Přehled o publikaci

Civilism, neofolklorism, and neoclassicism represent the dominant tendencies in Czech interwar avant-garde music. Although based on radically different sets of techniques and viewpoints, the three tendencies are also marked by internal similarities that are not immediately obvious. All three approaches to modern composition aim at abandoning romantic sensibilities and rejecting what Stefan Zweig termed “the world of yesterday” (“die Welt von Gestern”), the social and cultural order that dominated European civilization during the so-called belle époque prior to World War I and that came to be viewed as hypocritical and internally rotten after the cataclysms of the war. All three tendencies aimed at avoiding romanticism through different means: neoclassicism by a recourse to pre-Romantic music; neo- folklorism in an exploration of musical traditions of the common people from different ethnic groups; and civilism in a reliance on jazz.