Syllabus
Thematic blocks:
1. Folk music as a social phenomenon in the late-socialist Czechoslovakia
2. Czech folk music among ‘gray zone’ – political opposition – state power in the 1970s and 1980s
3. Jaromír Nohavica as a case study (problems of bargaining with the state institutions in 1980s)
4. Folk music after 1989 (the loss of its Impact in new political system)
Annotation
Students of this course will be introduced to folk music in Czechoslovakia (with overlaps with other semi-official music genres and others countries of Central and Eastern Europe) not as a "place of protest" (in layman's terms
"protest against communism"...), but as a phenomenon by means of which the potential of the late socialist system can be glimpsed to include and process into itself and the elements of transgression - despite the general feeling that it was already an ossified society incapable of development. In another words, the folk community will not be depicted as a place "outside" the system (something like "out communism, inside - at the concert - freedom"), but on the contrary as a full-fledged part of the system, as a place whose through the late socialist community was not only renewed, but even strengthened Czechoslovakia.