Announcement of Conference on Leoš Janáček, October 1999
Dear Dr. Culik,
I am taking the liberty of forwarding this call for papers to you in the
hope that it may be of interest: if you have any queries about it, I
shall do my best to answer them.
Geoffrey Chew
Department of Music
Centre for the Study of Central Europe
Royal Holloway College
School of Slavonic and East European Studies
University of London
CALL FOR PAPERS
A Tale of Three Cities:
Janacek's Brno Between Vienna and Prague
Friday 22 October 1999 - Sunday 24 October 1999
Senate House, London WC1
The current reputation of Leos Janacek (1854-1928) as the greatest of
twentieth-century Czech composers was slow in arriving: for the first half
of this century, the canonic succession was assumed to have been inherited
from Smetana and Dvorak by Vitezslav Novak, J. B. Foerster and others. The
change in his fortunes represents a change in the reception of his
particular brand of regionalism: his self-consciousness in belonging to
Moravia, and to its capital city, Brno, which are places that have often
seemed to provide a guarantee of Czech cultural authenticity.
Yet, even after the pioneering work of John Tyrrell among others, the
cultural self-consciousness of the Moravians is still too little
understood. Using Janacek as a focus, this interdisciplinary conference
will take the opportunity to reassess the self-image of Brno and of
Moravia in the period roughly between 1880 and 1930, within the cultural
contexts of Vienna and Prague, also taking into account wider
international contexts and influences from West and East. It is hoped that
papers will deal with the subject from a variety of disciplinary
viewpoints: literature, political history, music, art history,
architecture, among others; and it is expected that a published volume of
essays will be produced as longer versions of some of the papers given at
the conference. The conference hopes to consider, among others, the
following areas of enquiry:
The aesthetics of the period in Moravia, Bohemia, Austria
The Moravian school of criticism
Questions of patronage, politics, ideology, sociology
Mass political parties and art in the period
The Moravian Diet
The Moravian Ausgleich
Moravian literature of the period
- in comparison with other Czech and Austrian literature
- n relation to Naturalism, Symbolism, Decadence,
Expressionism, etc.
- in the wider context of Western European or Russian influence
- local variants of Naturalism and Decadence
Janacek himself
- in comparison to other contemporary Czech or Austrian
composers (Novak, Suk, Foerster, Schoenberg, Zemlinsky,
Schreker, etc)
- the succession (his pupils: Haas, Kapralova, etc)
- The literariness and artistic taste of Janacek and of other
contemporaneous composers
- Catholicism and, or versus, Protestantism
- Moravian art and architecture of the period
- in comparison with other Czech and Austrian art and
architecture
Papers should be 20 minutes long; please send abstracts (250 words) of
proposals by 15 February 1999 (including details of audio-visual
requirements) to:
Dr Geoffrey Chew
Tel: +44-1784-443537
Department of Music
Fax: +44-1784-439441
Royal Holloway College
Email: chew@sun.rhbnc.ac.uk
(University of London)
Egham Hill
Egham, Surrey TW20 0EX
