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Music from an Objective Machine: Folk Music and the Phonograph
Kratochvíl, Matěj
Sound recording began to play a more important role in many areas of human life from the end of the 19th century. The influence of this technology was manifested the most significantly in the area of music industry, where a new form of music consumption was born with the invention and spreading of Edison’s phonograph. In addition, however, this invention influenced the sphere of science as well. The field called ethnomusicology now started to form in approximately the same time that the phonograph appeared, and it may be said that without this device ethnomusicology would have never been what it is today. The possibility of capturing the elusive musical expression, play and study it over and over again, opened a path for scientists to grasp the music cultures of the whole world without being limited by the system of European music notation. At the same time, however, sound recording brought various limitations as well as the danger of a distorted perception of sound sources, and directed the speculations of music towards certain stereotypes, with which ethnomusicology was then coping for a large part of the 20th century. In the Bohemian Lands, the awareness of the technical novelty spread relatively soon among the lay public as well as in the academic circles, but its practical application in the area of the documentation of traditional music culture in the period before World War I was relatively rare. The sound documents that have been preserved were not published until the last decades.
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The Blacks and the car
Winter, Tomáš
The article studies the development of the caricatures on the theme of relation of the man and the machine. Particular attention is devoted to the works of Antonín Pelc and Adolf Hoffmeister. The study also treats the way of the confrontation of the European and "primitive" culture in the Náprstek Museum in Prague.
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The panorama and techniques of illusion
Machalíková, Pavla
The panorama became from the end of the 18th century a very popular entertainment. Soon after the invention of the medium, the panoramas of Vienna and Prague were exhibited (1803 and 1804). The text based on the analysis of a so far unknown description of the Viennese panorama investigates the reception of the panorama paintings.
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Inovations in the time of privileges: Höchenberger's invention of the field printery
Wögerbauer, Michael
The text analyses the attempts of the Prague book printer Jan Tomas Höchenberger to obtain the privileged position of a military book printer in the 1770s, hence at the time when it was difficult for new companies to win recognition against the obsolete system of privileges. After the first, unsuccessful attempt in 1779-1780, he applied for the privilege again with a 'filed printing press on a cart', which was labelled by both the author and the historian Josef Dobrovský as Höchenberger's 'own invention'. The attempt to obtain the privilege is analysed on the background of the stiffness of the existing system of privileges and on the basis of the thesis of the French book historian Frederic Barbier that at the end of the 18th century there was 'the second book revolution', which however unlike the first (Gutenberg's invention) and third (digitisation) was not characterised by technical progress but by the spreading and democratisation of printed communication. On this background, Höchenberger's attempt is all the more remarkable in that field printing presses fulfil the need of administering the new 'people's' armies and communicating with the growing number of the soldiers that do not fight as mercenaries for money but for their 'country' and 'nation'.
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Machine Work. On the Technology of Writing before 1914
Piorecká, Kateřina
The typewriter was a novelty in the Czech milieu at the beginning of the 1890s, which is evidenced by both the popularisation articles in dailies and professional journals and the first satires. Despite the parallel existence of multiple competing systems, the typewriter gradually found its application in administration (including the administration of publishing houses and periodicals), but very slowly in the creative sphere. A handwritten manuscript was considered to be an expression of the personality of its author and was highly valued in particular in connection with literary production. Generations of symbolists and decadents therefore placed emphasis on calligraphic writing. A writer initially selected a typewriter for very pragmatic reasons: joint diseases etc.); 2) the legibility of the resulting text (as a consequence of changes in typesetting technology and its multiple acceleration, the requirements on the handwritten text became much stricter); 3) the anonymity of the text (unlike the handwriting, the typescript does not point directly to its author). However, a typewriter found favourers among writers, it was used by Josef Kalousek or Eliška Krásnohorská, Václav Tille or Karel Matěj Čapek Chod.
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