Both presented studies represent in themselves an essay at summarization of the most significant essential information on the European polyphony theory. Their aim is to contribute to a more substantial shift in a theoretical and compositional cognition of a composer, theoretician and a pedagogue, as we speak about one and the same person in a modern concept of a contemporary musician. The studies form part of a more extensive study, focusing on disclosure of the principles and rules of polyphonic musical tradition of European musical history in the context of a deeper knowledge of relevant musical creation. An endeavour to see authentically the relations between the harmonic and polyphonic theories results in a historically and theoretically complete notion about a real appearance of European musical thinking, compositional technique, performing practice and musical pedagogy in a sense of teaching all necessary of the genuine substance of a musical organism functioning.

A substantial component of the studies is an attempt to outline a medieval and Renaissance teaching of polyphony with essential theoretical, compositional, performing and didactic consequences – covering the period from the 9^th century, when a compendium Musica enchiriadis originated, to some theoretical and didactic concepts of Italian, French and English Renaissance. Therefore the contents is formed by a concept of a self-contained theory of European polyphony stressing its syntactic relations and inner organization, which are practically inexplicable when disregarding phenomena of consonance and harmony.

It is therefore fully logical, that one of the main topics of the presented studies is an evolutional, chronological point of view. A volume of newer theoretical material and some experience, acquired due to a systematic study, enabled another topic in the work to evolve, with dominating examples of polyphonic music, and an attempt at a formulation of some innovations, influencing compositional imagination, theoretical thinking and performing practice of our predecessors. The third topic is an analysis of polyphonic music examples, utilized everywhere in the work, where it is highly necessary with respect to theoretical and compositional circumstances.

Both presented studies represent in themselves an essay at summarization of the most significant essential information on the European polyphony theory. Their aim is to contribute to a more substantial shift in a theoretical and compositional cognition of a composer, theoretician and a pedagogue, as we speak about one and the same person in a modern concept of a contemporary musician. The studies form part of a more extensive study, focusing on disclosure of the principles and rules of polyphonic musical tradition of European musical history in the context of a deeper knowledge of relevant musical creation. An endeavour to see authentically the relations between the harmonic and polyphonic theories results in a historically and theoretically complete notion about a real appearance of European musical thinking, compositional technique, performing practice and musical pedagogy in a sense of teaching all necessary of the genuine substance of a musical organism functioning.

A substantial component of the studies is an attempt to outline a medieval and Renaissance teaching of polyphony with essential theoretical, compositional, performing and didactic consequences – covering the period from the 9^th century, when a compendium Musica enchiriadis originated, to some theoretical and didactic concepts of Italian, French and English Renaissance. Therefore the contents is formed by a concept of a self-contained theory of European polyphony stressing its syntactic relations and inner organization, which are practically inexplicable when disregarding phenomena of consonance and harmony.

It is therefore fully logical, that one of the main topics of the presented studies is an evolutional, chronological point of view. A volume of newer theoretical material and some experience, acquired due to a systematic study, enabled another topic in the work to evolve, with dominating examples of polyphonic music, and an attempt at a formulation of some innovations, influencing compositional imagination, theoretical thinking and performing practice of our predecessors. The third topic is an analysis of polyphonic music examples, utilized everywhere in the work, where it is highly necessary with respect to theoretical and compositional circumstances.

During the last 500 years music in Dresden often formed an integral part of German musical history. Yet the contribution of Jewish musicians and composers has largely been omitted for decades. The article’s aim is to recover this forgotten history. The author traces numerous names of instrumentalists (e.g. Paul Aron), singers (e.g. Margit Bokor) and composers (e.g. Paul Hindemith), who were active personalities in the vibrant Dresden musical life during the 1920s, but lost their employments after 1933. While many of them resorted to exile, others continued to work under increasingly difficult circumstances. They founded the Jewish Cultural Asscociation in Dresden, which for a while offered artistic entertainment for the ghettoized Jewish community and employment opportunities for Jewish musicians. The prohibition to perform works of “Aryan” composers led to a strong emphasis on creation of Jewish composers, yet the growing emigration of musicians also required much improvisation to suit the restricted options of the times. Even so, Jewish musical life in Dresden ceased to exist after the pogroms of November 1938.

A development of the Czech musical creation after 1938 was strongly influenced by political turns, which marked fates of several compositional generations. In the time of protectorate great personalities of the interwar period were still active (Vítězslav Novák, Josef Bohuslav Foerster), but simultaneously we notice an entrance of a young generation, born at the beginning of 20^th century (Miloslav Kabeláč, Klement Slavický, Iša Krejčí, Jan Kapr, Jaroslav Doubrava). A feeling of existential danger demonstrates itself in a creation of all generations through leaning towards patriotic themes and a self-imposed turn to more apprehensible tonal language. During the World War II a number of creative composers in Bohemia reduces substantially. Many composers of the middle and younger generation lost their lives also on the basis of their origin, and after the war composers of a German nationality disappeared from the Czech musical scene. After the February 1948 the creation was under the ideological pressure of the Zhdanov aesthetics imported from the Soviet Union. Musical life was centrally controlled by a Communist Party, which commanded also the Union of Czechoslovak Composers, founded in 1951. The Union controlled not only the creation but in a fact the whole realm of music influence in a society. One of the results of such politics were personal implications against several foremost personalities of then Czech musical culture. Despite this pressure some of the composers (M. Kabeláč, K. Slavický, A. Hába, J. Rychlík, J. Doubrava) continued to develop their own compositional principles.

At the beginning of 1960s the appearance of another generation brings a marked shift towards application of techniques and stylistic tendencies of West European music. Jan Klusák, Jindřich Feld, Jarmil Burghauser, Vladimír Sommer and others belonged to the composers cutivating the practice. A distinctive feature of this period is an origination of creative groups and specialized performing ensembles. In the late 1960s a communication with foreign countries developed due to loosening of the political situation.

A special chapter in the Czech music of the 20^th century belongs to emigration. It has realized in three waves: at the turn of the 1930s and 1940s (B. Martinů, J. Ježek, K. B. Jirák), in the 1950s (K. Husa) and after 1968 (J. Novák, R. Komorous, P. Kotík). A personal political attitude of the composers was the main criterion for a personal manipulation in the 1970s. A great portion of a creative scene was suppressed. All artistic unions were cancelled and new ones set by a handful of the most faithful artists. After 1989 a tradition of interwar and afterwar associations was renewed. In the musical creation a period of tense plurality began.

In performing it is possible to speak about enduring immanent tradition in Bohemia, coming out from its own sources almost exclusively. Czech performing school was represented by instrumentalists, orchestras, chamber ensembles, conductors and singers. In international relations it broke through mainly due to performing Czech music of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Similarly to composers, performers were judged by criteria serving the governing ideology for 40 years (1948–1989). After the 1989 turn this model extincted immediately and a media market originated, which resulted in enrichment and differentiation of the offer. In the 1990s also newly founded media allotted the serious music a function of exclusiveness. The changes came in the concert as well as theatrical life. The state subsidy was reduced, what resulted in increase of the own artistic activities of many ensembles. In the middle of the 1990s a turn came in a musical dramaturgy towards more pretentious repertory and to less conventional works, including contemporary creation. But, on the whole, chamber works preponderate over great symphonic and musico-dramatic ones in composition and concert management, even though greater stylistic and generational differentiation came.

A traditional folk wedding ceremony in Slovakia preserved many elements by which it is joined not only with a wedding ceremony of Slavonic peoples but also with wedding rituals of the Middle European area. Singing at the wreath, prenuptial bride’s parting coming from the Middle Považie at the West of Slovakia (Trenčiansko region), ranks among these elements, too. Today it is impossible to find the custom in a ritualized form on majority of the Slovak territory. Therefore at the Middle Považie it belongs to regionally specific elements of the wedding ceremony, possessing wider parallels in several regions of the Middle East Europe and East Europe (ohrávat vínki at Moravia; rozpletiny in Poland; dievičnik and večeriny in Russia etc.). Thus it may be understood as a regional relic of an originally much more spread ceremonial form, which used to be a component of a rich wedding ceremony.

At the Middle Považie this custom was vanishing in its primary function during the first half of the 20th century. We reconstructed its shape using archive and published sources. They collected material from the field researches namely from the period 1950–1980. The material was acquired as a part of so-called oral history, on the basis of memories of older generation.

Singing was a dominant component of the custom. This article communicates a deep insight into the song repertory of one of ceremonial phases of the wedding and exemplifying a relation of a song and a ritual it points to the significance of singing in rituals, joined with turning points of a human life. Folk magic, ancestor worship as a sacral sphere and Christian religion – these are three basic components of thought, elements of which interwove not only in the whole wedding ceremony, but also in its particular phases and their song repertory.

We analyzed the prenuptial bride’s parting with her maidenhood from the Middle Považie and the song repertory joined with it in a context of structure and semantics of the ritual of passage (a theory of A. van Gennep), namely of its first sequence – a ritual of separation. It took place on the eve of the wedding in the bride’s parents’ home with participation of bridesmaids and female friends. It was filled by a preparation of wedding ritual items, ritual expressive lamentation of a bride and symbolical presentation of wedding gifts to a bride. The essence of the ritual consists in a parting with a group of female friends, marking the beginning of a gradual separation of a bride from her original surroundings and social rank while entering a new family and accepting her new social role. Archaic character of a ritual form of the custom is documented by ample song repertory, performed exclusively by bridesmaids, while a bride was bound by singing taboo at the same time. This repertory encompasses several song categories, differing by the rate of their functional obligation, e.g. by the strength of a song’s – its text and tune – binding to a prenuptial custom of the bride’s parting.

We concentrated most of all on a category of primarily ceremonial songs (A group), representing an archaic stratum of the ceremonial repertory with relics of magical and ritual functions. It is joined exclusively with this prenuptial custom, it originated on its basis and it preserved several signs of archaic ceremonial forms. It forms an homogeneous core of the whole repertory. The songs’ texts are bound to melodies of so-called wedding tunes – crystallized melodic types, characterized by a loose relation to text, obligatory recitation in a particular phase of a ceremony, return in the course of the custom or the whole wedding ceremony and its occurrence in its key points. If two or more wedding tunes were joining with a wedding, there was a functional and semantic differentiation between them: either they were bound to a particular wedding phase and they worked as its sign, or they were joined to particular semantic fields, joining several phases of a wedding ceremony into a common semantic whole.

We identified 4 wedding tunes in the prenuptial bride’s parting repertory. Two of them are bound exclusively to the prenuptial custom of the bride’s parting. They fulfil a communicative function possessing a calling and signal semantics (melodic type I) and a function of lamentation as a stylized weeping (melodic type II). The two remaining wedding tunes may be found also in other ceremonial phases of a wedding and they present a universal wedding tune (melodic type III) or a wedding tune with a function, narrowly defined by humorous connotations (melodic type IV). Topic of the texts, music and stylistic signs and antiphonal recitation confirm archaic magical and ritual basis of this song category.

Secondarily ceremonial songs (B group) represent a song repertory with a ceremonial function resulting from evolutional transformations of this custom. It documents some of its evolutional phases and local variants. This repertory is of an excessively heterogeneous character: on the one hand it encompasses songs typical for other phases of a wedding ceremony, which were transfered to prenuptial custom of the bride’s parting only subsequently, mostly on the basis of their semantic analogies, on the other hand there is a newer stratum of ceremonial songs present in the repertory, paralleling thematically and motivically with the contents of the custom. Next to folk songs it comprises also folklorized versions of anonymous literary creation – a genre of wedding parting songs spreading via fair press, rooting in Latin and Slovak literary creation of the Baroque period.

Loose repertory (C group) is formed by songs, sung in non-ceremonial and occasional situations. They permeated the wedding custom complex either on the basis of their motivic and thematic associations, or as a part of period stylish repertory. They helped to increase the basic song fund, to fulfil an interval between singing of obligatory ceremonial songs and to enliven a traditionallyprescribed, stable song repertory according to a period taste. They belong mostly to a newer stratum of harmonical songs. Love songs – lyrical as well as epical – dominate among them, related mostly to gender aspect – they are bound to girls’ and women’s singing.

The extinction of the prenuptial custom of the bride’s parting singing at the wreath was a result of a considerable reduction of a wedding ceremony in the first half of the 20th century. It reflects the changes in living conditions in traditional peasants’ surroundings. The part of these changes was enfeeblement of solidarity awareness within age-mates’ groups. Following the local tradition immediately or after partial interruption of its continuity this custom and a fragment of the song repertory was resumed as a scenic presentation of wedding customs and songs stylized on the folkloric basis in some villages of the Middle Považie.

[The contribution is available only in Slovak language in the printed version of the revue.]

[The contribution is available only in Slovak language in the printed version of the revue.]

[The contribution is available only in Slovak language in the printed version of the revue.]