LAWRENCE — Martin Nedbal says the new book he helped to write and edit is not only the first English-language survey of music in the Czech Republic but the first to provide a modern analysis of the subject in the polyglot state.
Nedbal, a professor in the University of Kansas School of Music, co-wrote and co-edited “A History of Music in the Czech Lands” (Cambridge University Press) with Kelly St. Pierre of Wichita State University and Hana Vlhová-Wörner of the University of Basel and Masaryk Institute, Prague.
Nedbal said the book takes a contemporary approach to the multilayered and tangled ethnolinguistic history of the country. Even the book’s title, “the Czech Lands,” reflects that.
The Czech native translated half of the book’s 32 chapters that were originally written in the Czech language, editing them with an eye toward the overall project as he went.
“Some of the Czech authors, when they heard it was to be a history book, imagined it would be an objective narrative — an encyclopedic approach,” Nedbal said. “But … we realized that that’s not how people approach historical writing these days. History cannot be presented in a supposedly objective narrative because everyone has their own version of history. So rather than pretending to be objective, it’s better to just present case studies with specific narratives and specific viewpoints.”
Thus, in addition to chapters on various forms of historically Czech music — starting with 11th century sacred Latin chant and continuing through anti-communist rock — there are chapters on Romani, Jewish and Slovak styles. And despite their roles as the undisputed top two composers in Czech history, Dvořák and Smetana don’t get their own chapters. Only Leoš Janáček, who remains one of the world’s most performed opera composers nearly a century after his death, does.
And yet the distinction between Czech and German peoples, including their languages and musical roots and the conflicts that engendered, is the new book’s through line. It is the subject of Nedbal’s chapter, as it was his 2023 book.
“This is the first book of its type in English — the first one that’s really substantial,” Nedbal said. “The last academic history of Czech music was published in the 1980s, during the era of communism. It has this supposedly objective narrative about how it actually was, but it has an ideological slant and a nationalistic one, as well.
“All the previous histories of music in what is now the Czech Republic were mainly focused on Czech music, but the area has been inhabited by lots of other peoples, including Germans and Roma and Jews and so on. And so we wanted to include them in the narrative.”
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source today.ku.edu ’
