Arti musices, Vol. 44 No. 2, 2013.
Original scientific paper
Franjo Kuhač and Mapping South Slav Musical Culture
Tatjana Marković
; Institut für kunst- und musikhistorische Forschungen, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Wien, Austria
Abstract
Franz Xaver Koch alias Franjo Ksaver Kuhač (1834—1911) made a great contribution to Croatian music historiography, ethnomusicology, organology, and ethnochoreology, among other disciplines, in the very wide context of the entirety of Europe. Before settling in Zagreb, he acquired his professional experiences and education in Osijek, Pest, Buda, Vienna, and Weimar. In addition to his unusually extended activities, he followed and tried to keep up with all significant developments in the field of contemporary musicology, from the very definition of this discipline to the latest results of subsequent research on the various musical disciplines. Being one of the main ideologists of Croatian nationalism, Kuhač embodied the nineteenth-century radical national ideology in many respects.
Therefore, his legacy — which I will consider through his studies of South Slav musical culture — is rather impressive, ranging from the outline of the Versuch einer Musikgeschichte der Südslaven (manuscript, 1875) then his lexicographical work related to the plans for the dictionary of biographies of South Slav musicians, to 1600 transcriptions of South Slav songs (including folk songs, urban songs, instrumental dance music) published as Južnoslovjenske narodne popievke (South Slav national songs, 1878—1881). Franjo Kuhač also contributed to establishing Croatian/South Slav music terminology, as did his collaborator Robert Tollinger, a Czech composer, musician, founder and editor of the music journal Gudalo (Velika Kikinda), who lived and worked in Vojvodina in Serbia. In this way, Kuhač provided a wide basis for constructing, defining, and profiling not only the Croatian, but also the national identity of other South Slav people. This paper is mainly based on the archival materials from the archives of the Hrvatska akademija znanosti i umjetnosti (Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts) and Hrvatski državni arhiv (Croatian State Archive).
Keywords
Franjo Kuhač; South Slav musical culture; lexicography; Robert Tollinger
Hrčak ID:
116809
URI
Publication date:
11.11.2013.
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