert hall.

IV.  Mgr. Emma Lásková, doktorandka: Historická interpretácia z pohľadu špekulatívnej-analytickej perspektívy

Historická interpretácia hudobnoteoretických diel

Hudobnoteoretické diela síce nezapisujú znejúcu hudbu, ale nám dotvárajú obraz o tom, ako hudba v minulosti znela. Popri problémoch interpretácie, hry na nástrojoch a iných, sa zaoberali aj ladením. Zo Slovenska sa tejto téme venoval Michal Buľovský. V štyroch traktátoch opísal svoj experimentálny nástroj riešiaci nedostatky dobového ladenia. Buľovský sa tým zaradil do skupiny vynálezcov, ktorí v období 16. – 18. storočia prišli s neobyčajnými návrhmi riešenia ladenia.

Historical interpretation of music theoretical treaties

Music theoretical treatises, while not notating audible music, help reconstruct the sonic character of music from the past. Alongside issues of interpretation, instrumental performance, and others, they addressed tuning. From Slovakia, Michal Buľovský engaged with this topic, describing in four treatises his experimental instrument that resolved defects in contemporary tuning. Thereby, he joined inventors of the 16th–18th centuries who proposed extraordinary tuning solutions.

3. EDUKAČNO-PSYCHOLOGICKÝ BLOK

I.  Doc. Marie Fulková, PhD.: Funkcie a limity interpretácie umeleckého diela v galerijnej edukácií a terapii
Katedra výtvarné výchovy, PedF UK, Praha / Department of Art Education, PedF UK, Prague

Funkcie a limity interpretácie umeleckého diela v galerijnej edukácií a terapii

Příspěvek se zabývá širším diskursivním polem výtvarné výchovy a na jeho pozadí se soustřeďujeme na funkce a praktiky interpretace uměleckého díla v galerijní edukaci. Zde rozlišujeme kognitivistické a populární terapeutické přístupy, které náležejí k odlišným interpretačním doménám a příslušným diskursivním formacím (edukace, škola, galerie, muzeum umění, psychologie, psychoterapie). Příspěvek rovněž prezentuje institucionální strategie a zájmy různých typů interpretací kulturních artefaktů (v prostředí edukace, rozvoje vizuální a kulturní gramotnosti, současného umění), přičemž čerpáme z výzkumných zjištění probíhajícího projektu (Horizon EU The Cultural Literacies’ Value in Europe/CLiViE).

Functions and limits of interpretation of a work of art in gallery education and therapy

The paper deals with the wider discursive field of art education, and against its background we focus on the functions and practices of interpreting artworks in gallery education. Here we distinguish between cognitivist and popular therapeutic approaches, which belong to different interpretive domains and respective discursive formations (education, school, gallery, art museum, psychology, psychotherapy). The paper also presents the institutional strategies and interests of different types of interpretations of cultural artifacts (in the context of education, the development of visual and cultural literacy and contemporary art), drawing on the research findings of the ongoing project (Horizon EU The Cultural Literacies’ Value in Europe/CLiViE).

II.  Mgr. Bianka Katreníková, doktorandka: Kolaboratívne výtvarné projekty v kontexte kritického myslenia a emocionálnej inteligencie

Kolaboratívne výtvarné projekty v kontexte kritického myslenia a emocionálnej inteligencie

Príspevok sa zameriava na objasnenie skúmania potenciálu kolaboratívnych výtvarných projektov pri rozvoji kritického myslenia a emocionálnej inteligencie žiakov mladšieho školského veku v dizertačnej práci. Teoreticky vychádza z koncepcií viacerých autorov venujúcich sa pojmom kolaboratívne učenie, emocionálna inteligencia a kritické myslenie. Výskum sa realizuje formou kombinovaného dizajnu pričom využíva participatívne pozorovanie ako hlavnú metódu. Projekty s environmentálnou a literárnou tematikou umožňujú sledovať prejavy spolupráce, reflexie a tvorivého riešenia problémov. Analýza dát identifikuje vzorce v emocionálnom prežívaní, argumentácii a spoločnej tvorbe žiakov. Očakávaným prínosom je objasnenie uplatnenia kolaboratívnych výtvarných projektov vo vyučovaní a ich prínos pri rozvoji kritického myslenia a emocionálnej inteligencie. 

Collaborative art projects in the context of critical thinking and emotional intelligence

This paper focuses on clarifying the potential of collaborative art projects in developing critical thinking and emotional intelligence in younger school-age students in a dissertation. Theoretically, it is based on the concepts of several authors dealing with the concepts of collaborative learning, emotional intelligence, and critical thinking. The research is conducted using a combined design, with participatory observation as the main method. Projects with environmental and literary themes allow for the observation of cooperation, reflection, and creative problem solving. Data analysis identifies patterns in students’ emotional experiences, arguments, and joint creations. The expected benefit is to clarify the application of collaborative art projects in teaching and their contribution to the development of critical thinking and emotional intelligence.

III. Mgr. et Mgr. Eva S. Kotláriková, doktorandka: Vidieť vidieť vidieť – umelecká vs. kurátorská interpretácia výtvarných diel s edukačným zámerom

Vidieť, vidieť a vidieť! Umelecká vs kurátorská interpretácia výtvarných diel s edukačným zámerom

Mgr. et Mgr. Eva S. Kotláriková, Pedagogická fakulta Univerzity Komenského, Katedra umenia a kultúry 

Príspevok predstavuje prípadovú štúdiu dizertačnej práce skúmajúcej kurátorské a pedagogické stratégie vo výstavách pracujúcich s kultúrnym dedičstvom. Analyzuje expozíciu „Vidieť, vidieť a vidieť!“ v SNG na Zvolenskom zámku ako model integrácie umeleckej tvorby, kurátorskej praxe a galerijnej pedagogiky. Zameriava sa na prácu s artefaktmi, interpretačné postupy a formy interaktivity zapájajúcej návštevníka fyzicky, kognitívne aj digitálne.

Artistic vs. Curatorial Interpretation of Works of Visual Art with an Educational Aim

The paper presents a dissertation case study examining curatorial and pedagogical strategies employed in exhibitions engaging with cultural heritage. It analyses the exhibition “See, See and See!” at the Slovak National Gallery in Zvolen Castle as a model that integrates artistic creation, curatorial practice, and gallery pedagogy. The study focuses on the treatment of artefacts, interpretive approaches, and forms of interactivity that engage visitors on physical, cognitive, and digital levels.

IV.  Mgr. art. Sonia Gallo, doktorandka: Fenomén vplyvu animovaného filmu na vátvarný prejav študentov stredných umeleckých škôl?

Fenomén vplyvu animovaného filmu na výtvarný prejav študentov stredných škôl umeleckého priemyslu

Príspevok otvára tému vplyvu animovaného filmu na výtvarný prejav študentov stredných škôl umeleckého priemyslu. Animácia ako autonómne médium formuje vizuálny diskurz založený na štylizácii, expresii a symbolike. Pravidelný kontakt so súčasnou animáciou môže ovplyvňovať vizuálne a tematické preferencie študentov. Teoretické východiská vychádzajú zo semiologického a kognitívneho prístupu a zohľadňujú aktuálny slovenský kontext. Príspevok poukazuje aj na pedagogický potenciál animácie pri rozvoji tvorivosti a umeleckej identity mladých autorov.

How Animated Film Shapes the Artistic Expression of Secondary School Students of Applied Arts

The paper introduces the topic of the influence of animated film on the artistic expression of students at secondary schools of applied arts. Animation, as an autonomous medium, shapes a visual discourse grounded in stylization, expression, and symbolism. Regular exposure to contemporary animation may influence students’ visual and thematic preferences. The theoretical framework is informed by semiotic and cognitive approaches while taking into account the current Slovak context. The paper also highlights the pedagogical potential of animation in fostering creativity and the artistic identity of young creators.

4. VÝTVARNO-VIZUÁULNY BLOK 

I.  Ing. Mgr. Patrícia Ballx, doktorandka: Umelec – tlačiar – recipient. Limity a výzvy interpretácie starej grafiky.

Umelec – tlačiar – recipient
Limity a výzvy interperetácie starej grafiky

Príspevok skúma grafickú tvorbu konca 18. storočia, ktorá prepája umeleckú, remeselnú, obchodnú i spoločenskú dimenziu a nemožno ju vnímať izolovane. Príkladom bol ateliér a obchod Franza Assnera vo Viedni, ktorý slúžili ako modelový priestor, kde sa tieto aspekty stretávali a grafika sa stala médiom komunikácie, ktoré spája remeselnú precíznosť, intelektuálny obsah a spoločenský dosah.

Artist – Printer – Recipient
Limits and Challenges of Interpreting Old Prints

The study investigates late eighteenth-century graphic production, a field in which artistic, technical, commercial, and social dimensions are inherently intertwined and thus cannot be examined in isolation. A representative case is the workshop and shop of Franz Assner in Vienna, which functioned as a model site where these facets converged and where prints operated as a communicative medium uniting technical precision, intellectual content, and broader social impact.

II.  Mgr. Kristína Mišechová, doktorandka: Vývtarná interpretácia literatúry v nižnej ilustrácií okolo roku 2000

Výtvarná interpretácia literatúry v knižnej ilustrácii okolo roku 2000

Príspevok sa zameriava na teoretické uchopenie knižnej ilustrácie ako vizuálneho prvku v mnohovrstevných vzťahoch s literárnym textom. Predkladá prehľad klasifikačných modelov a rámcovo opisuje sémantické, formálne a funkčné kategórie ilustrácie. Zároveň poukazuje na jej dynamickú povahu a premenlivý význam v kontexte vývojových tendencií literatúry, výtvarného jazyka a recepcie.

Artistic Interpretation of Literature in Book Illustration around the Year 2000

The paper examines the theoretical conceptualization of book illustration as a visual element in multilayered relation to the literary text. It provides an overview of key classification models and outlines the main semantic, formal, and functional categories of illustration. It highlights the dynamic nature of illustration and its changing role in the evolving contexts of literature, visual language, and reception.

5. BLOK MANAGEMENTU KULTÚRY

I. Mgr. Sabina Rýzková, PhD., doktorandka: Marketingová podpora literárneho diela

Marketingová podpora literárneho diela predstavuje komplexný proces, ktorý prepája umeleckú hodnotu s ekonomickou realitou trhu. Úspešnosť literárnej tvorby závisí nielen od obsahovej kvality, ale aj od efektívneho riadenia nákladov, vhodnej cenotvorby a strategicky zvolenej komunikácie s čitateľmi. Celkovým cieľom marketingovej podpory je posilniť kultúrnu hodnotu diela a zároveň zabezpečiť jeho ekonomickú udržateľnosť v konkurenčnom prostredí literárnej produkcie.

Kľúčové slová: tvorba literárneho diela, marketingová podpora, komunikačný mix, cenotvorba

Marketing support for a literary work represents a complex process that integrates its artistic value with the economic realities of the market. The success of literary production depends not only on the quality of its content, but also on effective cost management, appropriate pricing strategies, and strategically designed communication with readers. The overall aim of marketing support is to enhance the cultural value of the work while ensuring its economic sustainability within a competitive literary environment.

Keywords: Creation of a literary work, Marketing support, Communication mix, Pricing strategy

II.  Ing. Bibiána Konáriková Mackovčínová, doktorandka: Projektová podpora v manažmente kultúry

Projektová podpora sa v posledných desaťročiach stala kľúčovým nástrojom riadenia a financovania kultúrnych inštitúcií, pričom zásadne ovplyvňuje aj proces tvorby, sprostredkovania a interpretácie umeleckých diel. Predstavuje mechanizmus, prostredníctvom ktorého sa prepája kultúrna politika, verejné financovanie a profesionálny manažment, čím vytvára podmienky pre vznik a recepciu umeleckých hodnôt. Tento článok analyzuje systém projektovej podpory z európskej a slovenskej perspektívy, so zameraním na jeho procesné, organizačné a hodnotové aspekty a ich vplyv na umeleckú prax. Cieľom štúdie je identifikovať, ako sa európske rámce (UNESCO, OECD, Rada Európy a Európska únia) premietajú do slovenského modelu kultúrnej podpory a ako ovplyvňujú stratégie, interpretáciu a udržateľnosť v manažmente kultúry. Štúdia zároveň poukazuje na úlohu manažéra kultúry a kultúrno-osvetového pracovníka ako kľúčového aktéra projektovej podpory, ktorý spája systémové riadenie s umeleckou interpretáciou a spoločenským dopadom kultúry.

Kľúčové slová: projektová podpora, kultúrna politika, manažment kultúry, udržateľnosť

Project support in cultural management

Project-based support has become a key instrument for managing and financing cultural institutions in recent decades, fundamentally shaping the processes of creation, mediation, and interpretation of artistic works. It represents a mechanism through which cultural policy, public funding, and professional management are interconnected, thereby creating conditions for the emergence and reception of artistic values. This article analyzes the system of project support from both European and Slovak perspectives, focusing on its procedural, organizational, and value-related aspects and their impact on artistic practice. The aim of the study is to identify how European frameworks (UNESCO, OECD, the Council of Europe, and the European Union) are reflected in the Slovak model of cultural support, and how they influence strategies, interpretation, and sustainability in cultural management. The study also highlights the role of the cultural manager and cultural-educational professional as key actors in project support, linking systemic management with artistic interpretation and the societal impact of culture.

Key words: project support, cultural policy, cultural management, sustainability

History, Politics, and Serial Aesthetics in the 1950s and 60s

In very general terms, we can say that the catastrophe of World War II, and the crimes commited by fascist states, made many desire a new beginning after the war. In Germany, in particular, there was an effort to overcomFe the cultural propaganda of the Nazi regime. And because Schoenberg had been persecuted by the Nazis, his 12-tone method became more widely appealing after the war: it was free of the stench of collaboration, it was thought to symbolize resistance, and it offered an alternative to tonal harmony.[1]

The method became even more appealing in democratic Western Europe when the Soviet’s Division of Propaganda denounced “formalism” in 1948, which included 12-tone music, and promoted socialist realism: many artists “saw a clear analogy between the repressions of the Third Reich and those of Stalin.”[2] Recent scholarship has shown that serial music was actually practiced in many parts of the Eastern bloc and even supported by some socialist governments.[3] But Western observers at the time saw direct parallels between communism and National Socialism because both condemned or prohibited particular techniques and figures in modernist music.[4] Western governments responded to this by increasing their support for modernist art. The Darmstadt New Music Courses, for example, which were founded in 1946 to help promote music banned by the Nazi regime, became a center for the promotion of music prohibited in the East and a beacon for compositional approaches such as serialism, which was thought to represent the values of Western democracies.[5]

Thus we have one very broad account of the historical and political contexts of postwar serialism in Europe: serial music’s perceived antagonism to the aesthetic agendas of authoritarian regimes, and its new sound possibilities, made it sing like a voice of freedom. The composers themselves were, no doubt, influenced by this image, but they also created an additional justification for the method through a shared philosophy of history. It can be found in the writings of Dieter Schnebel, György Ligeti, Gottfried Michael Koenig, Luigi Nono, and Karlheinz Stockhausen, for example, and goes as follows: over the course of the 19^th century increasing chromaticism was said to lead to the freely atonal works of Schoenberg; Schoenberg was then said to be required to develop the 12-tone method as a means to control excessive expression and provide formal rules for fully chromatic composition; but the 12-tone method was seen to have its own limitations, according to postwar composers, and these were said to be solved by the “total” serial approach of the early 1950s, in which the serial method was applied to multiple elements of music besides pitch.[6]

There is no objective truth to this philosophy of history, of course. It is merely a story—a “fairy tale,” as Carl Dahlhaus put it[7]—that seeks to justify the aesthetic preferences of the time. It reduces something of terrifying complexity and scale—in this case, history—to easily understandable proportions. It is anthropocentric and domineering in the extreme. But it is remarkable because so many composers in the postwar period, despite their vastly different backgrounds and varied approaches to serialism, shared this unsophisticated—and Germanocentric—view of history. They also extended it to include post-serial developments of the later 1950s and 60s, many of which were understood as attempts to grasp and control new kinds of musical material. Specific examples were given by Koenig, among others, in an article on the topic of musical material: therein he stated that at the beginning of serialism, the concept of material applied to “pitches, durations, intensities, and timbres. Then other [things] became pressing: groups, which consisted of many tones; spatially conceived sound events; new musical instruments or new ways of playing old instruments; liberties given to performers; musical action.”[8]

Koenig’s statement describes an ever-expanding idea of musical material. It was a view shared by many composers in the period, who saw it as objectively determined rather than subjectively chosen. Fifty years later, as we will see, Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf’s idea of a Second Modernity tries to continue this process of expansion by including new materials in the same philosophy of history. And Mahnkopf is guided by the same constellation of ideas we find in postwar serialism: the concept of musical material, the goal-directed philosophy of history, and the absolutist, ethically tinged claim that one approach to composition is somehow demanded by history or more legitimate. Both the serialists and Mahnkopf were led to this constellation of ideas by the music philosophy of Theodor W. Adorno.

The Influence of Adorno

Adorno returned to Europe from exile abroad in 1949 and quickly made an impact through the publication of his Philosophie der neuen Musik, his teaching at the Darmstadt Summer Courses, his radio lectures, and his presence in the German Feuilleton. In fact, it would be hard to find someone who had more influence on the philosophical discussions around 12-tone and serial music than Adorno.[9] His book Philosophie der neuen Musik presented his ideas about Schoenberg’s 12-tone method, among other things, and it became so influential that there are stories of non-German composers learning German in order to read it.[10] In the book, we find that particular constellation of ideas I mentioned: the concept of musical material, the philosophy of history, and the ethical pretense that makes aesthetic preferences seem like objective imperatives.

Adorno claimed that Schoenberg’s 12-tone method was “truly the fate of music […] The rules are not arbitrarily conceived. They are configurations of the historical obligation in material.”[11] The reason why Adorno saw the 12-tone method as “truly the fate of music” is the same reason why he claimed “the rules are not arbitrarily conceived”: Schoenberg did not so much choose to compose in this way, Adorno argued, but was required to compose in this way. Adorno believed that this music resulted from a historical process in which musical expression developed through the breakdown of formal conventions, increasing chromaticism, and increasing dissonance to atonality, as well as through the use of the variation principle in composers like Beethoven, Wagner, and Brahms. These developments were said to be consolidated in Schoenberg’s 12-tone method and subjected to rational control.[12] But we should, of course, critique this supposedly “objective” history: Schoenberg was not required to compose 12-tone music, he merely choseto do so. Also, Adorno’s historical narrative favors practices from a specific period of Austro-German music while ignoring other periods and other cultures—and ignoring also Schoenberg’s own reasons for inventing the 12-tone method.

A few years after Philosophie der neuen Musik appeared, Adorno wrote an essay about postwar serial music titled “Das Altern der Neuen Musik.” Tellingly, the title replaced the lower-case adjective of his book on “neue” Musik with an upper-case proper noun “Neue Musik,” and it criticized the postwar practice for falling behind the “world spirit” and forgetting the imperatives of “New Music.” Those imperatives, for Adorno, were: a critical resistance to the existing order; the preservation of subjective freedom; and the expression of the individual before the abyss of the administered world.[13] All worthwhile undertakings, it would seem. In another essay on the topic, Adorno stated the ideal more succinctly: “the goal of New Music must be the complete liberation of the human subject.”[14]

But from where did this ideal come? Oddly enough, liberated subjectivity and New Music both have their roots in the same place for Adorno: in Beethoven. In writings on New Music, Adorno asserted that musical works “gain in importance in proportion to the resoluteness with which they give shape to their own negation,” and this “is the greatness of Beethoven’s last works.”[15] Paradoxically, if not to say absurdly, a genuinely New Music should follow Beethoven’s lead, according to Adorno. To protest the falsely affirmative gestures of tonality—the closed forms and consonant resolutions—new music should “generate connections from within itself.”[16] The ideal of new music is an ideal of organicism. Or so Adorno would have it.

Adorno’s emphasis on Beethoven may have been, in part, an effort to rehabilitate the image of German culture after the Nazi period. But the connection between Beethoven and the idea subjective freedom had been around for a while. Busoni, for example, believed that “with Beethoven, the human element first came to the fore as the primary argument of musical art.” And Scott Burnham has shown that “[this] perception is an eminently common one.”[17] Burnham argued further that “Beethoven [became] the hero of Western music, ‘The Man Who Freed Music’.” Indeed, in a 1961 recording of the Beethoven symphonies conducted by René Leibowitz, which Adorno reviewed and praised, the original liner notes proclaim this in bold capital letters: “BEETHOVEN: THE MAN WHO SET MUSC FREE.”[18]This would be the place to turn to Mahnkopf’s ideas about a Second Modernity.

Mahnkopf’s Second Modernity

The contemporary German composer Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf is also a prolific writer about the theory and aesthetics of contemporary music—including a movement that he considers himself a part of, which he calls the “Second Modernity.” One of his many essays on the topic begins by naming the art music of modernity as “New Music” (capitalizing the adjective “New,” as Adorno did), and then asserts, “New Music should be understood not so much as a result of the Schoenbergian ‘revolution’ (atonality), but rather as a consequence of something that began with Beethoven: the compositional self-determination of the musical subject out of freedom.” Like Adorno, Mahnkopf traces the roots of New Music back to Beethoven—the man who set music free and showed us the way, it would seem, to the art music of modernity, the New Music. Mahnkopf also adds the philosophy of history and concept of material to his thoery and thereby completes the constellation of ideas I mentioned earlier. He claims that Beethoven’s late works “set off the process of musical modernization extending to serialism via the central stages of Wagner and atonality, and thus unleashed an unstoppable dynamic of escalation that meant both technical ‘progress’ and artistic autonomy […] Postwar serialism, in its claims not only to total control over the material, but also to a seemingly ahistorical production of musical meaning from a tabula rasa, represented a sort of summit, needle’s eye, crisis, and turning point in one.”[19]

Just as in the writings of postwar serialists, music history is reduced by Mahnkopf to the following stages of progress: increasing chromaticism led to Schoenberg’s freely atonal music; this free atonality was then rationally ordered by means of the 12-tone method; finally, the twelve-tone method asserted its “total control over the material” by extending serial ordering to other parameters in postwar serialism. It is extraordinary that someone could hold this view of history at any time, but especially in the 21^st century. And it is asserted as an absolute truth; there seems to be no recognition that it is a fairy-tale that reflects a particular time, place, and culture.

Mahnkopf’s Second Modernity aims to continue this philosophy of history, and it does so by utilizing new material: “as far as the material is concerned, a progressive conception of material has a decisive role once again: microtonality, complex rhythms, nested formal constructions, poly-works, live electronics, computer assisted composition, the whole spectrum of pitch and noise, hybrid playing techniques.”[20] This list reads like an updated version of Koenig’s account of the material explored by serial and post-serial composers in the 1950s and 60s, quoted earlier.[21] And like postwar composers, Mahnkopf believes that material should be used to generate form: “material and form should form a cohesive unity once more.”[22] Unlike postmodernism which, he claims, avoided this problem, Second Modernity returns to the question of “how material and form can be connected internally […]. That was and still is the great question of modern music as a whole.”[23]

But is this really the “great question of modern music as a whole”? It was indeed the question that vexed Boulez at the time he wrote “Schoenberg is Dead” and composed his Structure Ia, both of which had a great impact on serial aesthetics. And it recalls Stockhausen’s early writings on serialism—in particular, his obsession with “Widerspruchslosigkeit” [a state of being without contradiction or opposition] and his call for an “agreement of the laws of form with the conditions of the material.”[24] It is, in short, an ideal of organicism. But that does not make it “the great question of modern music as a whole.” It seems, rather, more like an attempt to reassert the aesthetics values of serialism from the 1950s and 60s.

Conclusions: Returning to the Question of “Why?”

Why would the ideas that shaped Western European modernist music aesthetics of the 1950s and 60s still seem valuable to some composers today? We can understand why a young postwar generation wanted to create a new world after fascism and war. But what purpose does the idea of progress serve today? Others have attempted answers to this question. One answer claims that “the concept of progress [is] a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future.”[25] This idea almost seems worthy of Adorno, but it comes from popular culture. Adorno, for his part, would have pointed to the progressive domination of nature that accompanies the process of enlightenment, which he and his research partner Max Horkheimer argued can be traced back to the first chapters of Genesis.[26]

The first chapters of Genesis take us far beyond the topic of my short essay on Mahnkopf in all but one respect: anthropocentrism. Whereas now, just as in the postwar period, the belief in progress provides a sense of security in an unknowable universe or an undesirable world (because it provides human explanations about this universe and world), and whereas we can recognize the accomplishments brought by the efforts toward progress, we should not overlook the fact that the idea of progress seems rooted in a misguided, erroneous, and unwarranted anthropocentrism. Thus, anthropocentrism is the true object of investigation: its role in prompting humans to claim to know how history unfolds, or to author historical narratives that favor particular aesthetic preferences, has not been properly studied. But that is a task for a different, and much longer, essay than this one.

Bibliography:

Adorno, Theodor W.: “Classicism, Romanticism, New Music,” Sound Figures, trans. Rodney Livingstone, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 106-22.

Adorno, Theodor W.: “Musik und Neue Musik,” in Quasi una fantasia, Gesammelte Schriften 16, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1978, 476-92.

Adorno, Theodor W.: Philosophie der neuen Musik, in Gesammelte Schriften 12, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 65-8.

Herbert, Frank: Dune, New York: Ace, 1965.

Jay, Martin: The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute for Social Research, 2^nd ed., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

Kapp, Reinhard: “Shades of the Double’s Original: Rene Leibowitz’s Dispute with Boulez,” Tempo 165 (1988): 2-26.

Koenig, Gottfried Michael: “Das musikalische Material – Ein Begriff und seine Fragwürdigkeit,” Ästhetische Praxis: Texte zur Musik, Saarbrücken: Pfau, 1992, vol. 2, 142-52.

Kovács, Inge: “Die Ferienkurse als Schauplatz der Ost-West Konfrontation,” Im Zenit der Moderne: Die Internationalen Ferienkurse für neue Musik Darmstadt 1946-1966, eds. Gianmario Borio and Hermann Danuser, vol. 1, 116-39, Freiburg: Rombach, 1997.

Kovács, Inge: “Gründung und Zielsetzung,” Im Zenit der Moderne: Die Internationalen Ferienkurse für neue Musik Darmstadt 1946-1966, eds. Gianmario Borio and Hermann Danuser, vol. 1, 65-75, Freiburg: Rombach, 1997.

Lindstedt, Iwona: “Serialism in Central and Eastern Europe,” and Peter Schmelz, “Serialism in the USSR,” in The Cambridge Companion to Serialism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023, 241-65.

Mahnkopf, Claus-Steffen: “Musical Modernity from Classical Modernity up to the Second Modernity—Provisional Considerations,” trans. Wieland Hoban, Search Journal for New Music and Culture 4 (Spring 2009): 1-13.

Schubert, Giselher: “Adorno’s Auseinandersetzung mit der Zwölgtontechnik Schönbergs,” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 46 (1989), 254.

Stockhausen, Karlheinz: “Arbeitsbericht 1952/53: Orientierung,” Texte 1: Zur elektronischen und instrumentalen Musik, ed. Dieter Schnebel, Cologne: DuMont, 1963, 32-8.

Stockhausen, Karlheinz: “Situation des Handwerks (Kriterien der punktuellen Musik)”, Texte 1: Zur elektronischen und instrumentalen Musik, ed. Dieter Schnebel, Cologne: DuMont, 1963, 17-23.

Zagorski, Marcus: “‘Nach dem Weltuntergang’: Adorno’s Engagement with Postwar Music,” Journal of Musicology 22/4 (2005), 680-701.

Zagorski, Marcus: “Hearing Beethoven, Truth, and ‘New Music’,” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 44/1 (2013): 49-56.

Zagorski, Marcus: “The Aesthetics of Serialism,” The Cambridge Companion to Serialism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023, 20-36.

[1] Reinhard Kapp, “Shades of the Double’s Original: Rene Leibowitz’s Dispute with Boulez,” Tempo 165 (1988): 2-26, here 13.

[2] Inge Kovács, “Die Ferienkurse als Schauplatz der Ost-West Konfrontation,” Im Zenit der Moderne: Die Internationalen Ferienkurse für neue Musik Darmstadt 1946-1966, eds. Gianmario Borio and Hermann Danuser, vol. 1, 116-39, Freiburg: Rombach, 1997, here 117. Translations are my own unless noted otherwise.

[3] See Iwona Lindstedt, “Serialism in Central and Eastern Europe,” and Peter Schmelz, “Serialism in the USSR,” in The Cambridge Companion to Serialism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023, 241-65.

[4] See Kovács, “Ost-West Konfrontation.”

[5] Inge Kovács, “Gründung und Zielsetzung,” Im Zenit der Moderne: Die Internationalen Ferienkurse für neue Musik Darmstadt 1946-1966, eds. Gianmario Borio and Hermann Danuser, vol. 1, 65-75, Freiburg: Rombach, 1997.

[6] For a detaild examination of this philosophy of history see Marcus Zagorski, “Material and History in the Aesthetics of ‘serielle Musik’,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 134/2, 271-317.

[7] Marcus Zagorski, “Carl Dahlhaus and the Aesthetics of the Experiment,” Acta Musicologica 87/2 (2015), 249-64.

[8] Gottfried Michael Koenig, “Das musikalische Material – Ein Begriff und seine Fragwürdigkeit,” Ästhetische Praxis: Texte zur Musik, Saarbrücken: Pfau, 1992, vol. 2, 142-52, here 149. See also Marcus Zagorski, Adorno and the Aesthetics of Postwar Serial Music, Hofheim: Wolke, 2020, 65.

[9] A reception history is presented in Marcus Zagorski, “‘Nach dem Weltuntergang’: Adorno’s Engagement with Postwar Music,” Journal of Musicology 22/4 (2005), 680-701.

[10] Giselher Schubert, “Adorno’s Auseinandersetzung mit der Zwölgtontechnik Schönbergs,” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 46 (1989), 254.

[11] Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophie der neuen Musik, in Gesammelte Schriften 12, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 65-8.

[12] A more detailed analysis can be found in Marcus Zagorski, “The Aesthetics of Serialism,” The Cambridge Companion to Serialism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023, 20-36.

[13] See Theodor W. Adorno, “Musik und Neue Musik,” in Quasi una fantasia, Gesammelte Schriften 16, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1978, 476-92; see also Zagorski, Adorno, 53.

[14] Theodor W. Adorno, “Classicism, Romanticism, New Music,” Sound Figures, trans. Rodney Livingstone, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 106-22, here 121.

[15] For a detailed examination, see Marcus Zagorski, “Hearing Beethoven, Truth, and ‘New Music’,” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 44/1 (2013): 49-56.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf, “Musical Modernity from Classical Modernity up to the Second Modernity—Provisional Considerations,” trans. Wieland Hoban, Search Journal for New Music and Culture 4 (Spring 2009): 1-13.

[20] Ibid.

[21] See note 8, above.

[22] Mahnkopf, “Provisional Considerations,” 12.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Karlheinz Stockhausen, “Arbeitsbericht 1952/53: Orientierung,” Texte 1: Zur elektronischen und instrumentalen Musik, ed. Dieter Schnebel, Cologne: DuMont, 1963, 32-8, here 32. Stockhausen’s comments about “Widerspruchslosigkeit” appear in Karlheinz Stockhausen, “Situation des Handwerks (Kriterien der punktuellen Musik)”, Texte 1: Zur elektronischen und instrumentalen Musik, ed. Dieter Schnebel, Cologne: DuMont, 1963, 17-23, here 18-21.

[25] Frank Herbert, Dune, New York: Ace, 1965, 521.

[26] See Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute for Social Research, 2^nd ed., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

This article was made possible by a grant from VEGA (No.1/0016/23).

After graduating from Harvard, Boyd moved to England to open a branch of the Elektra label, focused on artists like the Butterfield Blues Band or new bands emerging on the West Coast. At the same time, he became one of the hidden architects of the swinging London scene. At the age of 21 he brought Muddy Waters to Britain, produced Pink Floyd’s first single, and together with photographer and activist John “Hoppy” Hopkins opened the underground club UFO in December 1966. While Hopkins served 6 months for smoking weed, Boyd held back: “I cheated, I never did much. My goal was to become an éminence grise, and in doing so I denied one of the myths of the 60s: I was there, and I remember it.”

At various stages of his career, alongside Pink Floyd, he “discovered” Eric Clapton, Stevie Winwood, and the later members of the Swedish pop icon Abba. Although he had dozens of opportunities to do so, he never used his skills as a manager for any of the later megastars. His priority was the creative process, working as a producer in the studio and shaping the final recording. In this field, he contributed to dozens of unique albums of the British folk rock era with artists such as Fairport Convention, Nick Drake, and the Incredible String Band. In 1973, he produced a documentary film about Jimi Hendrix, and as a co-producer he participated in Amazing Grace, a film depicting Aretha Franklin when she recorded her eponymous album in 1972. However, due to technical and legal disputes, the documentary was not released to the public until 2018.

When the rock scene was losing its creative momentum in the 1980s, he turned his attention to Eastern Europe. For the global audiences, he discovered artists such as Muzsikás and Márta Sebestyén from Hungary and the Bulgarian clarinetist Ivo Papasov. Less is known about how his role in introducing the Bulgarian female choir Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares, a “discovery” attributed to the Swiss organist Marcel Cellier and the British label 4AD 20 years later. “I’ll never forget the first time I heard them: thirty-five women screaming in unearthly, almost dissonant harmonies,” remembers Boyd. “The traditional custom of pairs of women singing ballads – with one holding a drone while the other chants the melody and often approaches to within a quarter tone – can make hairs rise on your arms, but in a good way. A bel canto voice would make such notes unlistenable, the vibrato muddying what in Bulgaria is pure and clear… These harmonic collisions, simultaneously horrifying and thrilling, are at the heart of arrangements by Filip Koutev and make it impossible to use classically trained voices.”

Fusion versus authenticity

Boyd works as a producer in a market economy environment, but unlike routine professionals who construct musically lame fusions, he has different priorities. The music should hold together as an organic unit. He claimed that the “sexiest rhythms come from live playing, not from drum machines.”

He explained his production aesthetic in detail at the 2004 Womex conference. “All over the ‘developed’ world, arts centres and clubs fill their schedules with Cubans, Brazilians, Touaregs, Mongolians, Mexicans, Javanese and Nigerians. But the plans that their producers are making here at Womex are absurd. How can you spend hard money on unbearably complicated fusions that will never pay for themselves?” He illustrated his point with his experience from Cuba, where he had travelled to record years before the Buena Vista project, with a suitcase stuffed with banknotes, a total of $20,000, to pay the musicians on the spot. “We worked in a wrecked studio that had once been built for live recordings. The musicians played brilliantly, and we recorded four songs on the first day. But our Cuban flutist, fascinated by Western sound technology, saw it differently: ‘This sounds like a demo. When are we going to make a real recording? When are we going to do all these other overdubs?’” Boyd explained that the recording he is doing will impress American audiences just with its natural charm. Later it appeared in two films and earned the incredulous flutist $80,000 in royalties alone. Boyd had similar priorities regarding African music.

“Years ago, I had a fascinating conversation with Youssou N’Dour… who wanted me to produce his next record. I suggested that we record music similar to what he plays for the domestic market in Senegal, and he accused me of racism. He said I wanted him to be a ‘museum exhibit’. I said that all I was doing was predicting what would sell best and make him the most money.”

On the other hand, in the chapter dedicated to Congo, Boyd elaborates on the concept of successful fusions. “To my ears, most fusion projects get it backwards, laying down a culture-neutral backing track for the ‘exotic’ musicians to play over (the egregious One Giant Leap being the most glaring example) rather than letting them set the beat…. My ideal fusions, of course, would have been for Celia Cruz and Bill Withers to sing a few numbers with Rochereau’s band at the Rumble in the Jungle.”

As mentioned before, it was Boyd who was the first to release music from Hungary and the Balkans on his Hannibal label. These were not academic field recordings, but authentic live music for general audiences, like the group Muzsikás or clarinetist Ivo Papasov. Boyd mapped Eastern Europe even before the fall of the Iron Curtain, when Soviet-style folk mega-ensemble groups still ruled.

Stalin’s concept of folklore

“The pioneer of the Soviet model of gigantic ensembles was Igor Moiseyev. Originally a choreographer, he worked for the Bolshoi Theatre,” explains Boyd in the article How Stalin created World Music, published in the British newspaper Independent in 2003. “He hated authentic folk music; in his opinion it was low, amateurish and inferior, which motivated him to create ‘high’ folklore. Everything he did was choreographed. It was the masses, not the individual, who dominated in his ensembles. At that time, the Soviet Union was undergoing forced collectivization and drastic agricultural reforms, which were associated with the destruction of national identity, peasant life and culture, and the liquidation of independent farmers, known as kulaks. After the war, the Eastern Bloc countries formed their own governments according to the Soviet model. Each had its own minister of culture and Moiseyev showed them how to build a folklore mega-ensemble.” When, after perestroika, Russian state television featured a program documenting the folk traditions, the editor in charge received a threatening phone call from the ninety-year-old Moiseyev: “Such music does not exist, you will not broadcast it.”

While Czech and Slovak folklore was decimated by imposed arrangements and Soviet-style choreography, the Hungarians did not like it. “They had a huge state folklore ensemble too, but in the late 1960s, after the bloody suppression of the anti-communist uprising, there was a certain relaxation. Instead of artificial and fake choreography, they were learning how to dance the traditional way. The band Muzsikás was created as a spontaneous reaction to the official ensembles. I remember one beautiful moment, sometime in 1987. In Budapest, I made friends with a local singer, and we went to a Muzsikás concert in a tiny university theatre on the other side of the river. It was a fantastic show. First, modern dance, accompanied by a Hungarian jazz band, which I usually don’t like, but this was very special. In the second half, the same dancers who had been experimenting before came on stage dressed as peasants and performed a country wedding dance. And then came the finale. When the song started, my companion flinched. She was obviously taken aback and whispered to me what the song was about. ‘It’s called Eddig Vendég, The Uninvited Guest: you drank all the wine, you broke the plates, you trampled on the ladies’ clothes, you ruined the party, you got drunk and now you refuse to leave. Bartender – throw him out.’ A folk song about a typical bar situation that could happen anywhere. But singing it as a climax was brave. Many expected the musicians’ boldness to be punished, because the uninvited guest, the Soviet Army, did not leave Hungary and other Eastern European countries until several years later.”

At the same time, a good eight years before the Balkan brass bands were introduced to Western audiences by Emir Kusturica’s film Underground, Boyd discovered a virtuoso Bulgarian clarinetist Ivo Papasov. “We went a little way outside Sofia, and there was a band on stage in the cultural center. And it was absolutely terrible. Something like a school orchestra playing folk tunes arranged by Blood Sweat and Tears. ‘But we have another interesting soloist here,’ claimed my interpreter, whom I had hired privately, outside the official structures. In the next song, Ivo appeared on stage out of nowhere and cut out an amazing clarinet solo. He was a guest with the band. We went behind the corner, I asked him: ‘Do you only play with this band?’ And he replied: ‘Nooooo, I have my own band. We are playing at a wedding this weekend.’ I rented a car, bought a map, looked up the village on the map, drove from Sofia for about three hours. There was a big tent on the edge of the village. I had the best wedding of my life there.”

World music as a concept

Joe Boyd was one of 20 participants in a meeting in London’s Russian Empress pub in 1987, where the marketing term “world music” was born, as well as the subsequent campaign that established it as a shelf in music stores and thus consolidated the position of dozens of independent labels and agencies. Within six months, world music sections were introduced in stores from Paris to Tokyo, and the new term took hold on radio, concert programming and in the columns of music magazines. Yes, the label has been attacked many times as artificial “pigeonholing”, the most famous being David Byrne’s article “I Hate World Music” published in the New York Times in 1999. “But how many tickets would he have sold for the tour of his favourite Peruvian singer Susana Baca without the media and festival infrastructure that we started at that time?” asks Boyd. And he explains the broader context: “I’d immersed my youthful self in the holy trinity of blues, jazz and rock ’n’roll, then added British folk to the mix when I moved to London and embarked on my career as a producer.” During the next decades, the initial spark gradually vanished. “Many music buffs were seeking refuge from years of assault by disco, punk, prog rock and glam rock, styles that repudiated much of what had drawn us to music in the first place: virtuosity, spontaneity, roots. Popular forms from faraway cultures, particularly African ones, seemed to offer a chance to regain some of what had been lost.”

During the golden era, when people still bought CDs and the proceeds could finance specialized projects, Boyd recorded a number of unique albums: the Songhai series with the Andalusian nuevo-flamenco group Ketama and the Malian kora virtuoso Toumani Diabate, or the album Kulanjan with Taj Mahal, Diabate and other guests from Mali, which President Obama once called his favourite album.

I was happy enough to meet Boyd regularly at Womex and similar events. I remember our first meeting in 1991, when I asked him if he was interested in any musician from Czechoslovakia. At first, he diplomatically replied that he loved Janáček, but nothing from the contemporary scene caught his interest. “Central European music is not very exciting,” he explained. “The interesting things happen on the borders of the continent – where there is Moorish influence, in Spain, or Turkish influence, in the Balkans.” This is also documented by his production, including the aforementioned group Ketama, or the Bulgarian clarinetist Ivo Papasov. It was not until a few years later that in our conversation he mentioned a then unknown singer, Marta Töpferová, born in Czechoslovakia, but based in New York City, and exploring Latin music. “She sounds completely different from most singers from Latin America. Her work reminds me more of bossa nova, that quiet Brazilian style, whereas singers from Spanish-speaking countries tend to be loud, pathetic, and show off.”

Hours of Exciting Reading

Boyd’s book’s title, And the Roots of Rhythm Remain, is a well-chosen borrowing from Paul Simon’s song, Under African Skies. Inspired by South Africa, it was part of his album Graceland (1986), a pop culture masterpiece that served as a “gateway” to the era of world music. The title also paraphrases Boyd’s credo. Rhythm, created by live musicians with real instruments and not machines, is the vital force that attracts Western listeners to the music of non-European cultures. The book has 9 chapters, mapping broader geographical and historical units: South Africa, Cuba and the USA, Jamaica, India with Roma music and flamenco, Brazil, Argentina and tango, Eastern Europe and Russia, Africa. It is the most comprehensive study on the subject to date, with an impressive 930 pages including the index, and Boyd worked on it for 17 years.

Boyd presents facts as arguments, adding his own opinions gently as a rare spice. Fascinating stories that connect seemingly distant cultural circles is another strong point. Right in the opening chapter from South Africa: “Mahlathini’s harsh voice was a fantastic instrument, eclipsing the sandpaper standards set by Tom Waits or Satchmo himself with its power and musicality.” At the same time, he provokes the reader when he shows how culturally different the place the music comes from is. What does Mahlathini buy with his first real earnings after returning from a 1988 European tour? Well, a cow. Another example, from the most freezing years of the Cold War: Willis Conover, who presented jazz on the “subversive” Voice of America station, visited Leningrad as a tourist. Local fans identified him, pulled him onto the stage at a concert, and when Conover agreed to introduce the next band, the entire hall recognized him by his voice.

According to Boyd, the era of world music began in 1853 in London, when Charles Dickens wrote a scathing review of a South African choir, and ended with the invention of autotune and drum machines. Although the book devotes 240 pages to Africa, Burna Boy and the entire army of global rappers are absent. “I’ve heard many tracks made in the modern way that are enjoyable but they don’t enter my head from the same door. You don’t feel the breathing of the rhythm section and to me, it doesn’t have the same life.”

Along with the history and changes in musical styles, he describes the development of colonialism, the effect of international pressures, commercial interests and unpredictable changes in mass taste in general. In this context, music works as a weapon against repression, a pillar of cultural identity, a tool questioning social taboos. Boyd’s style deserves special mention. Like a good musician, he avoids unnecessary notes. As a master of abbreviation, in one sentence he says what another would need the whole paragraph for. But the book is not intended for the culturally ignorant. Some cultural history knowledge is needed: who Cab Calloway or Erik Satie were, or where Presley started his career.

Motivation. Stories. Overlaps.

“I always loved the stories behind the music: Elvis shyly asking the Sun Records receptionist how much it would cost to record a demo for his mother’s birthday, Louis Armstrong inventing scat-singing when he forgot the lyrics,” explains Boyd. And he also admits that his own curiosity motivated him to write the book when, in 1999, he produced the Mardi Gras Mambo album by the orchestra ¡Cubanismo!, which maps the differences between the styles of Cuba and New Orleans. Both musical cultures have roots in Africa, both were shaped by slavery, but despite this, the rhythm works differently in each region. The roots are in history, the British and the Spanish brought slaves from different parts of Africa, differing in musical traditions. The British operated in the Sahel, where there were no trees, so lutes dominated over the drums, while the Spanish territory was the forested regions of the south. Moreover, the British feared drums as a potential signal for rebellion. Portuguese slave ship captains, on the other hand, allowed Africans to come on board and dance, which reduced mortality during the voyage. And the Spanish, unlike the English, found that if they kept slaves in their original community and allowed them to stick to their African customs, it would prolong their lives.

That is why the jazz trumpet player Dizzy Gillespie was so fascinated by the Cuban conga player Chano Pozo, whose rhythmic skills far exceeded those of black drummers from the USA. Their collaboration produced several classic compositions, the most famous of which is 1947’s “Manteca.” As Dizzy fondly recounted, Chano hypnotized the audience by taking off his shirt and playing long solos, accompanied by sacred Afro-Cuban chants. A year later, Chano was shot dead in a New York bar by a drug dealer who had previously sold him oregano instead of weed. Dizzy and his band, Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, and dozens of others attended the funeral.

Unlike most books available so far, Boyd uncovers the details, gets to the heart of the matter, and puts the differences into perspective. Examples? Passive listening is impolite in West Africa. Griots, members of a musical caste, expect shouts of encouragement from the audience when singing celebratory epics. Couple dancing is a purely European phenomenon that did not exist in Africa before the arrival of Europeans. In Europe, it served as an excuse for couples to touch each other, which an African would consider unnecessary or hypocritical.

Boyd also pays close attention to the instruments. Claves, the simple percussion that drives the rhythm of a Cuban orchestra, are not just any pair of wooden sticks, and they entered music as a by-product of shipbuilding. When the Spanish ran out of wood from their own forests, they moved the production of sailboats to Cuba. The hardwood pins that hold the hull together produce a beautiful timbre in the hands of a skilled player, which Federico García Lorca described as a “wooden raindrop.” Thanks to its timbre, the sound of the claves easily penetrates the singing and music of the band and serves as a solid pulse typical of Afro-Cuban music for musicians and dancers.

After Castro’s revolution, the Cuban musical climate cooled down. “Castro himself didn’t dance, not even one step,” explains Boyd. According to him, the Czechoslovak embassy in Havana helped to compensate for the inconvenience. The ambassador serving at the time loved bebop and played Monk and Miles on his gramophone for his diplomatic guests.

Boyd also explains the origin of Jamaican “sound systems”. These “mobile discos” were invented by the colonial administration, which granted private licences to circulate news and advertisements, combined with music, in public spaces. Jamaicans used the opportunity to spread music according to their own taste, which started the emergence of ska and later reggae. “The sound systems served as a lively dating agency, a fashion show, an information exchange, a street status parade ground… while also providing a community bulletin board, with DJs announcing who was out of jail or back from England,” writes Boyd.

How George Harrison discovered the sitar

Boyd also corrects some common myths. George Harrison discovered Indian music indirectly, through joint parties with the Byrds in California, when the Beatles rented a villa in Hollywood belonging to actress Zsa Zsa Gabor after their triumphant concert at Shea Stadium. “Parties were non-stop, with plenty of girls, fellow celebrities, grass and LSD. On the night of 25 August, John Lennon and George Harrison ended up in Zsa Zsa’s enormous (empty) bathtub, listening with stoned fascination as McGuinn and Crosby extolled the wonders of Indian music, of Ravi Shankar and of the modal scales McGuinn demonstrated on a guitar, a moment that has gone down in history as the start of Harrison’s lifelong bond with India and its music.”

The Indian chapter is one of the most impressive in the entire book in terms of how many musical threads it connects. The beginnings of minimalism started by Philip Glass, Terry Riley and others. The Parisian pedagogue visionary Nadia Boulanger. Romani music including flamenco. The rise of Django Reinhardt and his little-known influence on B. B. King. Bob Dylan’s meeting with guitarist Manitas de Plata in a pilgrimage town in the south of France that later became the base of the Gipsy Kings.

Another charm of the book is how it puts facts, often quoted out of context by other writers, into realistic perspective. Yes, the Brazilian military junta exiled two of the main figures of the Tropicalia movement, Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso. But they were allowed one concert, a benefit before their forced flight to Europe, to pay for their airfare.

A large part of the book is dedicated to tango. Why? At the beginning of the 20th century, tango became one of the first global trends, despite (or because of?) its controversial flavour. Since then, tango’s African roots have fallen into oblivion, and Argentina’s black population has died out in epidemics or wars. “Most couple-dances… make you laugh and forget your troubles, whereas tango is all about your troubles and makes trouble exciting.” And the European cliché “Would you like to dance?” with the risk of rejection does not apply in Buenos Aires. “No Argentine man will cross the floor, stand in front of a seated woman, ask her to dance and risk being refused. Male eyes scan the room, settle on a potential partner, attempt eye contact and, if found and held, he nods, she nods and they join together for a twelve-minute tanda, the four-tune set that marks the unit by which time is measured at a milonga. Julie Taylor, an American sociologist, struggled with it; after several agonising evenings of not being asked at all, she realised that her New York routine when a stranger met her gaze was to quickly lower it.”

Africa remains the harshest musical terrain: military coups and massacres, social prejudices, zero infrastructure, and pirated cassettes being the only functional music carrier. But even in these conditions it is possible to survive. Senegalese people have a special talent for doing business in difficult situations. Producer Ibrahima Sylla was born to well-off Senegalese parents in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, and stuck to his own principles. A contract with an artist is always for one project, because conditions change unpredictably. A new album is kept secret until tens of thousands of cassettes have been sent to all corners of West Africa, so they are on the shelves before the pirates copy them. Omou Sangare, today the region’s greatest singer, released her first and still unsurpassed album Moussolou at the age of 21 on Sylla’s label Syllart.

Stravinsky, Bartók and Diaghilev

The book goes far beyond world music boundaries. Boyd logically includes Béla Bartók, who, as one of the first composers, had unconditional respect for folk music and unknowingly paved the way for the Hungarian folk revival táncház. Boyd also pays attention to stage productions that follow local roots. The Argentine director duo Hector Orezzoli and Claudio Segovia have penetrated world stages, including Broadway, with their revues Flamenco Pure, Tango Argentino and Black and Blue: “Studying Orezzoli and Segovia’s productions should be mandatory for anyone involved in presenting ‘world’ or ‘roots’ music. They treat the music and the culture from which it comes with total respect: no apologies, no dilutions, no fusions, no kitsch storylines, no narration, just top-of-the-line sets, sound and lights and elite performers.”

Boyd goes into even more detail about Russian music, starting with the “mighty handful” (Balakirev/Borodin/Kyu/Rimsky-Korsakov/Mussorgsky) in the 19th century, through Stravinsky, and of course the ballet impresario Diaghilev, who staged the premiere of The Rite of Spring in 1913: “I was awed by this fellow producer’s ability to keep the theatrical equivalent of an indie label going at such a level for nearly a quarter-century, all the while nurturing the composers who would shape twentieth-century music,” Boyd writes about Diaghilev. He then places the premiere itself in a broader historical context: “By opening night on 29 May 1913, The Rite of Spring had been rehearsed for an unprecedented 120 hours… Parisians expected, at the very least, to see under ballerinas’ tutus as they were borne aloft by a muscular male dancer. What they were absolutely unprepared for was a stage full of girls in shapeless beige shifts stomping on the floor and gesticulating jerkily to a pounding, unfamiliar, inelegant rhythm… The brilliance of Stravinsky’s music camouflaged its subtexts, which were as totalitarian as Moiseyev’s. The Maiden dances to her doom without sensuality, passion or resistance; in her submission to the elders, she echoes the conformity demanded by tsars, commissars and now Putin. Stravinsky always resisted any attempt to analyse the thinking behind Rite, which is unsurprising given Taruskin’s research, which reveals the composer to have been a fervent member of a sinister cult known as Turanianism, which, like Eurasianism, professed by Putin’s ideologue Dugin, is defined against European values.”

Boyd further illustrates this by comparing Stravinsky and Bartók. Hitler kept a list of banned composers, which included Stravinsky. When he asked to be removed, Hitler complied. Whereas Bartók, on the other hand, asked to be included.

How Musical Diversity Disappears

In the concluding chapter, only 24-pages long, entitled How We Begin to Remember, Boyd searches for a reference point from which to connect, sort and close all these stories, and evaluate what we have lost. At the same time, we see tension rising between the world that is leaving and the one that may come, both in music and in general. “Metaphors are tempting. Are modern recordings a sonic fast food, tasty, briefly satisfying, but unhealthy?” asks Boyd. “A more apt analogy is biodiversity. At first we don’t notice the birds and insects disappearing from the landscape, but in the long run it comes back to haunt us like a domino effect of losses in our natural world.”

The book’s cover features endorsements from elite musicians like Brian Eno and Robert Plant. But the most telling words are from Ry Cooder: “One only hopes this is taught in schools.”

The book is accompanied by a Spotify playlist, which has a total of 100 items. Find it here:

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/24GhXLuPuOWivQ661vUNBl

https://www.joeboyd.co.uk/the-music