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Coping With Freedom
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17102 |
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THE ARTS
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| Issue
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12 / 1990 |
2,873 Words |
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Andrew Clark
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Musicians in Eastern Europe are waking up to the realities of freedom - and none more so than in Czechoslovakia. With prices rising, audiences slipping away, and state support of culture under wide-ranging reassessment, Czech musical life is in a state of flux. The old certainties have gone, together with many of the old evils, but the new dawn of democracy is not the utopia of everyone's dreams. For performing arts organizations that have long been geared to full employment and state subsidy, the sudden assumption of financial and artistic responsibility is a complex challenge. It takes time to shed the mentality of waiting for instructions. Elements of a market economy have arrived, and with them have come calls for greater efficiency and accountability - in orchestras, opera houses, and conservatories just as much as in state-controlled industry and bureaucracy. Music institutions are suddenly faced with the prospect of having to justify themselves. They realize they must now court their audiences and financial sponsors. The price of survival may be a slice of their newly won freedom and independence.
Now that the euphoria of the revolution has disappeared, how are Czechoslovak musicians coping with the new realities? Although memories are short, no one doubts that - despite all the current difficulties - democracy has made a vital difference to cultural life.
Composers have noticed the difference as much as any. Before the revolution of November December 1989, composers were persecuted if they did not submit to Communist Party control over their work. This process of ideological censorship led to ridiculous practices. Mounds of officially approved but unwanted music would be regularly printed, stored, and churned back into pulp, while internationally recognized dissident composers struggled to get their music published and performed. Many were not allowed to travel abroad. Miloslav Kabelac, whose works were taken around the world by the Percussionists of Strasbourg, died in official disgrace. Marek Kopelent's music was published in West Germany, but he was ignored in his won country. For ten years, before the revolution, Jan Klusak's music was quietly suppressed. When Petr Eben, known for his strong religious beliefs, wrote an organ concerto he was told disapprovingly by communist colleagues that his music "smelt like a church."
The nerve center for Communist Party control was the Union of Composers, a highly politicized umbrella organization for composers and performers in popular and classical music, controlled by a narrow clique of hard-line communists. Members of the presidium had priority when premieres were being decided by the country's principal music organizations. They monopolized the top appointments in music institutions, even if there were better-qualified nonparty candidates. Through their domination of the state awards system, they influenced the way royalties were calculated, the choice of commissions and scholarships to study abroad, and the amount of foreign currency a composer or performer could keep. They controlled the publication of scores and recordings of new music, and supervised the points system by which payment was decided: A political title like Ladislav Kubik's Diary of Vietnam Woman, for example, was guaranteed to earn more points. "People's music" - whatever that meant - was promoted, because it would supposedly be understood by the masses. A composer was not encouraged to remain true to his conscience.
All this ha changed. The Union of composers has been reorganized
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