Musicologica Olomucensia

Notes to Understanding of Beginning and Formation of Slovak Musical Avant-garde in the 1960s

When avant-garde intentions, orientations and results in artistic-creative environement are discussed, it is important to follow the cultural-social and historical conditions leading to closeness, normativeness, steadines and mental adjustment. This led to the decisive reactions of creative subjects, focused on a search of new, untried and dynamic sources, means and inspirational areas in order to get these sources into artistic and cultural contexts while negating previous traditions. The term "avant-garde", originally applied in military area, have been also used to characterize European history of artistic movements in the 20th century, also spread in musical-critical practice. This term began to be used when examining development of European music after the year 1945, especially nearly the reduction of this development to particular compositional-technical tendencies from "New Music" of a post-Webernian orientation.
Over-spannig of several pragmatist dualism - e. g. music old-new, conservative-progressive, traditional-avant-garde - as representatives of a mechanistically presented conflict and, however, the fact that new artistic ideas in music are not results of a simpe linear development from less perfect to more perferct, because the compositional creativity in the 20th century was profiled in a polystylistic and poly-chronic layers, we use the key term "innovation". This term applied to events or plots of musical development is functioning because it describes - as shows the schema - not only the specific phenomenons from technical-compositional area as isolated qualities, but also the various factors motivating and accompaining the beginning, development and results of innovation. In this schema symbol "T" marks the pole of traditionalism and "A" pole of avant-gardism. By placing the innovation "I" centrally between two polar categories ("T" and "A") it is emphasised, that this poles represent extreme potentialities. Complexity of "I" as a process emphasizes its integration to two spheres. The first one is a sphere of creativity - "C" in the lower half of the schema - which is an essential factor of musical innovative elements. If there is understanding among different creative individuals and they develop a common opinion, a result is a collective awareness. Creativity induced in this way is not only a part of subjective decision but it also occurs in a given social environment, cultural-geographic area and, in particular, in certain historical circumstances (symbols "D"). The sphere of the social-cultural environment - "S" in upper half of the schema - generates determining pressures influencing the central field of musical innovations. It indicates a possibility of two streams of impulses and normative pressures between the level of running innovative ambitions "I" in the oscillatory space delimitated by "T" and "A" and both spheres "C" and "S".
The development of Slovak music after 1945 was determined by two cultural ambitions - the self-identification (features of the "Slovak national music" as a stabile system, drawing mainly from folklore tradition), and the acculturation (the searching of impulses from outside, from the European cultural and creative contexts). The important orientation in Slovak music towards to West-European music of the 20th century, included a contemporary music, as a moment of breaking the strong and static orientation of Slovak music after 1945 to the domestic tradition and its isolation in the sphere of so-called socialistic realism, became the main impulse for new generation of young Slovak composers, who have been created in the second half of the fifties and during the 1960s. This group represent 15 composers - Ilja Zeljenka (1932-2007), Peter Kolman (1937), Ladislav Kupkovič (1936), Miro Bázlik (1931), Ivan Parík (1936-2005), Roman Berger (1930), Jozef Malovec (1933-1998), Ivan Hrušovský (1927-2001), Pavol Šimai (1930), Juraj Pospíšil (1931-2007), Dušan Martinček (1936-2006), Juraj Hatrík (1941), Tadeáš Salva (1937-1995), Jozef Sixta (1940-2007) and Juraj Beneš (1940-2004). Their first style formating can be followed in four developmental phases - latention, activization, confrontation, culmination.