Kosmopolitismus v Praze and The Question of Czech Authenticity

Thesis

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in the

Graduate School of The Ohio State University

By

Andrew Brinkman

Graduate Program in Music

The Ohio State University

2020

Thesis Committee

Ryan Skinner, Advisor

Daniel Shanahan

Arved Ashby

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Copyrighted by

Andrew Brinkman

2020

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Abstract

Cosmopolitanism, in all its forms, shares a few common facets to its definition that can be applied to the modern day musical scene in the city of Prague in the Czech Republic.

Since the Velvet Revolution of the 1990s, Prague has seen an explosive growth in cultural development and outreach, pulling in tourists and immigrants from all over the globe. The resultant mix of people in this city has resulted in a distinctly cosmopolitan place, where all kinds of cultures are able to flourish freely in a stable and welcoming environment. Amidst the flourishing cosmopolitan scene in Prague is also a deep desire to keep the Czech identity alive and growing. However, it is not clear exactly what that

Czech identity is, and what kinds of music get to be a part of it. In this thesis, I examine the ways that cosmopolitanism manifests itself in Prague through a musical lens that focuses on the question of authenticity.

Throughout the following chapters, I present three case studies of ethnographic fieldwork conducted during a summer visit to Prague in 2019. During that time, was exposed to several spaces where Czech and non-Czech musical elements swirled and combined with one another. I also met and spoke with close Czech and non-Czech interlocutors who willingly shared their ideas with me concerning what it means to be a

Czech or non-Czech musician in Prague. Alongside a presentation of these events is a thorough analysis of the different kinds of cosmopolitanisms that are occurring in

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Prague’s musical scene. This all culminates in a broad analysis of what it means to make or create “authentically Czech” music and an in-depth look at how the category of

“Czech music” is expanding considerably in the Czech Republic’s relatively new era of democracy

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Acknowledgments

Without the help of my advisors and faculty support of the Ohio State University. Great thanks is given to all of these people for their dedication to making my thesis a reality and to God who has stood by me every step of the way.

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Vita

2014 ...... B.A. Music Education, Midwestern State University

2016 ...... M.M, Music Theory, Louisiana State University

2016 to present...... Graduate Teaching Assistant, Department of

Music, The Ohio State University

Publications

Brinkman, A., & Huron, D. (2018). The leading sixth scale degree: A test of Day-

O'Connell's theory. Journal of New Music Research, 47(2), 166-175.

Fields of Study

Major Field: Music

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Table of Contents

Abstract ...... iii Acknowledgments...... v Vita ...... vi Introduction ...... 1 Chapter 1: Czech and Hindustani Influences ...... 12 Conclusion ...... 36 Chapter 2 – Buskers and the Street Aesthetic ...... 41 Conclusion ...... 54 Chapter 3 – Impromptu Cosmopolitanism ...... 59 Conclusion ...... 70 Final Thoughts ...... 74 Bibliography ...... 78

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Introduction

In today’s current socio-cultural environment, one in which Western ideologies and notions are giving way to a more globally diverse conversation, some European groups have gone relatively unnoticed. The Central Slavic region of Europe is one such group that has seen a long and turbulent history involving centuries of domination, war, and oppressive philosophies.1 However, in the post-communist era, many nations in

Central Europe have slowly developed their own independent cultures, free from the limiting forces of outside influences. That is not to say that these independent cultures were not always there, hidden underneath the surface of the current hegemony. However, without the potential to govern themselves and burdened by the cultural pressure put on these local cultures by oppressive regimes, the Central Slavic cultures have long struggled with establishing strong cultural identities. This phenomenon can easily be seen in the Czech Republic, where the struggle to carefully grow nationalist sentiment without radicalizing through the late-19th through early-20th century found near constant hassle

1 Examples of this can be traced all the way back to 16th century politics and monarchal relationships. Before the year 1526, Bohemia (the western portion of what would later be known as the Czech Republic, an area of Europe including Prague as its capital) was largely an independent nation operating at times without foreign influence and at times as a member of the Holy Roman Empire. Due in large part to the nature of kingdom succession, in 1526 Bohemia came under the rule of Archduke Ferdinand I of Austria. Since that point until the end of World War I, Bohemia would continuously be under the rule of the Austro- Hungarian Empire. During the time period from the 16th-20th centuries, Bohemian peoples would experience a fair amount of oppression from the Austrian government. Examples of this can be seen in the shift away from the use of the Czech language in favor of German, a constant movement of educated peoples away from Prague to Vienna and other parts of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and constant pressure to limit independent cultural thought. 1 from forces involved in various German nationalist parties.2 Following the World Wars,

Czech people then had to contend with various communist regimes lasting until the

“Velvet Revolution” of 1993. Over the recent few decades, urban centers in the Czech

Republic have seen rapid economic and cultural growth, quickly catching up to globalist trends in Western Europe and abroad. Outside of urban centers, rural Moravia and parts outside of Prague have experienced, and continue to experience explosions of cultural growth and development through a renewed emphasis of traditional customs and practices mixed with the experiences of living in the modern era.3

In this thesis, I am explicitly interested in how Prague, the capital of the Czech

Republic, has been shaped by both the sudden surge of independent cultural growth in the last two decades and the welcoming of the cultural influence of the “non-Czech”.4

Specifically, I am interested in how cosmopolitan ideas have both influenced and been influenced by the current musical environment in Prague. The rapid development of a uniquely cosmopolitan Czech culture brings with it some questions. How did this Czech cosmopolitanism develop? Where and when did it arise? And perhaps most pertinently, exactly what does this cosmopolitanism sound like? While I cannot expect to answer

2 Breuilly, Nationalism and the State; Pierre, Bedřich Smetana. 3 Examples of this can be seen the frequent folk festivals and rural festivities associated with regions like Moravia. Searches for traditional music festivals in various parts of the Czech Republic result in several annual festivals including Jízda králů in Vlčnov, held every May, the various International Folk Festivals held in different parts of the Czech Republic at various times, and the Slovácký rok, the oldest Moravian folklore festival. 4 I will be using the term “non-Czech” throughout this thesis as comparable synonym to the “Other”, a term favored by Levinas (Humanism of the Other; “The Trace of the Other.”). However, in recent years this term holds within it much academic baggage that I do not wish to carry over into this discussion. While there are a lot of implications in the term “non-Czech,” these are implications that I will attempt to address during the course of this thesis, while I defer to better academics than I to unpack the term “Other” in their own work outside of the confines of this current document. 2 these questions in this thesis, I hope to address them from the Praguean perspective, through the words, stories, experiences of Czech-natives and non-Czechs (in which I include myself as a non-Czech), to provide a snapshot of the current Czech cosmopolitan climate.

I have chosen to frame the current discussion by focusing on the Praguean perspective to better draw attention to the specific cultural mixtures and relationships between “Czech” and “non-Czech” musical practices in Prague. As so many have pointed out before, music is not and cannot be divorced from notions of sociality and community.5 To determine what elements of Czech and non-Czech music in Prague sounds like in the modern landscape, we must examine the multitude of ways that music exists in the current Czech environment. Modern Czech music in Prague is saturated in distinctly “non-Czech” elements. From the music that plays from stores dotting busy sidewalks to the sounds coming from the local street musician in the middle of Charles

Bridge, one hears a diverse number of different musical styles and practices. The sheer enormity of diverse musical practices that one encounters while wandering the streets of

Prague seems to suggest that this capital of Czech culture has been overrun by globalization to the point where Czech musical culture is all but eradicated, as was once suggested by a close friend and Prague native (this individual will be introduced and his words analyzed in more detail in Chapter 2). In the case studies presented in the Chapters below, we shall see that this is not exactly the case. In today’s current socio-cultural

5 This topic has been explored by a wide variety of scholars, but some of the primary influences for the work in this thesis come from the following authors and their works.: Feld, Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra; Feld, “Sound Structure as Social Structure”; Steingo, Kwaito’s Promise; Skinner, Bamako Sounds; Agawu, The African Imagination in Music. 3 environment, Prague’s diverse musical landscape is distinctly Czech, but with a new foundation of what constitutes, in Beckerman's terms “Czechness”.6

When I started my fieldwork in Prague this past summer of 2019, I had already come into my own ideas of what modern Czech music might be. At times, these ideas were not explicitly linked to non-Czech elements, while at others the non-Czech element served as the foundational principles of Czech musical practice. Research like that found in Lee Bidgood’s ethnography of Czech bluegrass suggested that I might find elements of

Czech music that would be heavily related to American vernacular music.7 Exposure to

Czech pop music through online media suggested that I should find music deriving heavily from mainstream popular song artists, often frequently originated from the U.S. or the United Kingdom. Still further, what little scholarly work that does exist on Czech folk music suggested that I might even hear something uniquely “Czech”. That is, I might expect to find music wholly unlike those styles represented in Western popular music genres and independent from any apparent outside influence. At the time, it was unclear what that “Czech” sound would be, but I was certain I would know what it was when I heard it. Therefore, much of my fieldwork experience in Prague was meant to discover and explore places where such “Czech” music might exist. In my mind, my task was not to find music that sounded “Czech” but to get an idea of what the idea of “Czech” music meant to people living in and around Prague. Imagine my surprise when the distinctly

6 Beckerman, “In Search of Czechness in Music.” 7 Bidgood, Czech Bluegrass. 4

“Czech” musical experiences that I stumbled upon did not fit into any of my preconceived expectations.

In the past, especially during the 19th century, Czech music has been synonymous with the tenacity of the Czech spirit. Czech music entails a combination of Western and

Eastern European influences apparent in its musical structure, organization, form, and performance practices.8 Throughout the early- to mid-20th century, Czech culture, perhaps in spite of the oppressive communist regime, embraced some specific

Americanized musical elements.9. Yet, if my fieldwork in Prague is to suggest anything, the idea that the musical culture in Prague today is only some “Czechized” variant of

American popular music stands upon a shaky foundation. In Prague, one hears a plethora musical styles and genres. At any moment, one might be exposed to American pop songs,

Hispanic-influenced mariachi-style music, Indian-style rags, Brazilian bossa nova,

Westernized Vietnamese sounds, Eastern European folk dances, and, of course, Czech bluegrass. In a society that just recently removed the shackles of old communist party dominance, how is it that such a variety of cosmopolitan perspectives on music have emerged? Or even more specifically, how might the combination of all these different musical influences within a Praguean sphere of music attain the status of

“cosmopolitan”?

8 Once again, the literature for this field is extensive but some of the more relevant work for this thesis includes: Beckerman, Janáček as Theorist; Large, Smetana; Clapham, Antonín Dvořák; Bidgood, Czech Bluegrass; Pierre, Bedřich Smetana; Beckerman, “In Search of Czechness in Music.” 9 The most noteworthy of which being folk and bluegrass musics. That is not to say that jazz has not also played a role in Czech music at this time. However, as American ethnomusicologist and Czech music enthusiast Lee Bidgood notes, some Americanized musical forms were still mildly disapproved of by the ruling Czech communist party. For many detailed reasons that Bidgood points out in his work, the few Americanized song forms that were able to flourish during this time were folk and bluegrass music 5

In his article on the idea and advocacy of a cosmopolitan culture, cultural philosopher and theorist Kwame Anthony Appiah describes the various factors and definitions that go into the term “cosmopolitan”.10 Cosmopolitanism is the idea that different people have different cultural backgrounds and foundations and that these cultural structures both interact with and are separate from those of the people around them. Appiah describes “rooted cosmopolitanism” as a phenomenon in which

“cosmopolitans” are those individuals who push for an all-embracing cultural environment while still striving for their own cultural independence. Appiah’s ideas are distinctly different from his contemporaries, though his argument for the “cosmopolitan” is most reflective of the sentiment of many Czech natives I encountered in Prague.11 In this thesis and where relevant, I point out how cosmopolitan ideas manifest themselves in the experiences and perspectives of my interlocutors and myself. Along the way, we find that different aspects of cosmopolitanism arise in different contexts. For instance, the nature of my experience performing with an impromptu group of Czech and non-Czech musicians in a local bar in Prague (presented in Chapter 3) speaks heavily to the active and multicultural experience of ethnomusicologist Steven Feld’s interactions in Accra.12

Discussions with close friends on the role of “Czech” culture within the cosmopolitan landscape of Prague (in Chapter 2) emphasize their experiences of a kind of “vernacular

10 Appiah, “Cosmopolitan Patriots.” 11 In particular, I would argue that Appiah’s “rooted cosmopolitanism” differs strongly most strongly from that of Paul Gilroy’s notion of cosmopolitanism in which individuals should attempt to distance themselves from any notion of a familiar culture (Gilroy, After Empire). In doing so, we gradually eliminate the idea of the “familiar” and the extremist notions that, in Gilroy’s mind, result from it such as segregationism, nationalism, or even racism and xenophobia. 12 Feld, Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra. 6 cosmopolitanism”, one driven by a need to keep up with globalization, as suggested by

Hall and Werbner.13 Finally, in discussions and observations with non-Czechs and ex- patriots (in Chapters 1 and 3) notions of the “Other’s” relationship with the native-Czech are explored, drawing on older notions of cosmopolitanism presented by Levinas,

Derrida, and the Stoics.14

My argument is a relatively simple one. Based on my experiences in Prague, I believe that Czech music, at least within the confines of the nation’s capital, has broken out of the Bohemian nationalist shell of the 19th and early 20th centuries. To find itself in today’s globalized environment, performers of “Czech” music have embraced many musical styles and practices from the many and diverse Prague inhabitants and visitors.

The result is a new and yet distinctly “Czech” music, the likes of which is characterized by its shifting reliance on and borrowing of different musical styles within an environment dictated and held together by an over-arching Czech culture. It is for this reason that I believe Appiah’s notion of cosmopolitanism is a most pertinent descriptor of

Praguean musical culture. In the chapters that follow, I present a few case studies of ethnographic fieldwork that corroborate this idea, drawing on perspectives of interlocutors that wish to keep alive the notion of a distinctly Czech musical culture, but one that allows for, embraces, and perhaps even prefers the musical practices of the non-

Czech. I recognize that I have only scratched the surface of cosmopolitanism in Prague,

13 Hall, “Cosmopolitanism-Conversation with Stuart Hall”; Werbner, “Vernacular Cosmopolitanism.” 14 Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness; Nussbaum, “Kant and Stoic Cosmopolitanism.” 7 but I hope that these case studies will provide an initial starting point for further research into this topic.

The three case studies presented in this thesis are meant to provide a personal, narrative experience of interacting with musical cosmopolitanism in Prague. Each of the following chapters addresses one of the case studies. The bulk of each chapter involves descriptions of first-hand cosmopolitan experiences in various musical spaces across

Prague either through my perspective or through the perspectives of interlocutors encountered along the way. In addition, I provide some context regarding how these experiences might be interpreted as unique musical environments that exist simultaneously as distinctly non-Czech and wholly Czech cultural practices thus embracing the notion of a unique Czech cosmopolitanism.

In Chapter 1, I describe the intersection of Czech and Northern Indian cultures, and the resultant cosmopolitan perspectives of the individuals present at the event, through my (and others) experiences listening to, participating in, and learning from a performance of Hindustani ragas by a musician trained in Northern India and raised in

France. I describe the multicultural background of our teacher, pointing out, in his own words, his embrace of Hindustani music and separation from complete Hindustani identity. For instance, our teacher prohibited us from referring to him as our teacher, citing that he still had much of his own learning and growing to do before reaching, in his mind, this rather unobtainable status. In addition, this chapter introduces the groundwork ideas behind aspects of a unique Czech cosmopolitan relationship. I explore the relationship between ideas of what constitutes a typical musical experience in Prague,

8 one that many suppose is heavily based on Western influences, and points of intersection with the musical Other, a group that is at once welcomed by Czech culture while kept sufficiently distant from it. I describe Czech music in its relationship with Western music more broadly directly through my interactions with British, Czech, French, and American notions of musicality. I then describe how my fellow interlocutors and myself interacted with what many considered to be a wholly foreign experience, using as its focus

Hindustani music in Prague and its relationship to the quickly growing cosmopolitan musical sentiment in the city.

In Chapter 2, I examine how the definition of Czech music has broadened alongside the growth of Prague as a tourist destination through my experiences with local buskers and street musicians and in discussions with Czech natives. I wrestle with notions of what defines “authentically Czech” music as I recount my exposure to performances by individuals who were obviously intending to profit (at least in part) from tourism, and the personal experiences provided by native Czech friends who accompanied me on this journey. I am specifically interested in how my Czech interlocutors frame the idea of an

“authentic Czech” music within an environment in which many musics from widely diverse backgrounds coexist. I discuss how their definitions of “Czech music” fluctuate and become nebulous in the face of welcomed outside influences. What does it mean to perform Russian folk music on the steps of a Prague cathedral? How does the tourist or globalist definition of Czech music allow for Portuguese fado guitar? Or even Mexican mariachi-style performances? At the core of this chapter is a detailed look at how these

9 various non-Czech elements have started (and continue) to influence how both native

Czechs and non-Czechs hear “authentic Czech” music.

Chapter 3 addresses the idea of a unique Czech cosmopolitan musical practices and its place within modern conceptions of more global cosmopolitan perspectives. In this chapter, I present how performing with an impromptu group of musicians in a local

Prague bar might be considered a distinctly “Czech” musical experience even though none of the music performed there fits into the category of “authentic Czech” music. In addition, I discuss how this Czech musical experience includes multiple different global popular music perspectives including blues, rock, hip-hop, jazz, and other mainstream styles found in different cultural contexts across the globe. I describe how the participation and observation of these musical experiences help to build a foundation for what might constitute major aspects of Czech cosmopolitanism. In large part, this chapter serves as a perspective on how non-Czech and Czech musics have interacted and how both Czech and non-Czech musicians and listeners interact with, and help to define, these musics.

It is my hope that the following chapters help to bolster discussion regarding what might be considered “Czech music” and its relationship to other musics, at least in the urban context of Prague, today. As an often under-represented musical voice in Europe, it is time that we allow the Czech voice to sing out, regardless of whether that voice is one resounding call, the result of a mix of different cultural perspectives on music through a distinctly Czech lens or a multitude of voices, singing out through the shared medium of

Prague and the Czech sentiment. The work presented in this thesis is an attempt to allow

10 that or those voice(s) to rise, to help draw attention to it/them, and to start a discussion on how that or those voice(s) might be interpreted. This work is ultimately the first steps towards a more comprehensive research agenda that holds modern Czech music as its focus. Perhaps by presenting and commenting on these case studies, we might begin to approach a more well-informed knowledge and understanding of, in Czech musicologist

Michael Beckerman’s words, “what makes Czech music ‘Czech’”.15

15 Beckerman, “In Search of Czechness in Music.”, 62 11

Chapter 1: Czech and Hindustani Influences

Shortly after arriving in Prague for my fieldwork research, I was lost in deciding where to begin my endeavors. I knew I would only be in Prague for a month and that meant that I needed to explore as many musical spaces as possible. The problem was that

I did not know what kinds of musical spaces existed in Prague. The simplest step forward would have been to go to a local club or bar that likely would have some kind of music going on. However, I found that many of these places preferred to play recorded music through the local sound system rather than allow for live performing musicians. I do not wish to suggest that this would not be an interesting topic of Czech music to explore further, but, for me, I wanted to experience a more “hands-on”, live experience of Czech music.16 I expressed this sentiment frequently with the hosts that I stayed with during this month-long period. On several occasions, these individuals (a single mother of two from the U.K. and her long-time boyfriend, an American self-described ex-patriot) enthusiastically exclaimed that they knew of plenty of spaces and musicians in Prague that would be of interest to me. Finally, during a moment where John and Mary had a break day from work, they were able to schedule some time to show me around town and to present some of these kinds of spaces and people to me.17 One such place will be

16 I should note that these initial “unsuccessful” expeditions into Czech music were not completely unfruitful. I notice that many of these spaces that played recorded music often played American or British pop/rock music. It was rather infrequent for me to encounter Czech pop/rock music. Most spaces that played this kind of music were very obviously catering towards its Czech constituents rather than the occasional summer tourist. Later, after approaching the topic of a Czech cosmopolitanism, I looked back on this experience as one that first exposed me to elements of this cosmopolitanism. The presence and mixture of American pop music in more tourist-friendly spaces with Czech music in the more residential or “unexplored” spaces seems to be a potential element of the kind of Czech cosmopolitanism I explore in this paper, though one that I will not dwell on. 17 All names used in this thesis have been changed for the purposes of anonymity 12 revisited in Chapter 3. In addition, through their various connections with different local community groups, John and Mary also invited me to attend a few community events that they hosted in their large, refurbished gathering space. These events frequently involved inviting local Prague residents to come enjoy watching a movie together, doing group yoga and meditation, discussing plans to be more climate conscious, chat about various topics of interest while enjoying one another’s company, and to listen/perform live music.

This chapter focuses on a specific event that I was invited to by my hosts, which first introduced to me a sense of the unique cosmopolitan environment in Prague.

During the second week of my trip, on a rather calm and clear evening in Prague, my hosts set their large living room up for a visit from a travelling Hindustani musician and teacher. John, a Georgia-born, self-described ex-patriot from the United States, was living in Prague to get away from what he considered to be a rather “toxic home environment”. Given John’s propensity for living in the present and his lack of interest in discussing his past, I chose not to press him too much on his past. Thankfully, during the course of my stay, John would open up a bit more as to his reasons for living in Prague, citing the lack of strict laws concerning drug use (he was an avid proponent of marijuana and LSD), the more friendly and welcoming atmosphere of Prague’s inhabitants, and, perhaps most obviously, that Prague was Mary’s home, and therefore the location of his significant other, as reasons for his continued stay. Mary had been living in Prague for the past two years or so and pointed out that one of her visits to Prague in her youth suggested that Prague would be a nicer place to live than in her hometown of London.

Dealing with the task of raising two daughters (one, described as a product of poor

13 relationship decisions and the other an adopted child and friend of the family), Mary gushed frequently about the benefits of living in the Czech Republic and claimed that she would probably stay there, as a permanent home, until her daughters were old enough to live on their own. Mary and John worked locally teaching English, Mary at a nearby middle school that catered towards immigrant populations and where her daughters attended, and John at one of Prague’s many English-language program centers meant primarily for adults wanting to broaden their language skills.18

The events that my hosts would frequently put on often occurred anywhere from twice to four times a week. As a professional yoga instructor and a fervent believer in

East Asian meditation techniques and methods of invoking and embracing the human spirit, Mary was an enthusiastic host for all kinds of events related to these topics. Most frequently, Mary would provide yoga instruction, steeped in what she considered aspects of Buddhist meditation, to the local Czech and non-Czech population. In addition to these yoga sessions, Mary would allow local practitioners of Buddhist meditation to come and instruct attendees on the finer points of accessing the “inner spirit” through group meditation. A large majority of those who would stop by tended to be American or

18 Interestingly enough, the large number of such programs in and around Prague suggests a growing need for a kind of “vernacular cosmopolitanism” as suggest by Stuart Hall and Pnina Werbner. Perhaps as part of the burgeoning process of globalization present in the newly-democratic nations of the Central Slavic region, it seems to be the case that many Czech natives are forced to become more “cosmopolitan” in order to obtain jobs in growing, multinational industries found both within and outside of the Czech Republic. In talking with younger Czech natives (individuals introduced in Chapter 2), this is less of a problem for the younger generation who are often taught to speak and read English before graduating public school. When asked about the nature of a kind of linguistic cosmopolitanism and its workings in Prague, both John and Honza (an interlocutor introduced in Chapter 2) mentioned that Czechs were becoming more and more likely to learn languages like English and German, and that this requirement in order for individual success has been met with a mixed reception by native Czechs. 14

English ex-patriots, followed by Czech natives and a small minority of individuals from all over the globe.

Here, I use the term “ex-patriot” as the label for a specific sample of the non-

Czech population. In discussions with John, Mary, and the different American and

English attendees I encountered over my month-long trip, this was the label that they gave to themselves to describe their specific living situations in Prague. The common thread among those who preferred this label was the distinctly American or English origin combined with a similar dissatisfaction with their hometown, state, or even nation more broadly. John and Mary, for instance, seemed to use the term as way of distancing themselves from their American and English roots rather than to suggest that they were somehow more “worldly” or more cosmopolitan than those around them. Their perspective on the term “ex-patriot”, and the one I will adopt for this thesis, is admittedly, perhaps rather different from more conventional definitions of the term. However, I want to stress that, in the minds of my interlocutors, being an ex-patriot was not exactly something one aspires to be. I do not believe that they would say that being an ex-patriot somehow made them more cosmopolitan. It was only a label used to describe their specific living situation. I could imagine that some non-Czechs living in Prague perhaps believed themselves to be “ex-patriots” in the sense of having the privilege and financial opportunity to live in Prague while still leaving their roots happily in their birthplace, therefore enabling them to hold a “citizen of the world”-like cosmopolitan status while keeping some welcome sense of familiarity. Yet, the interlocutors with whom I interacted during my travels had a distinctly different view of this label.

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While the various social events hosted by John and Mary helped foster communal sentiments in the local non-Czech population, for the Czech natives who attended in equal, if not higher, numbers than non-Czechs these events fulfilled many different purposes. For instance, these events provided the ability for Czechs to talk and interact with what they considered to be “foreigners” (though perhaps non-Czechs is a more apt categorization here). Many expressed that it was nice to practice their English at these events, to experience cultural practices and customs rather distant from their own, and to explore their own interests in popular aspects of East Asian culture. For the non-Czechs who did not self-identify as ex-patriots (often individuals visiting from various home countries across Europe), these events were often opportunities for them to meet local inhabitants and visitors to Prague within the context of a shared interested in developing the mind and body using meditation techniques. One Russian native (a student visiting

Prague for the summer) expressed excitement at having the chance to meet so many people, to experience these different East Asian practices, and to practice their Czech and

English skills. This individual would attend the events hosted by Mary and John frequently as a way of embracing, in her mind, a cosmopolitan environment which deemphasized the importance of cultural borders. One in which individuals of many cultural backgrounds could share their experiences with one another under the Prague skyline and that was distinctly different from her own back home.

In the days leading up to the event, Mary was informed of the fact that a travelling

Hindustani musician and teacher was staying in Prague for a few days. In her mind, because so many of their hosted events leaned heavily on North Indian cultural practices,

16 and because the community was deeply interested in learning more about such things, she felt that she had to invite him to come to their humble gathering space, talk about his background, and perhaps even put on a small concert. In Mary’s opinion, the opportunity to invite someone she thought was a fervent practitioner of the kinds of Indian practices and sensibilities that her group often espoused to come and give a lesson and performance was one that she could not miss. Therefore, through discussions, phone calls, and meetings with many friends of friends, Mary was able to invite our Hindustani teacher (I use the possessive pronoun to refer to the fact that I was also his student that evening) to come and give us all a lesson on Hindustani music and play a few songs. Our teacher was more than delighted to be invited to do this for us and readily agreed. It is through this series of introductions and discussions that Hindustani music was brought to a distinctly cosmopolitan audience, one representing not so much a group of “worldly” or

“well-travelled” individuals, coming from a place of financial or cultural privilege or status, but instead representing the gathering of people from various cultural backgrounds, each with their own unique experiences and histories, holding perspectives both affected by their cultural upbringing (one inherently influenced by nationality) and informed by the welcoming exposure and embracing of the Other as a form of cosmopolitan hospitality in Prague.

A small gathering of individuals was in attendance that evening coming from different parts of the surrounding neighborhood. Including myself, we had individuals from American, British, Czech, Brazilian, Russian, and French-Indian background. Yes, our teacher himself was quite the cosmopolitan, in the sense that he considered himself

17 very much as, echoing older definitions of cosmopolitanism, a “citizen of the world”.

Born and raised primarily in Paris, our teacher was heavily interested in his Indian ancestry and his parents’ background. As a teen, our teacher moved out of France and travelled to various parts of India where he steeped himself in the music and culture there for many years. During that time, our teacher would frequently travel back and forth from

France to India, often by land, picking up many interesting aspects of the various cultures and peoples he encountered along the way. As a French-Indian, he felt it rather uncomfortable to be called a guru, citing that, as someone who had not been born and raised in India and steeped in true Indian culture, it was impossible for him to take up such a culturally-bound mantle of importance. In this way, his cosmopolitan upbringing, one in which he was able to travel to and from different cultural regions, all the while embracing a multitude of cultural backgrounds and experiences, prohibited him from placing his own personal experiences wholly within the Indian context.

Our teacher’s background, for him, was both a blessing and a curse. While the constant travel from place to place would allow him to meet people of many experiences, expose him to many cultural practices, and present him with the opportunity to learn from many people about what it meant to perform Hindustani music, this same trans-cultural background would prohibit him from completely adopting the life of an authentically

Indian Hindustani musician.19 In his mind, because he was not born and raised in India,

19 It should be made clear that our Hindustani teacher was himself not exactly what one would consider a “financially-successful” individual. His travel from France to India was often one that involved extensive travel by land, using his musical experience to help open doors for travel. He talked frequently about playing small concerts or giving lessons in exchange for a place to rest his head or for the price of a train ticket or bus ride to the next town. It was only later in his life that he was able to experience the luxury of 18 and because he felt strong ties to his French background, he felt that it would be inauthentic to claim such a prestigious title as “guru”, a title that, to him, necessitated a deep understanding and experience of Hindustani culture (not to mention the technical expertise itself) in order to obtain.

While I can understand and respect our teacher’s experiences and perspectives, to me and many of the people in the room that evening, listening to him talk about his life showed us an altogether different yet distinctly “guru-like” side. It did not matter to us whether or not he was “culturally-qualified” to be a guru, for those of us in the room whose experience with the outside world beyond the confines of our own living spaces was very limited, our teacher seemed an altogether more worldly-informed or distinctly

“cosmopolitan” man. In our minds, our teacher had experienced aspects of the world that many of us would likely never encounter, and he took from these encounters a well- rounded education on the diversity of cultural perspectives. Our teacher was a guru, not of Hindustani music, but of cultural experience, of cosmopolitanism itself. Certainly, his manifestation of cosmopolitanism was primarily centered on that “citizen of the world” perspective. However, I do not believe that any of us in the room felt that we had enough personal experience with the world to consider ourselves coming from the same perspective.

Our teacher could speak at great length on many different topics related to the musics of the many different people and places that he visited. Of course, his primary

air travel, citing some relative success in fostering fruitful relationships with various individuals over the course of his life as what provided this opportunity. 19 expertise was in Hindustani music, but he talked extensively about the ways he combined his Hindustani practices with those of the various styles encountered on his journeys. He discussed his performances alongside Parisian “folk musicians”, incorporating

Hindustani ragas into traditional Western melodies. He talked about his experience playing Middle Eastern instruments across parts of Turkey and Iran and how he had to perform specific songs, often in specific ways, emphasizing this or that raga, to appeal to an audience with different expectations. He mentioned several times that he attempted to incorporate Middle Eastern techniques into his performances, citing his use of varying instrumentation as a way of combining this style with Hindustani techniques. Overall, his trips from Paris to various parts of India and back were often considered some of the most memorable parts of his life, and ultimately it was this very passage that brought him to Prague on that evening.

While the cosmopolitan experience of our teacher himself is interesting, I found that the experiences of the individuals in that room with him were perhaps more indicative of the unique Prague cosmopolitan environment, one that exists separately from the “citizen of the world” perspective of our teacher. Over the course of the evening, our teacher discussed many aspects of his life, gave us all a beginner’s lesson on

Hindustani music, and performed some of his own music. In that time, and especially afterwards when I was able to speak with the individuals who participated in these events, it became clear that, while none of us, Czech or non-Czech, could say that we felt the “citizen of the world” sentiment of our teacher, our own experiences were still cosmopolitan in other ways. Many of the non-Czechs in the room discussed how they felt

20 enlightened by their experience of the event that evening, going so far as to stress how great it would be to have him return. For them, our teacher was at once someone unrelatable, in the sense that his life experiences seemed unique and foreign to their own, and someone similar to themselves, an individual who had left his home to be a part of something else. For the Czechs, those in attendance talked about how they would want to go to more concerts of this kind, to experience more Hindustani music, and to see it be performed in other areas of Prague. For them, the experiences of our teacher were ones that, while completely different from their own, should still have a place within Czech culture. Before diving into the experiences of my fellow attendees more deeply, I feel it important to describe my own experiences and perspectives on this event.

As one of two Americans in the room, and the only one who was able to stay for the whole event (John, the significant other of my host, had to leave early to get ready for his job), I must say that, were it not for my musical background, I also would have been overwhelmed by the experience (and in some ways, especially in regards to our teacher’s presentation of his background, I still was). I am not someone who has travelled extensively outside of the U.S., and to hear our teacher discuss with some individuals in the room about their multicultural experiences was rather awe-inspiring. While I marveled at the ability of my teacher and our Brazilian friends’ interest and involvement in so much travel across the globe, I also could not help but to dwell on topics related to this travel that were perhaps unique to my experience. Questions of how such frequent and long-distance travel were financially feasible danced in my head. I wondered many times what it would be like to play music in any of the places discussed by these

21 individuals. I was perhaps most intrigued by the fact that neither our teacher nor our

Brazilian friend had ever been to the U.S. and wondered what sorts of experiences they would have had in my home country.

During the music lesson, I performed the tasks given to us with relative ease.

Having been exposed to Hindustani music frequently in other contexts, these lessons were just “normal” enough to my own musical background to make them easily accessible. In a way, you could say that my experience with Hindustani music was itself cosmopolitan though from a different perspective than that of our Hindustani teacher. As a graduate student in music theory and ethnomusicology, I had been afforded the opportunity to take courses on Hindustani during my student career. In this sense, it might be relevant to point out that my cosmopolitan experience with Western and

Hindustani music comes from a place of societal or perhaps more accurately, educational privilege. Unlike both the Czechs and non-Czechs in the room, I had a background in musical training and experience with (or at least exposure to) musics of non-Western cultures. That said, while I recognize that my own experiences have afforded me with opportunities to encounter musics outside that of my own culture, I do not consider myself the kind of “citizen of the world” cosmopolitan with which our teacher identified.

Perhaps I identify more with the ethical or moral cosmopolitanism of the 20th-century philosophers like Derrida in the sense that I try my best to embrace what the Other has to offer, both consciously and unconsciously. Though, I believe that my own cosmopolitan experience is perhaps most driven by the vernacular, globalized cosmopolitanism discussed by more recent theorists (like those of Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, and Pnina

22

Werbner), one formed out of the necessity to live in a world where many important institutions (academia being one of the most relevant to myself) can no longer thrive under the confines of strictly demarcated national or cultural borders. Regardless, I tried my best that evening to allow the experience of being an American, in the Czech

Republic, learning and hearing first-hand Hindustani music to wash over me as free from the bias of my own background as I could.

During the short concert our teacher put on, in which he sang and played the sitar with a drone played through his laptop, I was primarily interested in how the people around me reacted. This was not the first time I had heard Hindustani music performed live, but it was the first time I had been a part of such an intimate concert experience.

That there were only a handful of audience members did not detract from our teacher’s performance at all. Instead, it made the concert experience all the more personal, with many of us marveling at the sounds of Hindustani singing and playing. The concert itself did not last long. Our teacher only performed two songs. However, I am certain that those in the room that evening would likely never forget the experience. The two songs that he performed each highlighted his technical mastery of the instrument and style. He managed to fill the entire room with his voice, performing masterfully while managing to encapsulate his audience. Evidence of our teacher’s “citizen of the world” cosmopolitanism poured out from his style of performance as an unequal mix of different cultural styles, practices, and elements together with different parts coming to the fore in different situations. Our teacher was singing and playing Hindustani music, but elements of his French upbringing frequently came through in his use of the French language

23 interspersed through both dialogue and in the lyrics of his songs. His French background was submissive towards his Hindustani expertise during the performance, but it was there nonetheless, and contributed to the unique sound and style his music. His lyrics were a mixture of French and Indian, yet his playing was, as far as I was aware, distinctly

Hindustani, steeped in intricate rhythmic patterns, flourishes in treatment of the raga, and immersed in formal changes between fast and slow, aggressive and relaxed emotions.

Given the way that he talked about his life travelling across the globe, it is certainly possible that other cultural elements made their way into his performance that evening, unfortunately I am perhaps not enough of a “worldly citizen” to have been able to pick them out!

At times, I could not help but to dwell on the serendipity of the event. Here I was, an American, staying in Prague, a product of the mixture between “vernacular” cosmopolitanism and “privileged” cosmopolitanism (as an American with the opportunity to fund global travel). Around me were other non-Czechs including Brits,

Brazilians and Russians exemplifying both the cultural Other juxtaposed against the

Praguean Czechs and the familiar foil counter to our Hindustani teacher (and his North

Indian experience). Altogether, the event itself was situated within a distinctly Czech context, one saturated in the urban cosmopolitan environment of Prague and drawing on the Czech sentiment for welcoming and embracing the non-Czech. At the figural head of the event stands our Hindustani teacher, providing perspectives from the “citizen of the world” cosmopolitanism.

24

During a discussion with our teacher about his multicultural background and history with Hindustani music, several people in the room interacted with him, chiming in with questions and discussion topics coming from their own cultural experience. Our

Brazilian friend questioned him thoroughly on the different countries he had been to, comparing whether or not he had also been there and discussing some of the unique aspects of those places. Frequently, over the course of the evening, our Brazilian friend stumbled with accomplishing the singing tasks, for which our Czech friends playfully teased him as he was purported to have been one of the only musicians in the group. Our

Brazilian friend retorted that his skills on the guitar were not indicative of his vocal skills and teased back that they should be singing more and joking less. The kinds of playful teasing that frequently came from our Czech friends was something I found in many encounters with Czech natives during the course of my stay.

Later on, I would find that Honza and Šárka (two close friends introduced in

Chapter 2) shared similar aspects of their personality, frequently teasing me for doing something as silly as to learn Czech and teasing each other for many silly things like wanting to take a tram instead of walking or for wanting to stop by a pub too early in the day. This teasing seems to be a way to help make the social setting feel more relaxed and welcoming. It is expected that everyone will be teased in some way while out with friends (often with the “teaser” even teasing themselves), and this social phenomenon could be found everywhere, even within the context of our Hindustani music lesson. Of course, our teacher being one used to a diverse variety of social practices was quick to notice the teasing as a way of making everyone feel as though we should not take

25 ourselves too seriously. Several times during the evening, he mentioned that singing is often a “silly practice” and that we should not “be embarrassed about the natural sounds that come from our bodies”. The welcoming and relaxed persona that our teacher adopted helped to make the more self-conscious singers in the room feel more at-ease. Mary and our Russian friend, neither of whom had any musical training (expressing afterwards that they were, as far as singing was concerned, “tone-deaf”) seemed to open up more and sing with more confidence the more that we all embraced our “natural sounds”. It seemed clear that our teacher was an expert in getting people to come out of their shell by using humor to fight unease and that the teasing and often self-directed laughs of our Czech friends helped to make our teacher’s job much easier.

Some of our Czech friends mentioned that they were intrigued by what it was like to live in India for the express purposes of learning the music, while frequently travelling to France to be with family. One of our Czech friends casually mentioned that she had never been outside of the Czech Republic and rarely leaves Prague, to which another replied that she had only been to countries around Central Europe. Having only spoken about this topic in-depth with the few close friends I made during my stay, it is unclear whether this was a typical aspect of Czech cultural life. However, as Bidgood discusses in his own ethnographic work in the Czech Republic, there is a sense that Czech natives feel strongly about keeping the Czech Republic their permanent home.20 There seems to be a need for many Czech natives to help contribute to the common growth of the Czech nation, where the “nation” is considered by many to be another name for the Czech

20 Bidgood, Czech Bluegrass. 26 culture itself. These sentiments echo a kind of cosmopolitanism in which the Czech people, while welcoming of the “foreign” or non-Czech, do feel a certain gravitation towards their fellow Czechs (perhaps leaning towards a kind of cosmopolitanism suggested by Appiah).21

There is a sense present in this close identification with Czech culture that resonates with 19th-century nationalist sentiments, but I would argue that it is an altogether different nationalism. While many Czechs feel a certain obligation for bolstering the growth of their own people, the cosmopolitan Other was not something that my Czech friends considered lesser or somehow worse, nor was it the case that the cosmopolitan “familiar” (to borrow Appiah’s terminology) needed to be elevated above the Other surrounding it. Additionally, I do not think that this “nationalist spirit” is actually tied to the idea of a geopolitical Czech nation-state. Instead, the relationship felt by Czechs between themselves and non-Czechs seems to me in many ways similar to the relationship between African culture and the West.22 By this, while I do not wish to suggest that oppression of Czech culture since the 16th century is the same as the history of colonialization in Africa, I do think that there are interesting parallels between the reason opportunity for many African nations (Ghana in particular) and the Czech people to finally begin to develop a voice for themselves that is not forced into reliance on outside influence. Instead, as it seems to be the case in both the African and Czech perspective, Africans and Czechs are taking full advantage of the opportunity to carve out

21 Appiah, “Cosmopolitan Patriots.” 22 Here, I again refer to scholars who have dealt with this topic in greater detail. Some of the most pertinent works to this thesis include: Feld, Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra; Skinner, Bamako Sounds; Steingo, Kwaito’s Promise; Agawu, The African Imagination in Music. 27 their own cultural identity (or perhaps improve or develop upon an existing one) both in dialogue with and yet distinctly separate from the Other.

To get a better sense of the feelings and experiences of my fellow interlocutors during the music lesson, I now wish to focus more on how they each felt about learning to sing in a Hindustani style. To stress the importance of building a strong foundation in

Hindustani music, our teacher had us all use our voices as our performing instruments, pointing out that this was the same way he had been originally taught. Our teacher made sure to make everyone sing out loud on their own, one-by-one several times during the course of the lesson. At first, it was obvious that everyone was very nervous to be singing in front of other people, but due to the fact that everyone equally sounded terrible and that we were forced to sing so many times, this nervousness seemed to fade away. I recall that after the event many of our friends mentioned how “terrible their voices were” or how “poorly they sang” but alongside these statements were comments like “this was a lot of fun” and “I kind of wish I could do more of this”. The non-musicians in particular really enjoyed the lesson and were thankful for having a chance to experience what it was like to learn and sing Hindustani music. Afterwards, in a more personal discussion between myself and Mary, she expressed that many of our friends came up to her later to ask that she invite him back to give more lessons or to ask whether she knew of any other performers/teachers like him that she may be able to bring in to talk and play. Mary herself was very excited for all this and, like the others, frequently joked about her own

“terrible singing voice”.

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As a whole, the lesson in singing Hindustani music went over exceptionally well for all involved. Our teacher was immensely welcoming and encouraging even when some of us performed poorly or seemed to struggle with singing a particular passage. Out of all the people at this event, our Czech friends were the most vocal throughout the lesson, often laughing at their own attempts to sing or asking our teacher to show them how to sing a particular note again and again. Our Russian friend was perhaps the most timid, barely remarking on anything, but expressing much joy after the event was over. In particular, both our Czech and Russian friends elaborated on how they had never experienced Hindustani music before, let alone had a chance to sing it, and that they were immensely thankful for the experience. Through the course of the evening, it became clear that there was a special kind of cosmopolitan learning environment taking place in my host’s living room.

Stuart Hall, in various interviews discusses how we might incorporate a more cosmopolitan experience into our educational systems, calling for educators to help students learn to embrace the unfamiliarity of new experiences, cultures, and perspectives as ways to better understand each individual’s unique place in the world.23 Our teacher that evening was perhaps unintentionally putting some of Hall’s thoughts into practice in this moment, helping each of us, all from distinctly different cultural backgrounds, to learn how to embrace the Other in a musical way. Each one of us reacted differently to our interaction with our teacher and much of this reaction might very well be explained by differences in personality types and other psychological factors. However, this was

23 Hall, “Cosmopolitanism-Conversation with Stuart Hall.” 29 also my first glimpse of how Czech natives interact with musical practices wholly foreign to their own. Later, when walking with Czech friends through the streets of Prague while listening to and commenting on street musicians, the reactions expressed by our Czech friends during the Hindustani event would be echoed in the statements of other friends while wandering around town. There seems to be a kind of excited playfulness in the interactions of my Czech friends with these otherwise “foreign” musics. Here I put foreign in scare-quotes to stress that, after just a month in Prague, one finds that these musics are not exactly foreign to the city. Many Czech friends would mention how some musics tended to be heard in more popular tourist areas in Prague. Specifically, they remarked on how one could frequently hear Spanish or Central American music around the city center and Charles Bridge and how, in less popular areas, one could find Russian and Eastern European folk music. They would make statements about Portuguese fado music like, “this is becoming really popular here, but you won’t find this music over in the residential neighborhoods” and remark on Ukrainian folk musics about how “a lot of people confuse this music with traditional Czech music which is maybe why you find it in the less touristy places”. To my Czech friends, this music was never something displeasing, and acted as if they had never thought that this was not, in their minds, authentically Czech music when asked about the relationship between this non-Czech and what they considered to be “Czech” music. In fact, some would talk about how they would go out of their way travelling home to listen to a local Mexican mariachi band that had set up down the street from their apartment, and how often their preferred choice of

30 nightclub or bar revolved around whether there was a chance for the performance of distinctly non-Czech bands and artists.

While I cannot say this with certainty, I believe that this “foreign” music is quickly becoming (if it has not already) wholly “unforeign”, or more familiar. Perhaps non-Czech music has become popular in Prague precisely because of its “exoticism”.24

However, it is not as if this music was unknown or exotic to Prague residents. As a major capital in Central Europe, Prague might be thought of as one of many hubs of cultural diversity. Czech friends mentioned several times that it is only natural that this wide variety of music would come to Prague given its cultural and geographic position between Eastern and Western Europe and its large size, providing ample opportunity for musicians to make a living. Additionally, one friend mentioned that the fact that the

Czech Republic had only recently thrown off the chains of communism is perhaps one reason it has experienced such a cultural explosion. In light of its history (and the very reason I conducted this fieldwork), it is not clear what exactly “authentic Czech” music is and so it is difficult to say with certainty that the rise in popularity of non-Czech music is perfectly explained by the popularity of the “foreign” (though, of course, that is not to say that it is not one possible explanation). Yes, the experience that my Czech friends had at our Hindustani event was new to them. However, this newness resided not necessarily in the fact that this was an experience with new musics. Instead, I believe that the newness

24 Echoing sentiments brought up by Stuart Hall in his address of the relationship between cosmopolitanism and globalization where the “exotic” Other has found success primarily due to its novelty in a growing cultural climate dictated in many ways by Western culture. Hall and Werbner, “Cosmopolitanism, Globalisation and Diaspora.” 31 of this event unfolded from the opportunity to perform and take part in this novel (and in many ways “foreign”) musical experience.

I hoped to discuss more with our Czech friends that evening about their own experience. I wanted to ask them about how frequently they heard Hindustani music, what kind of background they have with music more broadly, what kinds of music they listen to today, and how they feel about these non-native Czech musics growing in popularity across Prague today. However, I also did not want to burden them with too many troublesome questions and perhaps dull their experience. Over the course of the next few weeks, I would slowly find answers to these questions in other engagements with other Czech friends. Looking back with the understanding that I have now, it is clear that there was at once a feeling of togetherness between us and the music of our teacher and yet still, at least for our Czech friends, a distinct separation.

I imagine the current relationship between Czech and non-Czech music as like a man who is constantly in search of the perfect hat. He knows what the archetypical perfect hat would look like, it needs a wide brim, to fit snugly on his head, and to not draw so much attention to himself, but he has not been completely satisfied by the hats he has seen thus far. They are all fine hats, in fact, the design of many hats has helped solidify the requirements for his ideal hat, but none of these hats are his hat. Therefore, he continues to search, broadening the requirements here, narrowing them there, all the while enjoying the experience of getting to try on many different hats, and confident that one day the perfect hat will turn up. While an oversimplification, I do think that the man and this story are a metaphor for Czech culture and Czech music. It is not entirely clear

32 what authentic Czech music is. My Czech friends would frequently stumble over this question when I asked it. They would say, “Well, Czech music has to have Czech lyrics!”, or “Czech music is entirely instrumental”. Others would say, “Czech music needs to sound like Dvořák or Smetana”, and “Czech music cannot be forced into submission by the old Classics”. When asked whether this or that non-Czech music could be considered Czech, they would reply “Oh, that certainly can’t be Czech! It sounds too much like Russia”, or “This is music for tourists, it sounds great, but it isn’t Czech”. On a few occasions, I was able to ask them why this or that music could not be considered

Czech, to which the reply was often something like, “well, it’s been around for forever so maybe it is Czech” or “I really like it and its popular so maybe one day it will be Czech” both followed by bewildered yet unassuming laughter.

In any case, the Hindustani music that we heard that evening was at once welcoming and enjoyed by our Czech friends while still snugly placed into the category of non-Czech. While I would never get a strong answer for why this music could not be considered Czech from my interlocutors, it was clear that some separation between Czech and non-Czech nonetheless existed. The events of that evening did not change the minds of our Czech friends regarding Czech and non-Czech, but we all managed to incorporate

Hindustani music into our lives, to take ownership of it in some way or another after that night. Mary would go on to incorporate more Hindustani music in her yoga and meditation sessions. Our Russian friend would attempt to find more spaces around town for performance of Hindustani music. Our Brazilian friend talked about incorporating

Hindustani sitar technique into his own guitar playing. That this was all happening in

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Prague seemed highly indicative of the kind of cosmopolitan elements that previous scholars have encountered in their own ethnographic work. I think particularly of work like Bidgood’s on the interaction of the “non-Czech” American bluegrass with Czech traditional musics or like Feld’s observations on the interactions between jazz music and

West African performers. In other ways, the interaction and incorporation of this

“foreign” Hindustani music in our lives appeals to the kinds of cosmopolitan sensibilities discussed by cultural theorists like Derrida and Levinas, one that involves an intricate exchange with cultural elements of the Other in a hospitable manner. For our non-Czech friends, there did not seem to be a sense of needing to keep separate their own musics from those introduced to us by our teacher. My non-Czech friends never once mentioned that this music could find no place within their own kinds of music, unlike my Czech friends who, no matter how strongly they admired the music of that evening, still held to the idea that it was not “Czech” music.

This slight difference of perspective between our non-Czech and Czech friends provides two different examples of cosmopolitan ideas. While, overall, everyone seemed to approach the Hindustani music with an open-mind, appreciating and enjoying what that music had to offer, and attempting to make space for that music in their personal lives (all leaning towards a more modernist cosmopolitanism notion of hospitality, our non-Czech friends seemed to, at least partly, allow this Other music to become a large part of their lives. Conversely, our Czech friends seemed to prioritize the unique aspect of their own culturally informed ideas of Czech music and its separate relationship from

Hindustani music. One Czech attendee at the event would mention afterwards that she

34 would like to go to more concerts of this music, but that she was not sure she would have time to go to such an event, nor was she certain that she would even be able to find such an event. Unlike our non-Czech friends, there was no strong indicator that she would attempt to incorporate Hindustani music into her life in the same way that Mary, our

Brazilian, and our Russian friend would. Our Czech friend was open to the idea of welcoming Hindustani music into her life, but was hesitant to go out of her way to make space for it over her other interests.

Here, I should note that, in the time since my visit to Prague, I do not have strong evidence that our non-Czech friends actually set out to accomplish their goals of making space for Hindustani music. Only time, and follow-up discussions, will tell whether such tasks were carried out. However, the difference in attitude between our non-Czech and

Czech friends was rather obvious. In later discussions with other native Czechs on the topic of making space for the inclusion of non-Czech musics, I would find similar opinions. In general, it seemed to be the case that my Czech interlocutors were more than happy to stumble upon non-Czech music frequently in their daily lives. However, the intense need to seek out and explore that music, to allow it to become a regular part of their lives, did not manifest itself in the same way as my non-Czech interlocutors. This perspective of the experience of non-Czech music by Czech natives will be explored in more detail in Chapters 2 and 3, where important Czech interlocutors and their experiences, dialogues, and thoughts are examined in more detail. Regardless of their need, or lack thereof, to incorporate Hindustani music within their daily lives, our Czech friends that evening would continue on, having an increased appreciation for Hindustani

35 music, and perhaps this increased appreciation is having an effect on the cultural environment in Prague today.

Conclusion

In their work on European cosmopolitanism, Robertson and Krossa talk about the collectivist identities that have been growing in East Central Europe since the fall of communist governments in the late 20th century.25 They make the claim that, due in part to the strength of radical notions of collectivism that were perpetuated by force in the old

Soviet “Iron Curtain” nations, it has become rather difficult for the peoples of Poland,

Czechia, Slovakia, Ukraine, and other places to escape completely from the hyper- sensitive “one people, one voice” doctrine. Unfortunately, due in large part to the constant and oppressive influence of outside nations in these regions, and the wave of

European nationalism that spread through the continent in the 19th century, it is unsurprising that people who have gone for so long with their voices suppressed would want to make sure that their own cultural identity is now allowed to flourish freely. While examples of this wrestling with cultural identities are apparent to me in my work and in that of others like Bidgood, I think that we are witnessing, within the past few decades, a changing definition of collectivism, or at least, a distinctive variant of collectivism present in the cultures of the Central Slavic region.

Throughout my stay in Prague, and even talking with our Czech friends that evening, it was very clear that there is a strong sense of separation between Czechs and non-Czechs, but there is more to this separation than mere separation from complete

25 Robertson and Krossa, European Cosmopolitanism in Question. 36 assimilation or incorporation of the Other. Instead, the separation between Czech and non-Czech cultures, at least in regard to music, seems to be more of a sense of cultural distinctiveness that is at once welcoming of the “foreign” while allowing for some distance. This idea of holding true the cultural identity of the familiar, while allowing for, and appreciating that of the Other is not new. However, what separates the unique situation in Prague from that of Appiah’s “cosmopolitan patriot” or Hall’s “vernacular cosmopolitan” can be narrowed down to some key factors.

First, unlike the tumultuous history of colonialization in West Africa, the Central

Slavic region has enjoyed the opportunity to accept and deal with outside influences in many ways that are not directly related to exploitation, cultural or otherwise.26 Second, as nations situated within short distance of Western economy that has largely driven trends in globalization over the past few decades, the Central Slavic countries have felt less of an intense need to Westernize in order to compete in the world market. Therefore,

Prague’s “cosmopolitan patriot” is made real by the need for Czechs to carve out a separate identity for themselves within the broader worldwide cultural climate.

Additionally, it is also allowed to intensely intersect with the Other in ways that blur the lines between what is “Czech” and what is “non-Czech”. Likewise, the impacts of globalization (economical, cultural, and otherwise), while present within the Prague

26 And while this is true in West African regions as well, I would stress that there have been few situations in which the peoples of the Central Slavic regions have been forced to give up cultural norms or face complete (or near complete) destruction. One monumental example of this is the Hussite wars of the 15th- 16th centuries when Czechs (and to a small degree, Hungarians and Poles) were intensely persecuted for their religious beliefs. Aside from such an extreme example, the damage done by outside oppression in these regions is not the same damage as has been carried out the West’s interaction with West Africa (not to mention the rest of the continent). 37 cultural context, are not so strong as to force Czech culture to incorporate, or even assimilate into, more the dominant cultures it. In a few personal discussions with friends about the Czech role in this ever-growing globalist environment, they expressed the need for Czechs to carve out their own cultural space, one in which they could be proud, or at least aware, of their heritage while enjoying and encouraging the cultural growth of those around them.

As perhaps an echo of the statements made by Bidgood’s Czech interlocutors, some of my closest Czech friends mentioned that it was not entirely clear what exactly

“Czech culture” was, only that non-native Czechs could not be a part of it. Of course, this is not to say that non-native Czechs were not welcome, or that non-native Czech cultural elements were somehow inferior to their own. Instead, this distinction between Czech and non-Czech served more as a tool with which to keep alive a cultural spirit that has been subdued and dominated for centuries. It may seem that this statement is directly related to notions of 19th century nationalism especially regarding Herder’s ideas of German unity.27 However, I would argue that the Czech perspective is slightly different in this case. As a group whose cultural identity has largely been crushed by foreign influence for most of its history, this tenacity to survive even in the face of oppression is, itself, an important aspect of Czech culture. Therefore, the importance placed on distinguishing between Czech and non-Czech is not so much a need to emphasize that Czech culture is better or preferable to the non-Czech as it is to simply make sure that Czech culture is not forgotten. This sentiment is largely echoed in the Bidgood’s (2017) ethnographic work on

27 Aspects of Herder’s ideology are encountered in: Wilson, “Herder, Folklore and Romantic Nationalism.” 38

Czech bluegrass where many Czech musicians argue that, even though the Czech music scene has had an immense impact on the bluegrass scene over the past few decades, they cannot consider bluegrass (or even their more distinctly and uniquely Czech version of it, as Bidgood notes) a “Czech” cultural practice. As an outside observer, and having a decent knowledge of Czech history, I can understand why there is such an intense need to separate Czech from non-Czech. However, I would argue that the line between what is musically Czech (or at least musically “Praguean”) and musically non-Czech is becoming ever more blurred.

As we will find in later chapters, Czechs in Prague are getting more and more involved in the performance of these non-native Czech musics. The newness of the experience that our Czech friends had during the Hindustani event is becoming rarer and this can be seen in the drastically increasing number of Czech musicians electing to perform and learn such music. It can also be seen in the growing popularity in establishments that welcome these musics and in the increasing number of individuals going out of their way to hear such music.28 After the events of that evening early during my trip to Prague, I could not help but wonder with glee when I would be able to attend a similar event but, for authentically “Czech” music. At the end of my stay in Prague, I would come to the realization that all of this music was, in some manner or another,

“authentically Czech”. This first experience with non-native Czech music would pique

28 Evidence can be seen in the anecdotal evidence of this thesis, in the work of ethnomusicologists like Bidgood and his experience with “Czech bluegrass”, in the diversity of popular music artists and performers covered by organizations like Český rozhlas (Czech radio) which has documented developments in the Czech popular music scene for several years. In particular, searching for articles on music topics by Český rozhlas provides a wealth of musical variety covering many genres including conventional pop styles, jazz, classical, Czech afro-pop, Slavic folk and popular styles, and many others. 39 my interest in what exactly is considered “Czech music” in Prague today. Even now, I cannot help but wonder whether this idea of a multicultural Czech music exists outside of

Prague. Would I find Hindustani performances heavily attended by native Czechs in

Brno? Moravia? What about the more rural parts of the Czech Republic? While I cannot answer this question in this current document, I do believe that this experience with

Hindustani music in Prague, including people of various national and cultural backgrounds, was indicative of a larger multicultural movement in music that is happening in Prague.

40

Chapter 2 – Buskers and the Street Aesthetic

Shortly after our concert and lesson on Hindustani music, I had the fortunate opportunity to meet some native Czechs who were kind enough to talk with me about my research and to show me around town. Interestingly, our first meeting was at a local rock concert put on at an old factory building that had been turned into a brewery/bar within the past ten years or so. These two were a couple, male and female, who were finishing up their undergraduate years at Charles University in Prague and were highly intrigued by the fact that an American would be so heavily interested in Czech culture and music.

Šárka, the female and younger of the two, was from a relatively well-off family who lived slightly north of Prague and was working on her pre-medicine degree. Honza, the older partner, was one semester away from finishing his law degree and participated in various sporting teams that would frequently tour across Central Europe during the summer months (both names have been changed for the sake of anonymity). While I only spent relatively little time with Šárka, both of them introduced me to some of the interesting music scenes around Prague and were very open to my many questions about

Czech music. Honza was particularly interested in helping me explore this concept in more detail and, after the rock concert, offered to spend a week showing me some of the more interesting places of culture around Prague. During the third week of my stay in

Prague, I discussed music with Šárka and Honza several times, as we went to museums,

41 shopping districts, nightclubs/bars, and various other places in Prague. During this time together, we discussed many aspects of Czech culture and music while travelling to and from our destinations and they shared with me their complicated thoughts on what might be considered “Czech music” today.

It was often the case, during our time together, that some of the most informative and memorable events occurred while walking past the many street-busking musicians that were scattered across different public spaces in Prague. Each time we came within earshot of one such musician, Honza would joke about the fact that the music they were playing “was obviously not Czech, no?” perhaps assuming that the music of these buskers was somehow not what I was looking for. “Oh, but we hear this kind of music all the time now in these areas” Honza would remark, pointing out that the more tourist- friendly centers of Prague frequently presented individual or small busking groups performing some kind of distinctly non-Czech music. The first time we walked by a small mariachi-like band, Honza reacted unsurprised and yet quite humorously, as if confronted by the sudden realization that such music in Prague was somehow ironic and laughably out-of-place. I could tell that much of these kinds of reactions came from our frequent dialogues on what exactly constitutes authentic Czech music. In his mind, it seemed very clear that this kind of music was distinctly non-Czech, but he himself was never completely sure why this was the case. Much like our Czech friends who attended the Hindustani performance, it was clear that this music was “foreign”, and that fact alone was good enough to prohibit such music from being considered “Czech”.

42

In this chapter, I explore these issues of what is considered “authentic Czech” (or at least “Praguean”) music in the context of the kinds of sounds one is likely to be exposed to while travelling through and visiting Prague. I point out some of the different musics that Honza, Šárka, and I encountered during our time together and discuss how their comments on the relationship between this music and the abstract idea of an authentic Czech music inform ideas of a more cosmopolitan sensibility, which are similar to Appiah’s idea of the “cosmopolitan patriot” and yet distinctly different from it. Finally,

I end this chapter by tying together my perception of my Czech friends’ experience when confronted (not necessarily by me) with the idea that non-Czech music is becoming more visible in Prague and discuss how their ideas of “Czech music” relate to similar ideas from other Czechs.

Three places and times in particular, and the music present there, provided some of the most fruitful dialogue regarding the idea of a “Czech” music. The first was my initial meeting with Honza and Šárka at a small rock concert near the Vltava. A few hours prior to this event, I was introduced to these two through a mutual friend and had the opportunity to learn more about their background before we arrived at the concert venue. Once there, the three of us and our mutual friend enjoyed a rousing rock performance by a local amateur group from Prague. The concert itself seemed rather normal in a globalized rock sense. That is, the music that was performed could easily fit into categories of Indie rock or Pop rock. The band was composed of four members: two guitars, a bass, and a drum set with the lead vocalist playing one of the guitars. The music varied slightly from slower, more atmospheric rock tunes in which the main emphasis

43 was the singer’s voice and how well he could woo the audience to more upbeat, flourishing kinds of rock where the instrumentalists were allowed to shine. As a whole, these musicians were not very different from the more typical kinds of Indie rock artists that one might encounter in the U.S. or abroad. However, as this was my first rock concert in Prague, I was curious as to whether this music was the “authentic Czech” music I was looking for. After about an hour of performing, the band decided to take a break for a moment, and we all filtered either to the bar or to the large outdoor sitting area to relax and cool off. Of course, once outside, we all immediately burst into discussion about how the concert had been going.

Our mutual friend and I both had musical training and Honza and Šárka were very interested in how we felt about the concert. During the course of our discussion, Honza asked several times whether this was the kind of music that our mutual friend and I would expect to hear in Prague. Having had a bit of exposure to Czech pop and rock music beforehand, I replied that they were very much like other bands that I had known from the U.S. with the exception being their use of Czech lyrics. I followed up by asking

Honza if this was the kind of music that he enjoyed, and he remarked that his musical tastes included all sorts of things. During the course of the evening, it eventually came out that I had a bit of experience with the Czech language; a fact that, until that point, I had not thought would be a very interesting aspect of my background. However, upon hearing this, Honza, Šárka, and even some other individuals who had stopped by during our discussion were immensely pleased that an American tourist would know any Czech.

Over the next hour or so, Honza and Šárka would playfully quiz me on certain Czech

44 phrases and words, seemingly teasing me for even bothering to learn Czech. To them, it was exceedingly rare for English-speakers to come to Prague and know anything more than basic words in Czech. It was not as if they were teasing me for my lack of experience, nor was it possible that they were teasing me for learning a “useless language”. Instead, I think this teasing was more a way to build relationships with each other not unlike the way my Brazilian and Czech friends from the previous Hindustani performance teased each other.

Over the course of my time spent with the couple, it became clear, through their interaction with their Czech friends and family members, that this playful teasing was a kind of endearment. With their teasing, it was a way of saying, “you are so strange for learning Czech language and culture, but we are pleased by it!” By the end of the evening, and even several times later in the week, Honza would apologize for teasing me about my modest knowledge of Czech, mentioning that this was just something that

Czech people do and that I should not find any offense at this behavior. Of course, at no point in my interactions with Honza or any other Czechs did I feel offended. To me, this was similar behavior that many of my very close American friends exhibited, and was a frequent phenomenon encountered while living in various Southern states. This teasing was less about “making fun” of someone and more about allowing for an opportunity to laugh, at ourselves, at one another, at just about anything. At one point, when I joked that

Czech has too many ways to say “thank you” that mean too many different things, Honza burst into laughter and, after trying to explain it to me, finally concluded with “ah well, you get used to strange things about Czechs like that!”

45

Eventually, after playfully discussing the intricacies of the Czech language with one another, the topic moved back to music. Šárka asked me why I wished to study

Czech music, a question that I think held multiple questions inside it. My answer at the time was that I knew a decent amount about Czech musical history, citing my near obsession with Classical composer Antonín Dvořák as an example, and that I wanted to know more about what Czech music was in today’s environment. At this, still in a playful mood, Honza quickly retorted “Oh but that’s not Czech music!” in reference to the rock concert. I asked him why he felt that way and he replied, “Sure, they sing in Czech, but that is American music they are playing. And they don’t even sing in Czech all the time!”

Šárka laughed and shook her head as if to agree with this sentiment, though not necessarily with as much passion. “Now Dvořák, that is Czech music.” Honza replied, pointing out that the kinds of music history to which he and his friends had been taught about in school was the perfect example of Czech music. This quick reaction from Honza and Šárka started a long discussion on what exactly is “Czech music”, a discussion that was carried out over several days and was often affected by the music around us. After setting up a place and time for us to meet again, I returned home that evening feeling very surprised by my Czech friends’ reaction. While I was not an expert on Czech popular music, I wondered how Honza and Šárka could suggest that the music that evening was not Czech. After all, it was Czech natives, performing their own original songs in Czech

(for the most part) to a Czech audience in Prague. What about this situation was not

Czech? I did not get my answer that evening, but I hoped that future discussions with

Honza and Šárka would shed some light on this issue.

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Two days after meeting the couple, we set up a time to go visit some of Prague’s cultural landmarks. This included a trip to the national museum, the museum of music, and the Smetana museum. As someone interested in both Czech culture and Czech music,

Honza felt that these would be some of the more interesting places to show me during my stay. These visits happened over the course of several days and often involved travelling around town, getting lunch in various places that Honza and Šárka really enjoyed, and chatting with one another about a variety of topics. During each day’s activities, all three of us frequently encountered street-busking musicians, performing music of one genre or another and each time we heard one of these individuals or groups, Honza and I would burst into a discussion about Czech music. This first of these groups was a small mariachi-like band near the Charles Bridge. On our way to one of the museums, Honza felt it necessary that I get to see the Charles Bridge in more detail, as it is one of the most popular tourist hotspots in Prague. It was especially busy on the bridge that day, but we had to stop and listen to such an eye- and ear-catching group. I marveled at the appearance of such music in Prague, remarking on the fact that I had not heard music like this live since living in Texas. Honza laughed and remarked that this kind of music was always fascinating to him and that he was not sure why it kept popping up around town. I asked if he felt that Prague had a large portion of tourists from Latin America and he could not recall having seen many Latin Americans over his time spent in Prague. He mentioned that the kind of guitar-style or “sound” of this music was becoming more and more popular for people to play in bars around town, a fact that I experienced firsthand

(and will be discussed in Chapter 3).

47

Throughout the day, Honza and I chatted at great length about what exactly Czech music is. That day, we wandered the halls of the Czech museum of music, looking at displays of antique stringed instruments, pianos, accordions, organs, drums, and many other kinds of instruments found from all across various parts of the Czech Republic.

That day they had a display showing the history of rock and roll music, tracing its origins with the Beatles and the British Invasion of the U.K. into the U.S. music scene to the various popular rock artists and groups of today both in the Czech Republic and abroad.

Honza asked me several times during this trip about what I thought Czech music was. I told him that, at the very least, I felt that what composers like Smetana and Dvořák wrote was a good example of Czech music. I mentioned that my research experience with folksong, along with my archival work in the national library, suggested that Czech history is filled with examples of Czech music. However, while I was interested in music of the past, I was especially interested in Czech music today. As we perused the displays on rock and roll history, Honza asked if I thought that this could be Czech music. I replied that I was not sure and that he would know better than I would. At this point,

Honza talked extensively about his opinions on Czech music. In his mind (and he stressed that he was not alone in this sentiment), much of Czech popular music today is not really “Czech”. This is because, “what people like John Lennon and the Beatles did, that is their own thing right? That is an English thing. In the Czech Republic, we are just copying them. Sure it sounds good, and we sing in Czech often, but it is not really our music” (his emphasis). I followed up by asking him what he meant by “our music”, to which Honza replied that it was difficult to say. In his mind, while there was not a

48 problem with Czech musicians playing rock and pop music (he even mentioned that some

60s English rock bands were his favorite artists), what those Czech musicians were doing was an imitation of British/American culture. When he mentioned this, my mind immediately went to Bidgood’s work on Czech bluegrass.

In his extensive fieldwork on the subject, Bidgood discusses with his interlocutors the origins, ownership, and identity of Czech bluegrass music. Across his ethnographical work, it is made very clear that Czech musicians, listeners, instrument-makers, and others all felt that, no matter how close they could get to emulating the original American bluegrass style, it could never really be the same. Czech bluegrass artists were constantly searching for what they called vono, that special “something” that separated the amateur bluegrass musician from the authentic bluegrass performer. Bidgood tries to define what vono is during his fieldwork, and ultimately arrives at the conclusion that Czech bluegrass artists have their own vono, one that is not reliant on imitation of American style. Whether or not his interlocutors agreed with this notion is not entirely clear. In my discussions with Honza, I asked him whether there existed any truly Czech rock and pop artists and his reply was that there could not be one. Because both of these genres were situated in a distinctly American or British history, it would not be possible for any Czech artists to claim ownership of those styles. He stressed that this was not a bad thing though, and that some Czech artists have done a better job with rock and pop than their

British/American counterparts. The problem was that, because of the origins of these styles, it would be rather controversial to claim that Czech rock and pop artists were doing anything other than imitating, altering, or otherwise appropriating these musics.

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Eventually, we found ourselves in a part of the museum with some exceptionally old musical instruments found in different parts of the country. While talking about the history of Czech music, and perhaps because I was still reeling from our discussion on rock music, I asked Honza what he thought about the Czech Republic’s history of foreign influence. At the time, Honza was not entirely sure how to answer this question, only managing to point out that Czech people are just now starting to heavily develop and present their own culture. I felt this was a rather odd statement and wondered why he felt

Czech culture had somehow been absent over the past few centuries. Honza seemed to struggle with this question a lot, apologizing that he could not answer it correctly (not that I felt there was a “correct” answer anyways) and bringing it up several times during our visits. To him, the question of whether anything could be considered authentically

“Czech” had to start with whether it could be traced to a Czech origin. This conversation carried over into our visit of other places in Prague and culminated in our visit to the national museum a few days later. While walking through a room full of busts and statues of many important historical figures in Czech history, Honza remarked on the fact that so many people had worked hard to get the country where it was today. He pointed out figures involved with the rise in Czech nationalism in the 19th century, discussing how they were some of the first people to push for Czech independence who were not completely dismissed by the government. He talked about the figures behind the Velvet

Revolution and how they helped to rid the Czech Republic of pressure from the Soviet

Union. Later, in a room full of historic flags of Bohemia, Honza pointed out that many

Czechs consider pre-16th century Bohemia as a kind of “Golden Age” for Czech people.

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He mentioned that some people were very proud of the fact that Prague was such an important cultural and economic center of Europe at that time, and that many hoped that

Prague would become that again in the future. Throughout much of these conversations, it seemed to me that Honza was trying to define aspects of Czech culture that Czechs would consider to be “Czech”. He would talk about how some important castle in Czech history was not actually Czech because so many Austrian nobles lived in it, or that this figure from Czech history is immensely controversial because they were okay with

Austrian/Soviet Hegemony even though they pushed for development of Czech culture.

In these discussions, it seemed that Honza was trying to point out that Czechs were immensely interested in ownership. That, no matter how appreciated it was, no matter how important it was, or no matter how much one might consider it a part of Czech culture, if it did not originate from, and exist within, a distinctly Czech sphere of influence, it could never truly be called “Czech”.

From Honza’s discussion, it seemed that Czech people were immensely interested in the Czech identity as one that is frequently reminded of how important it used to be, how well it has handled centuries of oppression, and how great it could be in the future.

These sentiments were echoed in many places across Prague. Buildings housing records of Czech history or displaying aspects of Czech culture could be found all across the city and were often immensely ornate, beautifully maintained, and heavily emphasized. Inside of these buildings, each display was saturated in Czech history and culture, emphasizing the importance of origins and identity to the observer. Perhaps the most substantial example of this was the national museum’s huge display on flags from Bohemian history.

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The hall that housed these flags was easily the size of a gymnasium and contained information on why certain flags looked the way they did, where they could be found, and how they relate to Czech history. However, it is important to note that, while aspects of Czech culture always seemed to be the focal point in these cultural exhibitions, the relationship between Czech and non-Czech was never something that was hidden. If a flag was made by an Austrian family but adopted into Czech history, this was made clear.

If a musical instrument originally came from Asia Minor, this fact was not hidden. If a

French artist did a painting of the Vltava, credit and praise was quickly given to them. In these cultural symbols, of which music is also a part, it seemed to me that Czechs maintained some level both of identification with and distance from its origins. In fact, this division between Czech and non-Czech was always made especially clear in these displays.29 For the curators of these cultural artifacts, credit was always given to whatever non-Czech element might even remotely have been considered a part of that item. By providing extensive information on the non-Czech quality of a display, there was a sense in which ownership of the Czech quality of an artifact could be more easily established and readily advocated. Unlike a kind of revisionist history, the Czech sentiment was clearly that, if they are to consider something to be “Czech”, then they had better be absolutely sure of it. Otherwise, they are doing themselves and the cultural owners of the

29 And if, for some reason, this division was not made clear, then Honza would very quickly become mildly frustrated, pointing out that I should notice how few people are paying attention to the display. For example, one suit of Czech armor that was on display in the museum had certain symbols engraved into it that suggested an Austrian history and this was not mentioned in the display’s description. At this, Honza noted that the museum should do a better job of giving credit to the Austrian people who made this armor and should not pretend that it is somehow owned by “us Czechs”. While this reaction could have been a part of Honza’s own personal feelings, he did point out later that only tourists were paying attention to that display, perhaps trying to suggest that he was not the only person who felt this way. 52 item a disservice, acting in Honza’s words “just as terribly as others have acted to

[Czechs] in the past”.

My interactions with Honza and Šárka travelling across various parts of Prague helped to make clearer the idea of what can be considered “Czech”. In my time spent with them, immersed in Czech history, I learned a bit more about the distinction between

Czech and non-Czech in regard to identity and cultural ownership. With a better understanding of their own feelings on the matter, I approached the couple once more on the topic of Czech music near the end of our time together. While walking by some of the historical churches near the Old Town Square in Prague, we happened to walk by another street-busking musician. This time, it was an older woman playing a balalaika and singing what appeared to be some sort of Eastern European folksongs. Šárka mentioned that she was singing Russian love songs, citing her limited experience in learning Russian in school. As we stopped to listen to her performance for a moment, I could not help but to reflect on the other street musicians that I had encountered during my time in Prague. I remembered the mariachi-like band and how Honza and I started our discussion of what constitutes Czech music.

After we had stepped away from the performance, Honza remarked that he really enjoyed that music and that he was happy that performers like her seem to be popular around Prague. I asked him if there was any relationship between her Eastern European music and what he considered to be “Czech” music. His reply was that, while they were similar, he did not think that this could be considered Czech music. At that point, Šárka, knowing that we had been talking about this topic for quite some time, chimed in by

53 remarking that it is hard to know exactly what Czech music is. When she thinks about

Czech music, she thinks about music in rural parts of the country, even suggesting that

Moravian music might be considered Czech due to its more traditional quality. Honza seemed to agree with this statement but mentioned that such music is not the only Czech music that exists. When pressed to give examples of what he was talking about, he brought up some of the local Czech folk groups in Prague who held events playing older

Czech folksongs to the public. I asked them if there could be anything like a modern

Czech music, pointing out that folksongs like those in question tend to be from an older time period, from a generation long passed. Neither one of them gave a confident answer to this question. Šárka, attempting to be the more realistic of the two, mentioned that it was highly unlikely that an authentic Czech music could have been made within the past few decades. To her, unless Czechs came up with a new completely new musical genre or style, it would be impossible to label any music coming out of Prague from the last several decades as being “authentically Czech”. While Honza agreed with this idea for the most part, he seemed optimistic that, as long as the Czech culture and nation continued to prosper without oppression, it was highly likely that new musical styles wholly Czech would eventually arise. Unfortunately, until then, Honza noted that I would just have to be happy with what Czech music already exists.

Conclusion

I hope that Honza and Šárka will forgive me for having a slightly different perspective on Czech music. I do not wish to diminish the importance of their perspectives and experiences regarding Czech music and its separation from the kinds of

54 music one hears while wandering about Prague. However, I think that there is something to be said about the current musical climate in Prague. As one walks the city streets in

Prague, one will be exposed to all kinds of music. Jazz, rock, pop, fado, mariachi, love songs, and folk musics of all kinds are always heard somewhere, from shopfronts, to the solo musician on the corner, to the group of performers who have dug out a space for themselves in the Old Town Square. The variety and diversity of musical sounds on the streets of Prague, to me, equal if not exceed that of many large cities in the States. With such a widely diverse range of musical possibilities, I cannot help but to wonder who was listening to such sounds. For whom was this or that music being played? Who was playing it? How do non-Czechs feel about this music? Are Czechs getting tired of it?

Moreover, perhaps most importantly, what, if anything, did these musics have in common? I had hoped that my time with Honza and Šárka would shed some light on these questions, in many ways, it did. They thought I would be disappointed in their answers about the music around Prague. They were worried that they were not giving me a good picture of Czech music. Of course, my discussions with them were anything but disappointing. I did not get the answers to these questions I expected, but I also realized that I may have been asking the wrong questions, or that I may have had the wrong assumptions.

I hesitate to claim something as optimistic and far-reaching as to say that all of the street music in Prague is somehow Czech music. However, I think that the music one encounters in Prague is indicative of a current change in the idea of Czech music. If

Honza and Šárka are right, in that there is not any current example of a distinctly “Czech”

55 music, then I posit that this will not be the case for much longer. Already, the music of

Prague’s streets is starting to affect, and be affected by, music in other performance spaces like the bar, nightclub, and concert hall. As I would find later on in my stay,

Czech and non-Czech musicians are playing genres like bossa nova, jazz, hip-hop, and rock across many parts of Prague. Many of these musicians did not bother to perform on the street but happened to play the same kinds of music one would hear on the street.

Others practiced their music for patrons at a local bar before going out to the street to perform for a wider audience or would do the exact opposite. The non-Czech musics one hears on the street are the exact same musics one hears in private establishments. If this non-Czech music was so pervasive, appearing in nearly every musical space in Prague one could imagine, and more frequently than the “authentically Czech” music that Honza and Šárka suggested, then what was stopping us from considering this as Czech music?

Again, I do not necessarily think that just because this music is popular therefore it needs to be considered Czech. In fact, I understand why Czechs feel so strongly attached to traditional musics even if they are not exactly popular to the Prague audience. However, I think the unique cosmopolitan perspective held by Honza, Šárka, and other Czechs in the wake of the growing non-Czech musical presence allows for the possibility for a kind of musical assimilation, or even “musical rebirth” to soon occur in Prague.

I might best describe the cosmopolitan attitude of the Czech friends that I made during my travels as something very close to an ideal version Appiah’s “cosmopolitan patriot”.30 For the most part, all of my Czech friends expressed that, while they were very

30 Appiah, “Cosmopolitan Patriots.” 56 happy to have the opportunity to listen to and participate in the expression of non-Czech music, it was very clear to them that such music could never be considered “Czech”. No matter how many people enjoyed or participated in this music, because it was not something originally conceived of by Czech people, or something that was intimately tied to Czech history, there would always be some kind of division between Czech and non-

Czech music. This idea reflects Appiah’s notion that a cultural identity first and foremost has a duty to protect and develop their own culture before dealing with that of the Other.

Of course, Appiah notes that the cultural Other is not necessarily dismissed just because the identity of the familiar has to be upheld. In this same way, the attitudes of my Czech friends towards non-Czech music welcoming, if not passionately embracing, even though some degree of separation is still present. However, where I think that the Czech cosmopolitanism, at least regarding the environment in Prague, differs from the notion of the “cosmopolitan patriot” is in the fact that the Czech people do not actively defend the familiar from the Other. Certainly, the notion of a distinctly Czech musical identity is there, present in the minds of Czech natives, but for some reason or another, the distinct need to defend “Czechness” is not present. Only when asked whether or not non-Czech music could be considered Czech did I ever hear from my Czech friends any concern over the difference between Czech and non-Czech music, and even then, while interested in the topics, none of my friends seemed especially bothered by the conjecture that some variant of non-Czech music might one day become Czech. For them, it was more important that we not forget where Czech music has come from then it was to elevate

Czech music to some metaphorical pedestal, towering over the diverse non-Czech musics

57 beneath it. On many occasions, Honza and Šárka mentioned that some of their favorite songs, artists, and musical genres came from what they considered distinctly non-Czech backgrounds, and at no point did they suggest that Czech music was more important to them than the music that surrounded them. Instead of needing to prioritize elements of

Czech identity in music, it seemed more important for them to simply make sure that the

Czech identity not be forgotten.

In some of our final discussions, Honza and Šárka both mentioned that the future of Czech music was unclear. They imagined that I, and individuals interested in Czech music like myself, would be the ones to “discover” modern Czech music, and were more than content enough to allow us to carry this burden. I am thankful that they felt I would be able to handle this task alone, but their impressions of what could and could not be considered Czech helped me in more ways than they could ever imagine. I understand their perspective on Czech musical identity, and their need to preserve traditional notions of “Czech music”. However, I do think that the line between Czech and non-Czech music is quickly becoming blurred in Prague, and that evidence of this phenomenon can be found all over the city, in houses played through radios, personal devices that allow streaming music, in the commercial areas, in nightclubs, bars, and outdoor restaurants, and even on the city streets, from Charles Bridge, across the Vltava, and through

Prague’s many wandering residential areas. I respect the perspectives offered by my

Czech friends, and I am interested to see what they think about the dichotomy of Czech and non-Czech music over the coming years.

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Chapter 3 – Impromptu Cosmopolitanism

With only a few days left before my return to the States, I found myself wondering how much of Prague’s musical scene I had missed during my short stay. Mary and John, my hosts, mentioned several times that they wished to take me to a local bar that they really enjoyed. They said that they thought the musical environment at this bar would be a perfect example of what modern Czech music sounds like. Unfortunately, neither had much time to actually take me to this location as both were quite busy with their own lives. It was not until nearly the end of my trip, after spending the day meeting with Honza and wandering around Prague, that I managed to catch John and Mary at a subway station, currently deciding whether to go home or meet up with friends somewhere else. Upon running into them, and after remarking on my soon-to-be departure, they decided that now would be a perfect time to take me to the bar they had been talking about so much up until this point.

It was around 11:00pm and the subways would stop running in just a few hours.

John and Mary were both tired from their daily activities and I was skeptical regarding the validity of their claim that this bar would be such a great musical venue. After traveling across Prague for a bit, we arrived at a place called Rama. From the outside, it looked as if the storefront was under repairs, to which, Mary noted that the bar was currently not open to the public. However, her and John were both close friends with the

59 owner and his wife, a native Czech couple who were both musicians and, for reasons unexplained, had strong ties to the non-Czech community in Prague. According to my hosts, Rama’s hours of operation fluctuated wildly, sometimes staying open for well over

24 hours depending on whether the owners felt the need to close. After being introduced to the Kuba, the male counterpart of the owner duo, I was told about the bar’s history and current relevancy in Prague. Unfortunately, I never had the opportunity to meet Kuba’s wife, but he was kind enough to tell me about their opinions on Czech music. Kuba and

Mary chatted at great length about how Rama was originally meant to be a place for the owners and their friends to “hang out” and listen to music. The couple figured that, with a small enough establishment, they could afford to subsist primarily on selling drinks to their friends and through the occasional donation.

Over time, Kuba and many of the original patrons began to bring their instruments to supplement the more passive listening experience with an active participatory one.

These impromptu “jam sessions” often lasted for hours, frequently bleeding into the sunlight hours of the morning. The musicians who attended these sessions often were not looking to start a band, nor were they especially interested in showing off skills or in advertising their own groups. Instead, these sessions were more focused on allowing various musician friends to relax with their instruments among great company and with great drinks. Due to the tendency for these sessions to go on for entirely too long, Kuba and his wife decided to delegate the sessions to Thursday nights. Additionally, perhaps as a way to help unwind after such a long night, the owners decided to start asking local musicians to come put on small concerts on the following Friday evenings. Patrons

60 interested in music, both musicians and non-musicians, immensely enjoyed these weekly gatherings and, before too long, word spread throughout the musical community in

Prague. For Kuba and his wife, the goal of Rama was never to expand their business past their small establishment like the larger, more successful (and overcrowded) bars in

Prague. The owners wanted to preserve the intimacy of Rama. Because of the fact that

Rama had been growing in popularity, they needed a way to keep the bar from becoming too popular. Surprisingly, this issue was solved simply by asking visiting musicians and invited patrons to keep quiet about the location and existence of the bar. It seems that patrons really enjoyed this more mysterious or exclusive aspect of Rama, and so efforts to keep word from spreading too fast and too far were successful.

Coincidentally, or perhaps luckily, Mary and John brought me to Rama on a

Thursday night, and through discussions with Mary and Kuba, it eventually came out that

I was a musician looking for examples of modern Czech music. Kuba, perhaps due to his

Czech background, seemed highly skeptical that I would find anything like a “modern

Czech music” but was more than happy to welcome me to the establishment and introduce me to some of the more regular patrons. Over the course of that evening, I witnessed a distinctly different side of the musical environment in Prague. Amongst the mix of Czech and non-Czech musicians, the variety of musical performers, their sounds, and their styles, and the many different musical genres that were featured that night, I both observed and took part in what I believe to be the perfect example of the “blurring the lines” style of musical cosmopolitanism that has been touched on in previous chapters. In the following pages, I delve deeply into this musical cosmopolitanism,

61 pointing out where it relates to cosmopolitan experiences of Bidgood and Feld and how it differs from those same experiences. The result of this experience did not provide a perfect example of “Czech music”, but it did show how the musical Other in Prague is quickly becoming less an unfamiliarity and more a part of the “familiar” for Czech musicians (to borrow Appiah’s notion of familiarity). What this means for the future of

Czech music, as understood by Czech musicians themselves, is still rather unclear.

However, the perspectives offered by my fellow interlocutors during the course of this evening provided immense insight into the mixing of different musical cosmopolitanisms in Prague today.

Shortly after meeting with Kuba, Mary, John, and I all stepped into the main room of the bar. The room itself was not especially large, but I was immediately drawn to the large number of guitars, basses, and other instruments that lined the walls. According to

Mary and Kuba, on Thursday nights, anyone was allowed to take an instrument down from the wall and play it, so long as they treated the instrument well and did not cause any issues for the other patrons. On one side of the wall were several amplifiers with various cables littered about, to be used in tandem with the electric instruments. In the far corner of the room was a small drum set and along the wall opposite the amplifiers was an old upright piano. Kuba mentioned that the drums were not allowed to be played after

11:00pm because they disturbed the residents living on the upper floors of the building.

After 11:00pm, anyone interested in playing percussive instruments were encouraged to accompany the other performers on a large cajón. Interestingly enough, do perhaps to the simplicity of the instrument the cajón was typically a favorite for patrons who did not

62 consider themselves to be trained musicians, thus emulating aspects of musicality that shift the focus away from the musician/non-musician distinction.31

There were already two musicians playing an instrumental 12-bar blues pattern on guitar and piano when we entered the room. The rest of the patrons were scattered around the outskirts of the room where various couches and chairs filled the remaining empty space. In the center of the room, one musician was attempting to set up a microphone for a couple than had arrived just before we did, while another was tuning a bass guitar. It was clear that we had arrived just in time to be a part of this impromptu “jam session”.

Mary and John were both visibly excited, speaking energetically with fellow patrons who were watching and listening to the performers. Mary was relatively familiar with the other patrons and they spent some time catching up on their lives since the last time Mary had been there. I learned that none of the patrons seated around us played any instruments, but that they were either related to, dating, or otherwise friends with various individuals playing and setting up instruments. One patron remarked on how her brother, the pianist, was a relatively well-known musician in Prague who had just finished an album with his band. She mentioned that her brother loved Rama and came here just about every Thursday and Friday, either to play or to meet new musicians to play with. I was content to listen to Mary and the other patrons’ discussions while observing the unfolding musical scene in front of me, but eventually Mary mentioned to the sister that I was also a musician. Apparently excited by this, she immediately barraged me with questions about my musical background shortly before calling her brother over to

31 Blacking, How Musical Is Man? 63 introduce me. Her brother seemed happy to meet me and talked shortly with me about why I had come to Prague before asking me to join them in their jam session. I was quickly offered a bass guitar, an instrument I had not played in several years, and asked to “lay down a line” by the brother. For the next several minutes, I played along with the brother on piano, the guitarist, and another patron on the cajón, all the while enjoying the scene that unfolded around me. Shortly after the performance, I learned that the brother, while having been in Prague for many years, was actually a non-native. The guitarist had been born and raised in Prague and was especially interested in blues and bluegrass music. For the majority of that evening, both the brother and the blues guitarist would perform for the rest of us. At various points, the brother would switch instruments, moving from piano to bass guitar to vocals and back to piano. The guitarist stayed on his instrument of choice but was more than happy to switch up styles depending on the whims of the other musicians.

After setting up the microphone, another guitarist and his significant other joined us. They were a couple from Portugal where they performed Latin American and

Portuguese music including bossa nova, samba, and fado. The male played guitar while the female sang along, sometimes accompanying on tambourine. After leaving Rama, I learned from Mary that this couple was also a fairly popular duo who frequently travelled to Prague to perform. It was often the case that, while in Prague, the couple would come by Rama, either to formally perform on Friday evenings, or to stop by the “jam sessions” on Thursday nights. Once the two had set up, I moved to the cajón to let someone else play bass and we quickly moved into a performance of various bossa nova standards.

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Both the Portuguese guitarist/vocalist duo were exceptionally skilled, receiving loud and energetic applause after every song. After the performance, our singer decided to take a break while the bassist switched over to piano and we brought in two new performers, another bassist and a male vocalist. I did not have the opportunity to meet the bassist, but our new vocalist was a Czech native who was immensely interested in hip-hop, rap, funk, rock, and fusions between these genres. As none of us were especially experienced in hip-hop, we elected to play some simple funk-like patterns while the vocalist shifted back and forth from singing and rapping along.

For most of the evening, we would switch our performances back and forth from bluesy rock, to covers of bossa nova and samba songs, to funk improvisations lasting well into the morning hours. During that time, while the original cast of musicians continued to perform on their instruments with few breaks throughout, the rest of us took frequent breaks to talk, rest up, and switch around instruments. It was during these breaks that I coult speak with the musicians for a few moments and get to know them a bit better. I learned that many of the non-musicians in the room were younger Czechs with proficiency in English. I also talked with the multi-instrumentalist brother for a short time about his interest and experience with performing these kinds of music in Prague.

Between the various patrons that I met and the short discussions that I had with the musicians, I began to piece together a better understanding of the current popular music scene in Prague. By taking part in the performance itself, I feel that I also learned quite a bit about the various processes involved in Prague’s music scene.

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Of all the musical styles and genres that I heard and played in Rama that night, of all the different kinds of music that I heard during my entire trip in Prague overall, the one music that I never once heard was the elusive “authentic Czech” music, at least as suggested by my various Czech interlocutors. At Rama, we did not play Czech music, we played American, Portuguese, Brazilian, British, and even African-American kinds of music. Sometimes our lyrics were Portuguese, other times English or Czech. There was never any performance of Czech folksong, but there were plenty of performances of 20th- century African-American “folksongs” (if we allow prototypical forms of blues music to be fit into this category). I do not think we could have played “authentic Czech” music even if we explicitly set out to do so. The musical scene at Rama was one that pulled from various different backgrounds and influences, involving Czech and non-Czech musicians, and resulting in a diverse set of musical styles and genres. This inherent merging or more broad-reaching cosmopolitanism of musical styles could not ever be considered “authentically Czech”, and yet here I was, once again, absorbed in another musical experience that was the complete opposite of unfamiliar to the Czech patrons, musician and non-musician, that were present that evening. Unlike the Hindustani event, the music we performed that evening was the kind of popular music that my Czech interlocutors were intimately familiar with. However these kinds of music could never be their “familiar”.

Appiah notes, in his writings on the “cosmopolitan patriot”, that the cosmopolitan has either a duty or a tendency to favor, cherish, and otherwise uphold their “familiar” cultural tenants. The “cosmopolitan patriot” can be fully welcoming of the outside but

66 will tend to place emphasis on what is familiar to them over the Other.32 When thinking about the discussions that I had with Honza and Šárka, and to some extent with my Czech friends that attended the Hindustani performance, it seemed to be the case that the Czech perspective on cosmopolitanism was one inherently steeped in this “cosmopolitan patriotism”. Of course, as I noted before, there were other cosmopolitan perspectives happening in those situations, but I could not, at the time, think of any better way to describe their personal Czech perspectives. However, while surrounded by both Czechs and non-Czechs playing music that they all were intimately familiar with, music that, for many in the room, defined their careers, experiences, and even lives, I could not help but wonder how the “cosmopolitan patriot” fit into this situation. Czechs in the room that evening had willingly decided to make the Other into the “familiar”. They had turned what they considered to be wholly non-Czech into a defining cultural characteristic of their own lives. To this, I wondered what to call this kind of cosmopolitanism. A cosmopolitanism that, in many ways, elevates the Other to the status of “familiar” while still managing to keep alive the line between the two.

In Bidgood’s work with Czech musical culture surrounding bluegrass music, he notes a similar phenomenon to the one I experienced. Even though Czech bluegrass had developed separately from American bluegrass in the wake of the second World War, every single one of his many interlocutors each mentioned, in some way or another, that

Czech bluegrass music was not, inherently, a separate entity from American bluegrass.33

32 Appiah, “Cosmopolitan Patriots.”, 619 33 Bidgood, Czech Bluegrass. 67

Instead, Czech bluegrass, in all of its possible forms and variations, would always be an imitation of its American counterpart. This imitation was not necessarily inferior. Many

Czech bluegrass listeners and performers even noted that there existed groups or artists who could create music that rivalled even the greatest American bluegrass musicians.

Yet, there was always some divide between Czech and American, something that kept

Czech bluegrass from attaining its own musical entity while simultaneously prohibiting it from being a poor copy of the original. Bidgood struggles with this issue in his work, continuously addressing the existence of this problem while never sufficiently arriving at a conclusion (a problem that he readily admits). How is it that Czechs have managed to borrow a musical genre from another culture and develop it enough to make it, in some way, their own, with their own unique problems, perspectives, and ideas for the genre, while simultaneously avoiding taking ownership of it as a part of Czech musical culture?

Bidgood presents the issue but, for the most part, ignores it, suggesting by his framing of this phenomenon that Czechs are just too humble for their own good. While my fieldwork in Prague provided only a snapshot of Czech musical culture, specifically from an urban perspective, I think that more can be said on this topic.

That evening in Rama, surrounded by Czech and non-Czech musicians, playing and listening to a variety of non-Czech musics, and conversing with many Czechs and non-Czechs, I experienced first-hand what I believe to be a rather unique cosmopolitan situation happening in the musical environment in Prague. It is not uncommon for musicians gathering and performing at Rama to be unfamiliar with each other in some way. Sometimes, a performer would be someone who was newly invited to the bar,

68 having just been introduced through a mutual friend. Other times, a performer would be a regular patron from the audience, someone who had not played an instrument in public before, or just someone who had not had the courage to get up and play before that moment. Occasionally, the performer would be someone who did not live in Prague, who had been invited on a whim to come and make music with other musicians. Only one or two of the performers that evening were individuals who were considered to be frequent

“regulars”, and even those few typically did not play every single week. At any moment, there would be an unequal mix of Czech and non-Czech musicians, or Czech and non-

Czech audience members. Occasionally there would be an unequal mix of instruments like a room full or guitarists or a single pianist. The music one heard each week varied from many musical extremes: classical, rock ‘n’ roll, metal, hip-hop, rap, soul, funk, bebop, free-form jazz, folksongs, and even just simple melodies sung by amateur audience members could be heard flowing from the various instruments and voices of

Rama’s patrons. The sheer variety and diversity of musical encounters one faced in this bar on a weekly basis exceeded any personal experience I had ever had. The seemingly limitless potential for musical experiences at Rama was one of the primary aspects of the establishment and helped to further the notions of community and togetherness that Kuba and his wife espoused.

The cosmopolitan musical experience in Rama is one that harkens back to older notions of cosmopolitanism. Like that of the Stoics, the musical cosmopolitanism in

Rama is one in which, ideally, no cultural identity can hold power over any other.34 At

34 Nussbaum, “Kant and Stoic Cosmopolitanism.” 69

Rama, any and all musical genres were welcomed. Any and all individuals with musical experience were welcomed. Individuals were encouraged to perform without fear of being judged regardless of their musical experience. With the incorporation of instruments like the cajón, and emphasis on group participation, even individuals with little to no musical training were encouraged to express their own musicality. In many ways, the performances at Rama were not unlike those encountered by Blacking in the

Venda communities of South Africa.35 While there would always be someone in the room with some degree of musical training driving the performance, everyone was allowed, and perhaps even expected, to take part in the musical experience, echoing broader notions of expressing musicality as suggested by Blacking. Of course, unlike the Venda community, the Rama community frequently flirted with modern musical practices, from modern genres to modern instruments. It is this very notion of the community experience, mixed with an emphasis on the universal musical experience, that makes the cultural climate of Rama, and even Prague more broadly, especially unique.

Conclusion

As mentioned previously, none of the native Czech interlocutors who I discussed with that night mentioned feeling that the music we performed was “authentic Czech” music, a claim that I was rather unsurprised to hear by this point in my trip. That is, none of the musics that evening were distinctly Czech in origin. Instead, Czechs present there were willingly and happily playing a wide variety of distinctly non-Czech music.

However, just as it was true in the minds of my Czech interlocutors that none of the

35 Blacking, How Musical Is Man? 70 musics that evening could be called “authentically Czech”, I also believe that many, if not all, of the musics that evening did not wholly belong to any other national or cultural identity, at least in the minds of the non-Czech patrons. Even the bossa nova that was performed had a distinctly “non-Portuguese” flair to it, in the presence of the occasional

Czech lyrics, in the interesting piano and guitar playing style of the Czech musicians, and within the context of the broader musical genres that were present that evening. At moments, certain musical identities rose to the forefront that evening, as seen in the hour of bossa nova and in the time spent with hip-hop and funk genres, but there was never a sense that one specific musical identity was dictating the flow of the evening. Sure, there was never any “authentic Czech” music playing that evening, but there was never any other “authentic” musics playing either. Instead, the musicians at Rama reveled and welcomingly embraced the “inauthenticity” of their performance. It did not matter whether the music they were playing was an accurate representation of a specific genre or style. It was more important that they played what they wanted to play, and that the sound of their music pleased themselves and the people around them. The only truly “authentic” facet of our experience that evening was the one commonality that each individual in the room shared: our present location in Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic.

It may seem rather simplistic to reduce the experiences of the individuals present that evening to merely a shared location, but I feel that this reduction is important to understand the core of the current Czech cosmopolitanism in Prague today. No, as far as I am aware, there is not any modern Czech musical style that can be wholly attributed to a

Czech origin, and therefore be considered an “authentically Czech” product. However, at

71 the risk of interfering with the perspectives of my Czech interlocutors, I believe that there is still a unique quality of Czech cosmopolitanism in Prague. This quality differs slightly from the cosmopolitanisms of various scholars discussed in this chapter. It is one in which non-Czech musical styles and genres are favored above attempts to create an

“authentic Czech” music. This form of musical cosmopolitanism not only welcomes the

Other, but in many ways incorporates the Other into the common cultural practices.

Czech musicians and listeners in Prague today, at least those I encountered, are completely enveloped in musical styles that they consider to be “foreign”. They point out that describing Czech music is difficult, and that determining whether there exists a modern form of Czech music is nearly impossible. However, they are also simultaneously, consciously or not, shifting these “foreign” musical styles, manipulating them into something that might one day be considered Czech, or at least more Czech than non-Czech. It was not clear to me while observing and discussing with the patrons that evening which musics were “foreign” to them, and which were commonly known. The patrons enjoyed all of the music that was heard that evening with a sense of intimacy that evening that burgeoned on the “familiar”, in Appiah’s sense of the word. These were not new musics, nor were they foreign musics. According to some, the musics were non-

Czech, but they were not not Czech. These musical styles may not have originated in

Czech culture, but the Czech patrons that evening had managed to make it their own, even if some still prohibited these musics from being defined as “authentically Czech”.

Additionally, there was something about the performances that drew in the non-Czechs; something that pulled them to Prague, the center of Czech culture. I believe that, in a lot

72 of ways, the music that evening was indeed Czech in some way or another, whether it be through specific stylistic features like Czech language, through the idiosyncrasies of the

Czech performance techniques, or through the fact that this was a gathering of primarily

Czech natives performing all sorts of music with many people.

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Final Thoughts

In Chapter 1, I set the scene for my initial experiences with Prague’s musical cosmopolitanism. The Hindustani event was the first live musical experience that I had been a part of in Prague, and it piqued my interest in exploring more deeply the distinctions between Czech and non-Czech music. I was certain, after the event, that there was a different kind of musical cosmopolitanism happening in Prague, but I was not sure how it worked or how to approach it. Through many discussions and interactions with friends like Honza and Šárka mentioned in Chapter 2, I began to piece together what

Czechs considered to be authentic Czech music. If I was to understand anything about the cosmopolitan perspective in Prague, I had to investigate the feelings and sentiments of individuals who identified with the majority culture. The Hindustani event showed me that Czechs were welcoming of non-Czech music in a way unlike other kinds of familiar and foreign identity dichotomies suggested by previous scholars encountered in this thesis. After discussing with my Czech interlocutors, it became clear that the relationship between the Czech familiar and the non-Czech Other apparent in Prague’s musical environment was an interesting one. The purpose of the distinction between Czech and non-Czech, at least in the minds of Czech natives, was not to establish Czech culture as an authoritative power over the non-Czech. Instead, the purpose for this distinction was to make sure that the Czech music was not forgotten and to make sure that both the credit

74 was given to the ownership and responsibility of the musics provided by the non-Czechs.

This distinction was made most clear in one of the final musical events of my fieldwork, a night spent with Czech and non-Czech musicians and listeners in Rama. Here, the inner workings of the musical cosmopolitanism in Prague was made clearer through a better understanding, experienced first-hand through observations, discussions and performances, of the relationship between Czech and non-Czech musics.

Before closing out this thesis I would like to address some of the major concerns that I feel lurk in the background of the observations and claims that I have made in this document. First, there is the issue of whether the observations made in this thesis are truly representative of the Czech culture as a whole, or if it is solely indicative of the cosmopolitan climate in Prague alone. Where relevant, I have attempted to be as clear as possible in mentioning that the aspects of Czech culture encountered in my fieldwork come from a distinctly urban lens. Additionally, when referencing aspects of Czech culture not explicitly related to urban contexts (such as the rural Czech folksong and traditional musics both within the Bohemian region and, more specifically, in the southern Moravian region), I have attempted to be as clear as possible. However, I recognize that urban qualities of Czech music versus the widely diverse qualities of rural

Czech music is relatively thorny. Unfortunately, I was not able to conduct much fieldwork outside of Prague, which is why I have attempted to narrow the focus to Prague alone, and there is an argument to be made that my distinctions between Czech and non-

Czech could be better defined as Praguean and non-Praguean. I have avoided this distinction primarily on the grounds that, indicative of only the urban climate of Prague

75 or not, the distinction between Czech and non-Czech is more representative of the observations and perspectives encountered during my fieldwork.

A second possible issue is related to my discussion of Czech cosmopolitanism itself. I have attempted to avoid explicit claims regarding the cosmopolitan environment in Prague that go against the notions and ideas posited by my Czech friends and interlocutors. While I believe that, should this current wave of Czech cosmopolitanism continue, there will inevitably result new musical styles that, to many, could distinctly be associated with Czech culture, my fieldwork (as well as Bidgood’s) suggest that there is a strong possibility that Czech natives will still feel some separation between their personal

Czech identity and that new music. It is easy for me, a non-Czech, to say that new musical practices which are born from the interaction between Czech musicians and non-

Czech musics should be credited, at least in part, to the Czech identity. However, I do wish to protect the sentiments of my Czech interlocutors and to respect their will to give credit to non-Czech originators, even if I personally believe they are perhaps “being too humble” (to borrow a similar sentiment shared by Bidgood, a fellow non-Czech interested in Czech music). Perhaps one might make an argument in the future that this

“humble”, or otherwise “distancing” sentiment of Czech natives is, in fact, the key to understanding modern Czech music. For now, I hope that I have made the distinction between Czech and non-Czech clear while providing insight into the nature of the cosmopolitan relationship between these perspectives.

I do believe that there is a distinctly unique quality of the sum cosmopolitan perspectives that I experienced in my fieldwork. I think that the interaction between

76 aspects of native Czech cosmopolitanism, with its focus on embracing the Other, and non-Czech cosmopolitanism, which enjoys the freedom for intermingling with Czech identity, has resulted in a unique cosmopolitan climate in Prague. This unique cosmopolitanism relishes in a freely moving focus between the “familiar” and the Other.

One that both embraces the Other as the “familiar” and the “familiar” as the “foreign”

(or, in a sense, the “unknown”), while simultaneously establishing divides between the two that harkens back to 19th-century Czech nationalist sentiments. Of course, there is still more work to be done with Czech cosmopolitanism. The number of scholars working with modern Czech music is immensely small, but if we are to reach a better understanding of the kinds of insights that Czech cosmopolitanism can share with us, then we need to continue this work well into the future. This thesis is only the initial groundwork into a deeper investigation into the current musical environment in Prague today, and I hope that this work will increase further interest into studies of Czech music in the future.

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