Popular Music Research behind the Iron Curtain

Jan Blüml / Aleš Opekar

Popular Music Research behind
the Iron Curtain

Czech Musicology in the Context of Central European
Culture and Politics

Berlin · Bruxelles · Chennai · Lausanne · New York · Oxford

Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Blüml, Jan, 1980- author. | Opekar, Aleš, 1957- author.

Title: Popular music research behind the iron curtain : Czech musicology in the context of central European culture and politics / Jan Blüml, Aleš Opekar.

Description: [1.] | Berlin ; New York : Peter Lang, 2025. | Series: Jazz under state socialism, 1867-724X ; vol 12 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2025000643 (print) | LCCN 2025000644 (ebook) |

ISBN 9783631919323 (hardback) | ISBN 9783631935002 (ebook) | ISBN 9783631935019 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Musicology--Czechoslovakia--History--20th century | Musicology--Czech Republic--History--20th century. | Popular music--Historiography--Czechoslovakia. | Popular music--Historiography--Czech Republic.

Classification: LCC ML3797.2.Y85 B58 2025 82 (print) | LCC ML3797.2.Y85 82 (ebook) | DDC 780.72/094371--dc23/eng/20250110

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2025000643

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2025000644

This monograph was written with the financial support of the Czech Science Foundation under the grant GA ČR 21-16304S “The Development of Popular Music Investigation in the Czech Lands in the Context of Central European Culture and Politics since 1945”.

Cover Image: Josef Kotek in the 1960s, © Popmuseum, Prague (2025)

ISSN 1867-724X

ISBN 978-3-631-91932-3 (Print)

ISBN 978-3-631-93500-2 (ePDF)

ISBN 978-3-631-93501-9 (ePUB)

DOI 10.3726/b22740

© Palacký University Olomouc (2025)

© 2025 Peter Lang Group AG, Lausanne (Switzerland)

Published by Peter Lang GmbH, Berlin (Germany)

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Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1 Research on Popular Music in International Contexts

Chapter 2 Czech Theoretical Reflection on Popular Music before the Second World War

Chapter 3 Union of Czechoslovak Composers (1949–1961)

Chapter 4 Institute for Musicology of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences (1962–1970)

Chapter 5 Commission for Folk and Entertainment Music of the Union of Czechoslovak Composers (1962–1969)

Chapter 6 Section of Musicology of the Institute for Theory and History of Art of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences (1972–1989)

Chapter 7 Institute for Musicology of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences/Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic (1990–1998)

Chapter 8 Academic and Non-academic Theoretical Reflection on Popular Music – Official and Unofficial Music Journalism

Conclusions

Select Bibliography

About the Authors

Index

Introduction

This monograph focuses on academic and, to a relevant extent, non-academic research on popular music in Czechoslovakia in the international context and in the historical stages defined by the years 1948, 1968 and 1989. Czechoslovakia emerged as an independent Central European state after the collapse of Austria–Hungary in 1918. In the interwar period of the so-called First Republic, it was profiled as a pro-Western democracy with strong trade and cultural ties to neighbouring German-speaking countries but also to France.¹ However, due to its geographical location ‘in the heart of Europe’, it had long functioned as a place where Western and Eastern European influences clashed.² In 1948, as a result of the global political events and crises of the previous years, Czechoslovakia became part of the Eastern bloc as a state on the very edge of the Iron Curtain. It was one of those countries where ‘regimes aligned themselves with the Soviet Union on all foreign policy matters and embarked on Stalinist transformations of their social, political, and economic systems’.³

The political development of communist Czechoslovakia between 1948 and 1989 was far from uniform, however, but fell into specific stages conditioned by internal and external political and other influences. These included Stalinism in the first half of the 1950s, the political thaw after the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956, the restoration of relations with the West and liberalisation in the 1960s and the development after the occupation of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops in 1968, referred to as normalisation and characterised by a return to a consistent pro-Soviet policy. The history of Czechoslovak musicology and ‘popular musicology’ was closely intertwined with the political developments outlined previously, as this book will attempt to show.

This monograph deals specifically with research into popular music in the Czech lands, which were part of the state formation of Czechoslovakia between 1918 and 1992 but which differed from Slovakia historically and culturally in many ways. This also applies to the history of music and musicology. While the official institutionalisation of popular music research took place in the early 1960s in the Czech lands, this did not happen until several decades later in Slovakia. If the speciality of musicology in the Czech lands was research on popular music, in Slovakia, it was music folkloristics and ethnomusicology. Given the cultural differences between the two countries, this division of the scholarly agenda was also taken into account in the central state research plans for musicology in Czechoslovakia.

The presented history of popular music research’s institutionalisation in the Czech lands belongs to the history of humanities and at the same time follows the Czech tradition of self-reflection in the field of musicology. In the early 1970s, the musicological workplace of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences already had a plan to map the history of Czech musicology, which resulted in a comprehensive book synthesis, Hudební věda: historie a teorie oboru, jeho světový a český vývoj [Musicology: History and Theory of the Field, Its World and Czech Development],⁴ several years later. In this work, the authors incorporated the distinctive field of the theory and history of popular music into the system of musicological disciplines; within it, they also discussed the development of theoretical reflection on popular music in the Czech lands, other socialist countries and the West.⁵

The history of popular music research is also a natural part of the self-reflection of the field of ‘popular music studies’, which was mainly founded on the initiative of young sociologists in the late 1970s and early 1980s in the anglophone West, as documented in the introduction to the book of the same name, Popular Music Studies (2002), by sociologists and media scholars David Hesmondhalgh and Keith Negus. It concentrates only on the anglophone theoretical reflection on popular music, however (although this information is not explicitly stated, so it may appear that the authors are talking generally about ‘worldwide’ development).⁶ A similar focus appears in the introduction to the book The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Musicology (2009), which, with its emphasis on music and music analysis, established an alternative to sociologically oriented popular music studies. The book’s editor, Derek B. Scott, placed the emergence of popular musicology in the 1990s and considered the field a ‘relatively recent domain of study’.⁷

It is only in recent years that (English-language) works on the history of popular music research outside the anglophone sphere have begun to appear. With regard to the German-speaking environment, the subject has been dealt with by Martin Pfleiderer,⁸ Helmut Rösing⁹ and Michael Kahr,¹⁰ and the situation in Italy has been approached by Franco Fabbri.¹¹ Information on developments in other countries can be found in monographs from the Routledge Global Popular Music Series, in partial studies in the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) Journal and elsewhere.

Recent years have also witnessed the development of research on the theoretical reflection on popular music in former European socialist countries, in which authors with some distance from the fall of communism, in addition to looking to ‘world’ anglophone scholarship, have begun to discover a complex history of research on popular music in their own region, in some cases predating developments in the West. Peter Wicke,¹² Mariusz Gradowski and Przemysław Piłaciński,¹³ Ádám Ignácz,¹⁴ Yvetta Kajanová,¹⁵ Anna G. Piotrowska,¹⁶ Leonardo Masi,¹⁷ Jan Blüml¹⁸ and Petr Vidomus¹⁹ contributed to the aforementioned issue. Among the frequent topics are the influence of politics on the form of Eastern European theoretical reflection on popular music and its institutionalisation as well as its relationship to Marxist criticism, scholarship and musicology.

These issues in the context of the situation in the Czech lands are also addressed in the present monograph, which was produced as part of a project awarded by the Czech Science Foundation (21-16304S) between 2021 and 2024. Several key studies were published within the framework of the project, on which this monograph is partly based: Jan Blüml and Ádám Ignácz, ‘History of Popular Music Research in the Czech Lands and Hungary: Contexts, Parallels, Interrelations (1918–1998)’;²⁰ Jan Blüml, ‘Sociology of Popular Music in Czechoslovakia (1948–1989)’;²¹ Jan Blüml, ‘Josef Kotek and Popular Music Research in the Czech Lands’;²² Aleš Opekar, ‘Jiří Fukač and His Contribution to Popular Music Research’;²³ Aleš Opekar, ‘Non-academic Writing on Popular Music in the Czech Lands after 1945’;²⁴ Peter Wicke, ‘Popular Music Studies behind the Iron Curtain: The Constitution of Popular Music Research in East-Central Europe before 1989’²⁵ and Petr Vidomus, ‘Just Don’t Call It a Magazine: Czech Jazz Fanzines of Two Totalities (1944–1958)’.²⁶

The monograph is divided into eight main chapters. The first focuses on the international context of popular music research. It studies the theoretical background of Czech research on popular music and pays attention to the situation in neighbouring capitalist (West Germany, Austria) and socialist (Slovakia, Poland, Hungary) countries. Only a brief mention is made of research on popular music from an Anglo-American perspective. The second chapter concentrates on the Czech theoretical reflection on popular music in the interwar period, which, through Marxist music critics oriented towards the Soviet Union, was crucial in institutionalising the investigation of popular music after the Second World War. The following chapters chronologically analyse the main institutional vehicles for popular music research in the Czech lands, such as the Union of Czechoslovak Composers and the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, reflecting on key events, personalities, projects, theories and debates. The interpretation is brought up to the post-communist era, when academic research on popular music in the Czech lands stopped for many years. At the same time as considering what was happening within academia, activities outside it are recalled since the fields of musicology and music journalism overlapped to some extent in the Czech lands as a result of the centralisation of musical culture in the socialist state. Nevertheless, non-academic reflection on popular music is also the subject of the final chapter, which discusses, among other things, attempts at higher theoretical thinking about popular music related to the unofficial music scene and underground.

The present monograph is a historiographical work based on extensive archival research, analysis and interpretation of primary sources. The principal sources of material were the holdings of the Union of Czechoslovak Composers and the Union of Czech Composers and Concert Artists, deposited at the Czech Museum of Music and the National Archives of the Czech Republic, as well as the collection of the Institute for Theory and History of Art of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences deposited at the Masaryk Institute and the Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences. Information was also drawn from the personal estate of Josef Kotek, the long-time principal Czech researcher of popular music, stored at the Popmuseum in Prague. The analysis and reconstruction of the academic and non-academic discourse on popular music in the Czech lands, as well as in neighbouring countries, was based on extensive research using relevant journals and magazines (Hudební rozhledy, Melodie, Hudební věda, Muzyka, Studia Musicologica, Beiträge zur Musikwissenschaft and so on). The work also drew on interviews with witnesses. The Czech academic debate on popular music was further reconstructed through the analysis of original theoretical writings (published and unpublished articles, monographs, conference papers and reports, scholarly reviews, etc.), which were rarely translated into German and other Eastern European languages and had not yet been reprinted or discussed in English.

The monograph is based on the assumption that scholarly work in social sciences and humanities (whether it is the very formation of a discipline, the selection of topics, the methodology or the formulation of research questions or objectives) is always to some extent determined by the political environment. In this sense, the authors ask to what extent the early institutionalisation of popular music research in the Czech lands was conditioned by the influence of Marxist criticism and its appeal to the investigation of mass music genres, and they compare it with that in neighbouring socialist states, where it happened with greater or lesser delay. They consider the role played by the liberalisation in the 1960s with the de-ideologisation of scholarship, the restoration of cooperation with the West, the rehabilitation of music sociology previously dismissed as bourgeois pseudoscience and so on and investigate how, conversely, the theoretical reflection on popular music was influenced by the return of pro-Soviet policies during the normalisation era. The authors also contemplate how popular music research was organised in the Czech lands, who the protagonists were, how the environment of the respective Central European country behind the Iron Curtain influenced their work and how their work differed from the approaches of their Western colleagues. Naturally, the monograph seeks to show the style–genre areas on which Czech theorists focused, how they evaluated them, how the approach to popular music was influenced by the fact that most of these theorists belonged to the field of musicology and not sociology, as was the case in the first phase of popular music research in the Anglo-American sphere, and so on.

The debate on popular music in the Czech lands was especially accelerated by the advent of radio in the 1920s, which reinforced the impression of many critics and other observers of the formation of a new type of music alongside the traditionally understood folk music and classical music. This ‘new’ type of music, which constituted the dominant content of radio broadcasting²⁷ and was associated with industrial production and a commercial function, was referred to at the time by various terms, such as ‘popular music’, ‘light music’, ‘entertainment music’, ‘functional music’ and ‘jazz’.²⁸ The use of these terms and their meaning varied according to the nature of their users, their generational profile and their professional affiliation. Moreover, terminological practice evolved over time, reflecting local linguistic and cultural–political specificities.

The term ‘popular music’ [‘populární hudba’] in the Czech lands during the interwar period referred mainly to simpler forms of symphonic music.²⁹ At the beginning of the 1950s, however, it appeared in official documents of the Union of Czechoslovak Composers as a general category for musical expressions intended for a wider audience that were not traditional folk music.³⁰ At the time of liberalisation and opening up to the West in the 1960s, as the influence of Anglicism grew in Czech discourse, the term ‘popular music’ was often shortened to ‘pop music’ and its content was directed towards current hit production mediated by radio and gramophone records. The history of the labelling of popular music in the Czech lands had other characteristics, whether it was the unsuccessful attempt to sovietise Czechoslovak discourse with the term ‘estrada music’ in the Stalinist era of the 1950s or the attempt to introduce artificial terms–concepts, such as ‘mass music genres’, ‘applied music genres’, ‘small musical forms’, ‘everyday music’ or ‘non-artificial’, with which Czech musicologists tried to overcome the problematic connotations of the adjectives ‘light’, ‘entertainment’, ‘popular’ and so on. These never gained acceptance in common usage, however.

From the position of Czechoslovakia as a Central European country, the content of the term ‘popular music’ has long consisted of two components defined on the basis of historical criteria, place of origin and style: (1) traditional popular music (older forms of European popular music influenced by local folk music and classical music dating back to the nineteenth century) and (2) modern popular music (historically younger forms of popular music established after 1900, imported from the United States and later from England and influenced by African–American music folklore).

When official research on popular music began at the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences in the early 1960s, the key problem was the definition of the subject of interest itself. According to the definition in the early 1970s, in the opinion of Czech musicologists, popular music was characterised by the following features: (1) a standardised basis of creation; (2) less significant compositional uniqueness of the work and, on the contrary, a more important share of the performance; (3) spontaneity of perception and consumption; (4) a strong and immediate representation of social and psychological functions; (5) a broad (and at the same time class-, group-, generation-, etc., concretised) social consumer base and (6) a commodity character of the majority of popular music production and thus its subordination to standard economic mechanisms and laws, especially the law of supply and demand. These and other features, according to Czech theorists, led to the separation of the given field from other music and, after the nineteenth century, created the preconditions for its relative developmental autonomy.³¹ When we discuss research on popular music in the Czech lands in this book, we are referring to research on musical expressions that correspond to the aforementioned definition.

To explain what Czech theoreticians meant by popular music, it is also necessary to discuss the term ‘jazz’. It had a broader meaning in the interwar period, as documented in one of the first Central European books on the subject, Jazz (1928), by the Czech author E. F. Burian, which included in this category the works of Rudolf Friml, Paul Whiteman, George Gershwin and other Tin Pan Alley composers. In the following years, the term was gradually narrowed to settle in the 1950s on the contemporary sense of traditional and modern jazz. Just as the later founders of anglophone popular music studies explored rock and pop simultaneously and perceived a certain polarity of these categories (rock as a space for authentic artistic expression vs. pop as a space of commerce), the founders of popular music research in the Czech lands, a generation older, naturally explored jazz and dance music of the swing type, also with an emphasis on the former as a space of artistic values standing in opposition to the commercial production of the latter. Thus, in Czech academic discourse, jazz has been part of the phenomenon of popular music from the beginning.