https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0290-8720
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ABSTRACT
This case study is based on ethnomusicological fieldwork and interviews conducted with two contemporary performers in the Czech Republic, the underground singer Dáša Vokatá and the popular actor Oldřich Kaiser, whose joint performances are based on reminiscences of Czech underground as well as mainstream culture during late Socialism. The paper explores cultural and communicative memory and musical activities regarded as mnemonic products and practices, aiming to demonstrate the process of transition of significant aspects of communicative memory to the domain of cultural memory and to identify the reason for their success in the contemporary commercial music scene.
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my thanks to Zuzana Jurková, Daniela Stavělová and the two anonymous reviewers for their very useful comments and suggestions.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes on contributor
Zita Skořepová is an anthropologist and ethnomusicologist who received a PhD in General Anthropology from Charles University (Prague, Czech Republic) in 2015. She conducted research on the musical self-presentations of immigrants in the Czech Republic and musical activities of Czech minorities in Vienna. She is currently appointed as an early career researcher at the Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences. Her research interests include anthropology of music, urban ethnomusicology, music of minorities, folklore revival movements in the Czech Republic, identity and cultural memory.
Notes
1 This is especially the case of projects undertaken by the Institute for Contemporary History at the Czech Academy of Sciences (Vaněk Citation2010a: 37–50), or work dealing with the memory of Communism by the French sociologist Françoise Mayer (Citation2004).
2 Paměť národa is ‘one of Europe’s most extensive collections of life stories, which illustrate how the totalitarian regimes impacted individual lives, and allow for uncovering of their substance. For more details, refer to https://www.pametnaroda.cz/en (Retrieved 14 February 2019).
3 While ‘national memory tends to make a single teleological plot’, ‘shared everyday frameworks of cultural memory offer us mere signposts for individual reminiscences that could suggest multiple narratives’, ‘having a certain syntax, but no single plot’ (Boym Citation2001: 88–89).
4 For details, see Jirous (Citation2006: 7–32).
5 See http://www.festivaltrutnoff.cz/english (Retrieved 14 February 2019).
6 See https://www.divadlokalich.cz (Retrieved 18 February 2019).
7 Dáša Vokatá – 9 September 2013, Vienna; 18 February 2015 and 23 May 2018, Prague. Oldřich Kaiser – 18 February 2015, Prague.
8 The biographical interviews were conducted according to recommended techniques outlined and practiced by oral historians (see, e.g. Quinlan and Sommer Citation2009).
9 Being a native speaker in Czech language, I conducted all the interviews in Czech.
10 For more on this, see Maderová et al. (Citation2013).
11 For more on Czech singers-songwriters, see Houda (Citation2008).
12 ‘The poet with the guitar’, whose protest songs spoke against the Communist regime and particularly against the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. See Denčevová and Stehlík (Citation2014) or Čermák (Citation2001).
13 See final section of Jirous’ Report on the Third Czech Musical Revival (Jirous Citation2006: 30–31).
14 Members of the community were, therefore, often outclassed on account of having the wrong political background, having a history of offences or disorderly conduct and harbouring anti-socialist views; they were prevented from enrolling in higher education and thus had to make a living by manual labour (cf. Pažout Citation2017).
15 Members of underground communities and residents of ‘open houses’ lived together, often working in agriculture and sharing everyday duties including child raising.
16 ‘Magor’ can be roughly translated into English as ‘shithead’, ‘loony’, or ‘fool’.
17 The typescript document ‘Charta 77: Síla slabých’ (Charter 77: The Strength of the Weak) was created by an unofficial civic initiative of dissidents who expressed public criticism of the violation of human rights in Communist Czechoslovakia. For more detail and the direct connection of Charter 77 to Czechoslovak underground musicians, see Skilling (Citation1980).
18 Interview with Dáša Vokatá (9 September 2013 – Vienna).
19 Indeed, DášaVokatá had performed with the saxophone player of Psí vojáci several years before pairing up with Oldřich Kaiser and returning to the Czech music scene.
20 In 2014, The Plastic People of the Universe recorded a remake of their 1981 album Co znamená vésti koně with Brno Philharmonic.
21 Despite that, the general image of the underground and its fans is an ambivalent one. The undergrounders are officially recognised as fighters against Communist totalitarians. However, a small number of Czechs agree with the previous Communist propaganda that they are also thought of as drunkards, losers and troublemakers while their activities are thought to be of hardly any artistic value.
22 This section is based on data retrieved from the biographical interviews realised with Dáša Vokatá (9 September 2013 – Vienna) and Oldřich Kaiser (18 February 2015).
23 Recordings of Nachtasyl performances from the late 1980s courtesy of Jiří Chmel.
24 For more on Oldřich Kaiser, see Fikejz (Citation2009: 558–560).
25 Developed in the late nineteenth century in Russia, estrada show is a specific entertainment format which spread throughout the Soviet Union and into the socialist countries of eastern and central Europe. Consisting of self-contained numbers, the estrada shows draw on a wide range of art forms and may include popular music, comedy and satire, the recitation of poems, dance and circus acts. For more on estrada as an example of musical relics of socialism, intersection between popular music and state politics, see Klenke (Citation2019: 13).
26 When asked about his contacts with the underground, Kaiser said,
Of course I knew what it was, but I didn’t have a single chance to meet any of those people. I suppose I regret it a little. You know, someone would bring some stuff or petition to the theatre, but otherwise I had no contact with the underground. What a pity. It must have been horribly beautiful.
27 The series remains controversial. It was made to present TV audiences with the ‘correct’ interpretation of major criminal cases which occurred in Czechoslovakia between 1945 and 1975 (Růžička Citation2005).
28 Recordings from the years 1976–1989 are featured on a retrospective album entitled Najdi místo pro radost (Find a place for fun), published by Guerilla Records in the Czech Republic in 2011.
29 Můj milý and other songs are available at Vokatá’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/DagmarVokata (Retrieved 12 August 2019).
30 President of Czechoslovakia in the normalisation period.
31 Jiřina Švorcová made regular appearances in Czechoslovak television and films in the post-1968 normalisation period (Rohál Citation2011). The 1977 series Žena za pultem centred on the everyday life of a supermarket shop-assistant, Anna Holubová, and her colleagues in the days of real socialism.
32 Undergrounder is an approximate English translation for androš, a colloquial term in Czech for an underground sympathiser, member of the underground community.
33 ‘Vzpomínka na Mejlu’, Remembering Mejla, held at the Club Fléda, Brno, on 8 March 2014.
34 ‘Zpívání u Karla’, A singing party at Karel’s place, held on 10 April 2014; a commemoration of Ivan Martin Jirous at 24 Na Neklance Street on 27 September 2014.
35 See https://www.facebook.com/kaiser.vokata (Retrieved 14 February 2019).
36 The underground and the events of 1976 are covered by Episode 7, titled ‘Je to jen rock’n’roll’ (It’s no more than rock’n’roll).
37 Contemporary festivals referring to pre-1989 underground balance between restorative and reflective nostalgia (cf. Boym Citation2001: 70–89). While there is a conscious effort of ‘return to the original stasis’ and perfect snapshot of the past on the one hand, where the same people who know each other from the 1970s meet to listen to the same bands and their repertoire, the context of legality and of officially-recognised heroic status of the former Czechoslovak underground provide the material for reflective nostalgia.
38 For comparison of this phenomenon with the case of Hungarian underground musicians, see Szemere (Citation2001: 180–192).
39 For more on music and conflict, conflict transformation and reconciliation, see King and Tan (Citation2014); O’Connell and Castelo-Branco (Citation2010); Urbain (Citation2015) or Brinner (Citation2009).
40 ‘Reflective nostalgia allows us to distinguish between national memory that is based on a single plot of national identity, and social memory, which consists of collective frameworks that mark but do not define the individual memory’. (Boym Citation2001: 20).
41 Ageing undergrounders, conformists in their fifties or sixties and a heterogeneous group of younger generation people in their thirties.
42 Pravdivý příběh Plastic People (The Plastic People: The True Story, Jirous Citation2010). Kaiser had been hired for the recording by Czech Radio.
43 Kalich is now one of the private theatres with the best ticket sales in the country. Launched in 1999, it is the brainchild of the producer and actor Michal Kocourek, founder of five theatres and a concert agency, and a collaborator of many Czech show business stars. The repertoire revolves around a wide range of styles and genres in international and Czech drama, musicals and concerts.