23 - The ‘People’ in Czech and Slovak Music Criticism

Summary

There is a pattern of circular logic built into discussions of ‘Czech’ and ‘Slovak’ music. On the one hand, scholars are long familiar with processes of nationalist invention; indeed, the task of defining and even determining the sounds of the Czech and Slovak nations – in many ways, the task of Czech and Slovak music criticism – arose with their nationalist movements during the nineteenth century. On another, as Oskár Elschek points out in his introduction to a History of Slovak Music (2003), the field of musicology hinges on its own nationalist myths: it favours the study of European art music in which notions of a stable, in some ways timeless, ‘Europe’ are generally left uninterrogated, or at least recognised as a given assumption.