Every composer makes distinct emotional, intellectual, and somatic demands on performers. These demands are written into the notes, asking our bodies to take particular shapes and execute specific, sometimes unique, actions, and our minds to understand particular ways of organising sound. I will suggest that our habits of thought regarding these demands are profoundly shaped by cultural constructions of the figure of the composer, as well as by more palpable influences such as current performance practices and lineages of teaching. Some of these habits of thought – especially ways of analysing the notes or understanding how a work fits into an oeuvre – are consciously learned and deployed. Some are less consciously absorbed from the conventional wisdom that attaches to composers concerning their biographies, characters, or the characteristics of their music.

The musical foundations of the Bohemian Catholic Reformation were laid during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48). Successive Habsburg emperors spent enormous sums on sacred music, which refashioned their image as protective fathers of their citizens, in a distinctive pietas austriaca, emulated competitively by aristocrats to demonstrate piety and loyalty.

Religious orders, especially Jesuits, prioritized education, combining Italian musical influences with older Bohemian traditions, such as those of “literary brotherhoods”: their vernacular strophic solo song followed Italian models while raising the status of the German and Czech languages. The balanced phrases of Italian canzonettas encouraged clear musical forms and cadence-oriented tonality, as in the hymns of Adam Michna.

Recreational music for aristocrats encouraged meraviglia, “marveling,” especially in the virtuosity of Heinrich Biber’s Mystery Sonatas (c. 1674), depending on scordatura (“mistuning” of the strings). Some such music imitates natural sounds ingeniously.

Czech-language music criticism first became prominent in the 1860s, and its authors often used their musical discussions to explore then-emerging political conversations, especially ethnocentric concepts of identity. Still, they drew their models from earlier, predominantly Germanophone music critics, historiographers, and aestheticians – writers who did not yet subscribe to such ethnocentric views. This chapter focuses on Germanophone writers, specifically Franz Xaver Niemetschek, Anton Müller, and August Wilhelm Ambros examining their perspectives on canonic composers of the past – particularly Mozart and Gluck – to illustrate the ideological underpinnings of Bohemian music criticism. Compounding the complexity of these critics’ ideas, twentieth-century scholars like Mirko Očadlík and Tomislav Volek reinterpreted both their writings and identities once again to reflect still new political goals.

Drawing on postcolonial and decolonial theory developed since the 1990s for the study of socialist and post-socialist East Central Europe, this chapter approaches opera as a crucial cultural site for (re)negotiating the relationship with “the West,” Soviet hegemony, and the Global South after 1948. It focuses on the ambivalence in representations of the racialized Other in Czech opera, which highlights the specific, lateral relationship between what was formally known as the Second and Third worlds. The chapter offers a close reading of the opera Jezero Ukereve (“Lake Ukerewe”) by Otmar Mácha, premiered in 1966. Featuring Black and mixed-race characters, the opera generally expresses empathy for and solidarity with the colonized populations, informed by the Czechs’ experience with German oppression, yet it unavoidably reproduces the colonial ideology of a civilizational mission. The opera is interpreted in relation to Czechoslovakia’s official Africa policy and the aesthetic debates about Czech New Music.

This chapter situates itself between the untheorizable singularities of specific case studies and the unsustainable generalities that usually result from attempts at broad historical characterization.  By looking at everything from a late fifteenth-century image of Jews making music in a Prague synagogue to armies of wooden klezmer musicians in a twenty-first-century store window, and from a nineteenth-century Jewish musical caricature to a bit of concentration-camp ephemera involving Hebrew words spelled with musical notes, this chapter endeavors to give some of the flavor of the Czech Jewish musical experience.

It is the winter of 2021. Like many parents around the world, I have donned the new hat of home-school administrator. My children are high-school age, so they resist oversight (as expected), but I have come to see that they do not need much (who knew?). My role is simply to find suitable remote-learning resources. Again, I am pleasantly surprised, and relieved: high-school level art history, for example, seems to be an especially engaging subject online, given the potential for abundant accurately coloured images, flexible user interfaces, and up-to-date critical content. This happy realisation hits me as I notice that the unfamiliar hat has slipped off the side of my head: I am no longer surveying the resources for the kids’ sakes, but rather I am absorbed, of my own accord, in a lesson on Fauvism.

The societal liberalization of the decade that culminated in the Prague Spring in 1968 was evident early on in a wave of new small-scale theater companies. One notable example is the Semafor Theater, founded in 1959 by Jiří Suchý and Jiří Šlitr. The main model for these ensembles, especially for Semafor, was the Osvobozené divadlo (the Liberated Theater) of the interwar period (1926–38). The Liberated Theater earned a legendary reputation, thanks in part to the comedy duo Jiří Voskovec and Jan Werich. Equally legendary was the music of the nearly blind in-house composer and bandleader of the Liberated Theater, Jaroslav Ježek (1906–42). This chapter begins by exploring the place of the Liberated Theater and its music in Czech theater culture and concludes by highlighting the continuities with the Semafor Theater.

This chapter explores the ways folksong research in the Czech lands emerged both within and alongside race and ethnicity studies during the first half of the twentieth century. Many scholars have thoughtfully examined interrelationships between folksong research and German nationalism, specimen culture, and Darwinian assumptions, and yet these same interrelationships in Czech music studies have only recently begun to emerge. Anthropologists, too, have brought into focus the political roles of ethnographic studies in defining the Czech and Slovak nations, but the specific role of folksong research within this remains unstudied. Examining the ways music research in the Czech lands participated alongside and sometimes overlapped with German nationalist race and ethnicity research, however, illuminates early Czech folk-music studies as an instrument of ethnonationalism; a tool not merely descriptive of a repertoire, but also delineative of who belonged and who did not.