Theoretical basis for the study of mass music genres (Stanislav, Asafyev and Adorno)

A specific line of sociological thinking about popular music in the Czech lands had already been formed in the interwar period within the framework of the developing Marxist criticism, the key representative of which was the composer and theorist Josef Stanislav (1897–1971). In terms of his influence on Czech musicology and its relationship to popular music, Stanislav can be compared to T.W. Adorno and the impact of his ideas on musicology in Germany. The only difference is that, while the former legitimised the study of popular music to such an extent that it became a fixed part of the research plans of top Czech scientific institutions after World War II, Adorno, in (West) Germany, on the contrary, ‘produced sufficient arguments to create a feeling of verification among the representatives of historical musicology in their opposition to popular music as a subject of research’ (Rösing Reference Rösing, Ahlers and Jacke2016, p. 19).

The comparison of Stanislav and Adorno shows other remarkable facts. The two theorists shared the same generational affiliation, education in classical music, work in the field of music journalism, influence of Marxism and interest in mass music culture initiated by the advent of radio, which, for many observers, presented ‘a new audience of hundreds of thousands and millions of members of the most diverse social classes and cultural strata, whose socialisation takes place in an imaginary space, the ether’ (Vetterl Reference Vetterl1938, p. 27).

What distinguished these theorists was Stanislav's inferior social background, his lack of philosophical and sociological training, his leaning towards Soviet-style Marxism, and his anti-elitism, which, as a graduate of the Praha Conservatory's master school, led him to abandon his original interest in the musical avant-garde, collaborating with amateur workers’ ensembles and creating mass songs. Stanislav's inclination towards socialist realism also predetermined a different understanding of mass culture, as later defined by Vladimír Karbusický: (1) in Zhdanov's aesthetics, the term mass culture had a positive meaning since massness was seen as a desirable goal for the intelligibility of socialist–realist music; and (2) as a sociological term in the manner of Adorno's critique, mass culture, conversely, had a pejorative meaning (Karbusický Reference Karbusický1967, p. 30).

While Adorno did not attribute any artistic value to light/popular music, Stanislav argued that light music had its good and bad authors, like classical music: ‘It even has outstanding figures, and alongside them epigones and eclectics’ (Stanislav Reference Stanislav1957, p. 38). While Adorno's seminal studies of the 1930s and 1940s criticised the standardisation of popular music as a means of manipulating the masses (see Adorno Reference Adorno2002), Stanislav at the same time spoke of the life-giving impulses coming from the music culture of the people and the distinctiveness of that culture. In this regard, Stanislav thematised the current reality of the massification of music culture in the light of the views of his teacher, Zdeněk Nejedlý, the founder of Czech musicology and a music historian who, in the 1920s, had already explored 19th-century dance, brass and entertainment music as the starting point of Czech national musicFootnote ¹ and whose inclination towards Marxism, communism and the Soviet Union guided him to top political positions after World War II (see Křesťan Reference Křesťan2013).

The takeover of power by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in 1948 also led Josef Stanislav to high positions; he was instrumental in the Sovietisation of Czech musical culture and the establishment of the Union of Czechoslovak Composers.Footnote ² As one of its top representatives, Stanislav systematically promoted the necessity of exploring mass music genres, which, especially through his students, eventually found a place in academia in the early 1960s (Blüml and Ignácz Reference Blüml and Ignácz2022).

The mass music genres as carriers of the ‘revolutionary ideas of the people’ had a logical position in the subject field of official Marxist musicology. However, the priority task appeared to be to find a unified theoretical framework that would explain and legitimise their role in the context of musical culture as a whole, not only socially and politically but also taking into account their aesthetic and artistic functioning. This framework became the heritage of the Soviet composer and theorist Boris Vladimirovich Asafyev (1884–1949) and was further elaborated by the leading Czech Marxist musicologist, Jaroslav Jiránek. In Reference Jiránek1967 he devoted a monograph to Asafyev's theory, and in 1972 he touched upon the same topic in relation to popular music at the International Musicological Colloquia in Brno. Jiránek's paper, entitled ‘The interrelation of bytovaya muzyka (“бытовая музыка”) and art music as a musicological problem’, discussed three concepts that emerged after World War I that attempted to cope with the gradual differentiation of musical life (Jiránek Reference Jiránek and Pečman1979, pp. 22–33).

In the first case, the author referred to Max Weber and his Reference Weber1921 book Die rationalen und sociologischen Grundlagen der Musik, in which the author distinguished two basic musical worlds standing in sharp contrast to each other in the historical development of the organisation of musical material: (1) a musical sphere based on the principle of melodic distance; and (2) a sphere based on the chordal–harmonic concept, which simultaneously represented the sociological pole of music and the pole of the rational/mathematical essence of music. Weber identified the first sphere with the domain of non-European musical cultures and the second with European musical culture (Jiránek Reference Jiránek and Pečman1979, pp. 23–4). In the second case, Jiránek spoke of Heinrich Besseler's key concepts of ‘Darbietungsmusik’ and ‘Umgangsmusik’, which captured the escalating polarity of modern musical life, split between music of the highest artistic quality and music fulfilling utilitarian and practical purposes. Jiránek refuted the notion that art music, meaningful in itself (‘eigenständig’), was the main focus of musical history, referring to Besseler and arguing that it was only a refinement emerging in the Renaissance and culminating in the rise of concert life in the 19th century. In addition to this type, there was

In the third case, Jiránek analysed Asafyev's approach, which transformed the contemporary problem of the relationship between European and non-European musical cultures addressed by comparative musicology into the axis of the relationship between Western and Eastern Europe and asked whether it was acceptable to intellectualise Russian music using methods borrowed from Western European musical culture. In his 1925 article ‘Contemporary Russian musicology and its historical tasks’, Asafyev commented:

On this basis, Asafyev formulated a polarisation of ‘art’ and ‘everyday’ music,Footnote ³ which, according to Jiránek, was not merely a description of the objective differentiation process of music but also affected the internal logic of this process and integrated both poles into the totality of musical culture:

According to Jiránek, Asafyev's concept meant a rethinking and synthesis of Weber's and Besseler's theoretical perspective and could be applied to both levels of the historical differentiation process: to the relationship between European and non-European musical cultures and within the musical culture of modern industrial society (Jiránek Reference Jiránek and Pečman1979, p. 29). This is also how the concept of ‘everyday music’ was adopted by Czech musicologists and used in the central collective project of the 1960s on the history of 20th-century Czech musical culture, which, alongside classical music, included the treatment of mass music genres for the first time.Footnote ⁴

At the end of his conference paper, Jiránek mentioned T.W. Adorno in passing but concluded that his approach is not relevant to the purposes of understanding musical culture as a whole.

A brief episode of Adorno's popularity in Czechoslovakia occurred in the 1960s, when a number of local academics, as a result of the political thaw and their departure from the former Marxist musicology discredited by the dogmatism of the 1950s, gradually began to return to West German scholarship, which in their eyes represented the Western ‘world’ trend, as it had often been in the past before the communist takeover. In this sense, Czechoslovak academics renewed their contacts with Adorno, who, within the framework of the historical interdependence of Czech and German milieus, had already been in personal touch with Czech culture in the interwar period, and who, as an exponent of German ‘bourgeois scholarship’, was removed from public debate only by official Marxist musicology after 1948.

The first Czech translation of Adorno's study, namely ‘Über den Fetischcharakter in der Musik und die Regression des Hörens’, was published in Reference Adorno1964. Most inspired by Adorno's texts was Josef Stanislav's pupil and pioneer of Czech music sociology Vladimír Karbusický, whose original enthusiasm for the artistic appreciation of mass music genres cooled somewhat under the influence of the German theorist during the 1960s. After reading Adorno's chapter ‘Leichte Musik’ in Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie (Reference Adorno1962), Karbusický developed a discussion on the type-standardised basis of popular music production. but only in relation to aesthetics and artistic axiology (Karbusický Reference Karbusický1967).

It is telling that the frequency of references to Adorno in the Czechoslovak music press peaked at the time of culmination of attempts to reform the political regime in the late 1960s. After the occupation by Warsaw Pact troops in August 1968 and the restoration of a consistent pro-Soviet policy, the impact of Adorno's theories on Czech musicology was again interrupted. This was also due to Karbusický's emigration to West Germany, where he continued his academic career and from where he would in the following years fundamentally oppose the principles of Eastern European Marxist musicology, of which he was an active promoter in the 1950s as a co-founder of research into mass music genres.

The fact that the theoretical reflection on popular music in European socialist countries was based on different foundations from those of T.W. Adorno also applied in Hungary, where the first significant responses to the German scholar's work appeared only in the 1960s, especially in the work of sociologist Iván Vitányi (Blüml and Ignácz Reference Blüml and Ignácz2022), and furthermore, in Poland, where the German scholar's theories started to be discussed only in the 1980s (Misiak Reference Misiak1983, pp. 85–108).

Discovering the audience in the cultural and political changes of the postwar era

In his 2003 summary of the history of Czech music sociology, Mikuláš Bek noted that the field was first approached in the 1930s by Marxists such as Josef Stanislav, ‘obviously dissatisfied with the state of musical culture and society at the time’. However, with the revival of music sociology at the beginning of the 1960s, the positions of the ‘dissidents’ were reversed – ‘the role of an instrument of resistance to the system was taken over by empirically oriented positivism’ (Bek Reference Bek2003, p. 25). The following text examines the development of the sociology of popular music in the Czech lands after World War II, with a particular emphasis on the field of empirical sociology.

An attempt to develop this discipline was made immediately after World War II, when the Czechoslovak Institute for Public Opinion Research was established in 1946 within the Ministry of Information. From the outset, the Institute developed cooperation with analogous Western and Eastern European institutions and published its research in a new journal, Public Opinion, which was to become ‘a forum for sociologists, psychologists, statisticians, and workers in the fields of journalism, promotion, and education’ (Adamec Reference Adamec1966, p. 1). One of the surveys conducted in 1947 also focused on the field of music, specifically on the degree of popularity of ‘classical music’, ‘jazz’ and ‘brass music’ (‘dechovka’) among a representative sample of the population divided by gender, age and socio-professional affiliation. This was the first Czech research of its kind and, among other things, showed a remarkably low popularity of jazz, ‘even among the youngest age group, which at that time still highly preferred brass music (and lidovka) over modern popular music’ (Kotek Reference Kotek1990, pp. 383–5).

The post-war activities in the field of empirical sociology, however, did not last long. In 1948, they were ended by the communist takeover, as a result of which the field of sociology was rejected as ‘bourgeois pseudoscience’; all the sociology departments in the country were closed down and their workers who did not emigrate were subjected to persecution (Možný Reference Možný2017).

Both the Stalinist era and the immediate post-Stalinist period of the 1950s were characterised by withdrawal from exploring the interests of the musical public and instead a leaning towards socio-cultural engineering and the construction of a new socialist musical culture. The state institutions, led by the Union of Czechoslovak Composers, established on the Soviet model, concentrated their interest primarily on the field of creation and creators since their correct programming in the spirit of the progressive principles of socialist realism, according to the utopian goals of communist cultural policy, should have automatically guaranteed adequate audience reactions.

The ideological fervour of the first half of the 1950s, however, soon began to wane. This was due to the general political thaw after the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956, accompanied by the reconstruction of relations with Western countries, but also to Czechoslovakia's growing economic problems. These began to raise questions among many of the actors involved as to whether the extraordinarily large sums of money spent by the state on the development of socialist culture and the arts actually achieved the declared goals and whether the generous subsidies for various forms of musical education, including concerts in factories, and the intensive distribution of ‘art’ to regions and other such enterprises, actually changed society, elevated its tastes, and so on (Kotek Reference Kotek1966, p. 130).

The increasingly felt need to know the behaviour of consumers of culture culminated in the organisation of the Congress of Socialist Culture at the end of the 1950s. This was a national event with the stated aim of discussing the cultural revolution in the period of socialist construction with the participation of the widest range of cultural, artistic, scientific and political workers. The congress took place from 8 to 11 June 1959, but its centre of gravity lay in the preparatory phase, that is, a several-month-long pre-congress campaign that included trips by cultural workers, scientists and artists to Czechoslovak regions to talk to the public. A total of 2366 talks were organised, at which 2131 cultural workers from Praha and the regions spoke and which were attended by almost 230,000 people. According to official documents, the talks were intended, on the one hand, to stimulate interest in the activities of art unions and other cultural institutions among the working people. The representatives of culture, on the other hand, expected feedback from the public, which would serve as a guide for further management of culture and science (Záruba Reference Záruba1959, p. 7).

Several dozen members of the Union of Czechoslovak Composers also took part in the trips. Their discussions with workers, students and other people touched on a wide range of problems related to the influence of radio, television, amateur music practice, music as a background, and so on. The meetings revealed a number of facts that, in the absence of sociological surveys, were not known to the members of the Union or were only approximated, especially the high level of interest in modern dance music and jazz with no links to any political tendencies.

The conclusions and findings of the Congress of Socialist Culture and its pre-congress campaign had their political outcomes. After discussing them, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia adopted a resolution on 1 December 1959, in which it responded to the rapid development of mass culture with an appeal for the usefulness of exploring the social functions of genres intended for the entertainment and leisure of workers (Blüml and Ignácz Reference Blüml and Ignácz2022, pp. 168–9).

The development of Czech sociology began at the turn of the 1960s. In the same year, when the Congress of Socialist Culture took place, the term ‘sociology’ entered the professional discourse with the book Contemporary Empirical Sociology by J. Klofáč and V. Tlustý (Reference Klofáč and Tlustý1959), who also initiated the establishment of a sociology department at the Party University of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in the early 1960s (Možný Reference Možný2017). In the field of musicology, a book by the Slovak scholar Jozef Kresánek, Social Function of Music (Reference Kresánek1961), reflecting on the social functions of music in various historical periods, sparked a particularly lively discussion.

On the initiative of the Marxist musicologists revolving around the Union of Czechoslovak Composers, the Institute for Musicology of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences was founded in February 1962 as a coordinating centre for all domestic musicological departments, including those of universities. The Institute consisted of three departments according to the main research areas of the time – music history, aesthetics and theory. The first department included a group for research on mass music genres, which had been assigned to the Institute as a priority topic by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (Blüml and Ignácz Reference Blüml and Ignácz2022, pp. 170–1). Particularly associated with the existence of the group in the 1960s are the personalities of Josef Kotek (1928–2009) and Vladimír Karbusický (1925–2002): the former approached the sociology of popular music primarily through music historiography and research on the history of music reception and the latter through empirical investigations of contemporary musicality.

Part of the revision of Czechoslovak Marxist musicology after the Stalinist dogmatism of the 1950s was the organisation of a national seminar from 10 to 13 April 1962, which emphasised the importance of investigating mass music genres and rehabilitated music sociology as a legitimate musicological subdiscipline. This seminar was to contribute to the main task of Czech musicology in the 1960s, which was to elaborate the history of Czech musical culture from 1900 to the present.

In particular, Kotek, who, together with his colleague Lubomír Fendrych, presented a paper on the issue of ‘genres directly connected with the life of the people’, was a success. He reflected on the specifics of mass music genres and on the adequate methodology of their research, also comparing it with the approaches applied to the field of classical music. In the former, the authors discussed the extra-musical contexts of mass music genres, including the role of mass media and the wider social and political contexts as well as the compositional, textual and performance components of songs. In terms of methodology, the authors noted the need to confront statistical and sociological data with the artefact itself and its multifaceted analysis (Blüml Reference Blüml2024, p. 88).

An innovative element was the differentiation of entertainment and dance music from the mass songs and works for youth ensembles officially promoted in the 1950s. Although both areas theoretically fell under the common term of mass music genres at the time, Fendrych and Kotek pointed out, on the one hand, the specific features of the two spheres that needed to be taken into account in the research design. In the context of entertainment and dance music, the authors spoke of the utilitarian and listening functions, the synergy of artistic and psychophysical effects, the links to the lifestyles of specific social and socio-generational groups and the close interdependence with the economy and market mechanisms. In the latter case, Fendrych and Kotek, on the other hand, emphasised the link to specific historical stages and cultural and political determinism (Blüml Reference Blüml2024, p. 89).

The national seminar also gave impetus to the first large-scale empirical investigation carried out in cooperation between the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences and Czechoslovak Radio under the leadership of musicologists Vladimír Karbusický and Jaroslav Kasan (Karbusický and Kasan Reference Karbusický and Kasan1969). This was undertaken in the spring of 1963 with the help of an audio questionnaire conducted with a sample of about 2000 people and examined the popularity of all ‘contemporary music categories’ in detail. As additional data, it tracked the frequency of playing musical instruments, active singing and participation in musical ensembles, the popularity of dancing, the personal use of mass media (including listening to foreign radio), the attendance at music-related cultural venues and the influence of school on overall musicality.

The findings of the research first updated the concept of mass music genres: specifically, it confirmed the extraordinary social reach of Czech and foreign ‘dance songs’ while stating that politically exposed mass songs and estrada music no longer belonged to this category. It was also surprising to find that people did not tend to appreciate particularly the ‘pure values’ of the traditional national folk music consistently promoted by state institutions after 1945. The authors commented on these facts, arguing that the issue of ‘modern rhythmic music’ can no longer be viewed in simplistic political terms but that it is time to think about this music realistically as a phenomenon accompanying the contemporary civilisational process. In its totality, the survey helped ‘to refute definitively the optimistic, yet not very realistic, notions of a unified cultural base, equally and indiscriminately exploited by all workers’ (Kotek Reference Kotek1966, p. 131). At the same time, confirming the minority role of classical music, it showed that, ‘even under the conditions of a socialist society, the ability to apperceive more artistically demanding music (and, by analogy, arguably more demanding art in general) cannot be considered general for all its members’ (Kotek Reference Kotek1966, p. 131). The authors of the investigation as well as the empirical–sociological approach itself became part of the process of liberation from the social experiments and manipulation of the will and taste of the people of the ‘Zhdanovism’ of the past years, and in this sense the whole survey also had an obvious ethical and cultural–political dimension.

This research, however, had a practical aspect too: on the one hand, it was to supply information to Czechoslovak Radio, which, like other state media, was under direct pressure from the public; on the other hand, it was to provide information useful for reforming pedagogical practice. The investigation was based on the postulate, widely rooted in the Czech environment, of the key role of public institutions in educating listeners in more demanding music as well as on the thesis that popularity cannot be a measure of aesthetic value (Karbusický and Kasan Reference Karbusický and Kasan1969, p. 11).

In the end, the research also had an impact on musicology. Thanks to the new data on the state of music reception, the reality of the distinction between ‘folk music’ and ‘popular music’ began to emerge clearly – a fact that was echoed over the next 10 years in the innovation of musicological systematics and the emancipation of two separate subdisciplines devoted to each of these types of music (Kotek and Poledňák Reference Kotek and Poledňák1974; Lébl and Poledňák Reference Lébl and Poledňák1988). Furthermore, owing to the findings of this sociological investigation, Czech musicologists strengthened their interest in a comprehensive analysis of popular music, which they saw as a unique opportunity in the international scientific field, as evidenced by Karbusický's (Reference Karbusický1964) commentary:

The advent of empirical sociology in the 1960s also brought about other partial investigations. Some were compiled by state music producers, who, inspired by the actors of the Western music industry, conducted ‘market surveys’ within the constraints of a monopolised, centrally controlled economy. Sociological investigations were also carried out by individuals working at the intersection of music journalism and musicology, such as Lubomír Dorůžka, who investigated the correlation between the popularity of particular genres of entertainment, jazz and classical music (Dorůžka Reference Dorůžka1965, pp. 292–4, 338–9). The starting point of Dorůžka's research was the discussions in the late 1950s about the extent to which popular music (especially jazz) could be used to lead listeners to a positive relationship with classical music. The musical educational framework was then consistent with the pioneering work of Karbusický and Kasan. Several other investigations were conducted directly in the music education departments of university faculties of education.

In accordance with the original intention to repeat the empirical–sociological surveys three times within 10 years and thus to provide sufficient material for historical sociology, which could identify trends in music reception and thus provide the basis for state institutions in the field of education and cultural policy, Karbusický and Kasan repeated the survey in the following years. However, its complete publication was not possible owing to the onset of normalisation after the occupation of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops in 1968 and Karbusický's emigration to West Germany.

After 1970, music sociology became largely a subject of occasional interest to general sociologists, while professional musicologists, with the exception of a few individuals, cleared the field (Bek Reference Bek2003, p. 19). The newly established Institute for Cultural Research at the Ministry of Culture began to carry out empirical research, and in 1973 it conducted its last survey, with a significant overlap with popular music, focusing on the cult of singing stars and their social impact (Hepner and Maříková Reference Hepner and Maříková1975).

Encounters between Eastern and Western European sociology of popular music

The authors R. Serge Denisoff and John Bridges, in relation to the development of a Western, mainly Anglophone sociology of popular music, argued that ‘Most of the sociological investigations of music since World War II have concentrated on the popular music phenomenon’ (Reference Denisoff and Bridges1983, p. 52). This thesis was also valid in Czechoslovakia, the only difference being that, while in Western countries such research was mostly initiated by sociologists (Denisoff and Bridges Reference Denisoff and Bridges1983, p. 51), behind the Iron Curtain it was mainly performed by musicologists. The different disciplinary background determined the nature of research and its objectives: while in the former case the scholars primarily investigated the behaviour of the carriers of music culture, in the latter case the research overlapped with historical investigations of music culture and music itself, regarding which official Marxist musicology (as opposed to traditional non-Marxist musicology) focused on the ‘present’ of the 20th century as well as music aesthetics and music education. Within the Central European trend towards the creation of international research networks across geopolitical blocs in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the two traditions had the opportunity to meet directly.

This trend continued in the first phase in Czechoslovakia, where an international conference on music sociology was held in 1966 by the Union of Czechoslovak Composers (Karbusický and Mokrý Reference Karbusický and Mokrý1967). Later, instigated by Slovakian musicologist Ladislav Mokrý, the idea of organising an international conference on popular music was conceived as part of the international festival of pop songs, the Bratislavská lyra 1968. The conference was to host 15 experts from socialist countries, 15 from Western countries and the same number from Czechoslovakia. For the meeting itself, Czechoslovak scholars, led by Vladimír Karbusický and Josef Kotek, proposed two thematic areas: (1) the basic criteria of popular music research (methodology and definitions); and (2) popular music as a part of mass culture (including the sociological functions of mass media, cultural–political functions, economic functions, etc.) (Blüml Reference Blüml2024, p. 98). In the politically unstable period of the Praha Spring, the event was eventually unable to take place, and an attempt to move it to the following year, when the process of normalisation was already underway, also failed.

A few years later, however, a similar initiative was taken up by the International Institute for Music, Dance and Theatre in Audiovisual Media, which had been operating in cooperation with UNESCO in Vienna since 1969 under the leadership of the Austrian music sociologist Kurt Blaukopf. Given the extraordinary social importance that popular music enjoyed at the time, the Institute aimed one of its first projects in this direction (Blaukopf Reference Blaukopf1972, p. 128).

From 18 to 23 September 1972, a conference on ‘New Patterns of Musical Behaviour of the Young Generation in Industrial Societies’ was held in Vienna, attended by representatives of several Eastern and Western European countries as well as Canada and the United States (Bontinck Reference Bontinck1972, pp. 263–71). Among Czech musicologists, the congress was attended by Jiří Vysloužil, whose paper on the evaluation of the musical activities of Czechoslovak youth aroused resentment among Western European sociologists, who, by the nature of their field, refused to apply any aesthetic criteria to popular music:

The exclusion of aesthetic criteria, which had accompanied sociological thinking about mass music genres in the Czech lands since the interwar period, was unimaginable to representatives of Eastern European countries. It was similar to the topic of youth escapism through drugs, as the problem of drug abuse and drug addiction did not exist in socialist Czechoslovakia.

Sociology of popular music and social prognostics

According to Mikuláš Bek, music sociology literally became a ‘buzzword’ of Czech musicology in the 1960s, when almost every musicologist felt obliged to ‘conduct sociological surveys, cite relevant authorities, or directly write a treatise on the fundamental methodological issues of the discipline’ (Reference Bek2003, p. 19). At the same time, however, Bek argued that this music sociological campaign waned as quickly as it began, aided by ‘among other things, the political pressure on sociology after 1969, which led to further personal devastation of sociological research’ (Reference Bek2003, p. 19). The only significant representative of music sociology and the sociology of popular music thus remained Josef Kotek, whose historical–sociological approach of the 1960s merged with the politically exposed discipline of social forecasting during the period of normalisation.

The importance of social prognostics in the European socialist countries was discussed in 1973 by sociologist Oleg Suša, according to whom the revolutionary changes in the conditions of social life, the increasing complexity of the interrelations and interconnections of various areas of development, and the undeniable acceleration of social processes constantly produced new and more complex problems. Solving these problems required new approaches, including ‘scientific anticipation and concrete forecasting of the prospects for the development of the whole society and its individual areas’ (Suša Reference Suša1973, p. 660). According to the author, the theoretical problems and methodological approaches of Marxist social prognostics began to develop intensively in the second half of the 1960s, first in the Soviet Union, the German Democratic Republic and Poland and then in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. While prognostic research concentrated mainly on technical and economic issues in the first phase, the scope later broadened to examine the dynamics of social and cultural development as well. Scientifically based anticipation of the development of society was seen as a key means of its central management and direction (Suša Reference Suša1973, pp. 660–1).

Kotek came to the phenomenon of social prognostics in the 1970s. It was then that he began to talk about the laws of dialectical and historical materialism, which offer us not only an interpretation and a better understanding of the past but also, if applied consistently, a way of learning about the hidden contexts and recurring evolutionary mechanisms that subsequently enable us to forecast the likely directions of future development (Kotek Reference Kotek1990, p. 459).

In this sense, from the early 1970s, Kotek developed a theory of universal laws of the evolution of style–genre typesFootnote ⁵ of popular music and their exchange. Its basic theses had already appeared in the manuscript ‘Towards some social aspects of mass music culture’, which the author contributed to the project General and Special Features of the Spread of Socialist Culture conducted by the Scientific Department for Cultural Research of the Faculty of Arts of Charles University at the end of 1973. The roughly 100-page manuscript, intended as the first comprehensive treatise on the sociology of popular music in the Czech lands, was to be published as a separate book monograph in 1975.Footnote ⁶ However, it was never issued, and Kotek's theories were published only in the form of partial studies in the following years. The text that most fully captured Kotek's theory was ‘Popular music and sociological aspects of its reception’, published in 1982. The core of the study was a discussion of the theory of the social reception of popular music as a four-phase process. This was based on the general question of how society adopts popular music:

The four evolutionary stages of the social reception of popular music, identified using Friedhelm Debus's terms ‘innovation’, ‘diffusion’, ‘adaptation’, and ‘restriction’, could be identified in the development of virtually all styles and genres of popular music that entered Czech musical culture in the 20th century, according to Kotek: ‘from the cabaret song and the first jazz echoes before the First World War to the recent waves of rock, folk and disco’ (Reference Kotek, Zenkl and Chyba1982, p. 82).

Kotek asserted that the first phase of the ‘innovation’ was characterised by a narrow, generationally and socially compact group of particularly informed and programmed participants, especially youths. For this group, music was not only a matter of listening and the information and recreation associated with it but also, in the ‘second plan’, an individualised generational expression and a group identifier. The group interest could even be demonstrative, functioning as a kind of protest against social conventions and an expression of social non-conformity. The ‘innovation’ phase was characterised by the dominant participation of amateurs, who compensated for the weaker technical level of their work by the ‘novel and therefore stimulating, even tantalising, spontaneity of their expression’ (Kotek Reference Kotek, Zenkl and Chyba1982, p. 82).

According to Kotek, the second phase of the ‘diffusion’ was characterised by the entry of professionals and a more informed part of the public, expressed by the first pressings of songs and official recordings. Another characteristic feature was the formation of a fashion imperative binding members of the entire potentially interested socio-generational circle. The second stage, as the author suggested, began to respond to some other factors of a social nature, such as the social and property status of the new consumers and the extent of their leisure and action space. In sum, in Kotek's view, the second stage represented the peak of authenticity and stylistic typicality of a particular style–genre type, when the spontaneity of expression was not yet constrained by the conventions and profit-making aspects of professionalism but when the music was already based on the consent and interest of a wider audience.

Kotek described the third phase of ‘adaptation’ as the longest in terms of time. Its typical features were commercialisation, stylistic conventionalisation, broader consumer democratisation and the smooth integration of the original novelty into the reception, taste, and socio-functional circuit of the middle and older generations. In Kotek's opinion, more ambitious creators and artists at this stage sought a way out in the escalation of artistic complexity.

The fourth phase of ‘restriction’, according to Kotek, was characterised by stagnation in artistic, socio-functional, artistic, organisational and economic terms but also, for example, by the defensive efforts of the institutions involved (publishing houses, media, cultural and political organisations, etc.) to preserve a given style–genre type; this may constitute a serious organisational ‘blockade’ for the necessary further development of popular music, which will only be overcome by ‘a truly viable new style-genre type’ (Kotek Reference Kotek, Zenkl and Chyba1982, p. 89). The author complemented the four-phase model with ‘revival waves’, linking the ‘second life’ of popular music styles and genres to the nostalgia of older generations and to the interest of younger listeners who have grown up in ‘different social and ethnic conditions and thus no longer experience the initial style as a convention or even a degenerate banality’ (Reference Kotek, Zenkl and Chyba1982, pp. 89–90).

Kotek's theory also included the concept of the cyclical development of popular music and its mechanisms. Its essence was the question of how the exchange of different style–genre types takes place: ‘Is it a coincidence, an unpredictable temporal sequence, or on the contrary a development strictly bound to external socio-political and economic conditions? Or are there some other influences that we have not yet taken into account?’ (Kotek Reference Kotek, Zenkl and Chyba1982, p. 93). In this sense, Kotek defined three determining factors: (1) external, (2) internal and (3) generational. In the first case, these were influences of a social, ideological–political, economic and cultural nature, through which the relevant social formation ‘moulds popular music as one of the many auxiliary instruments of its existence and necessary social and cultural development’ (Kotek Reference Kotek, Zenkl and Chyba1982, pp. 95–6). With regard to the second factor, Kotek spoke of the structural and technical aspects that assert themselves spontaneously in the creation of each composition, both as part of the subjective authorial and performance pursuit of distinctiveness and as a result of the influence of technology: ‘It is therefore still necessary to reckon that the entry of each new medium of communication or technology will in some way be reflected in the further style-genre development of popular music’ (Kotek Reference Kotek, Zenkl and Chyba1982, pp. 96–7).

Kotek, however, argued that neither external factors (predetermining ‘what is sung and why’) nor internal factors (predetermining ‘how it will be played and sung’) are in themselves completely decisive for the development of popular music since there is another circuit of forces at work between them, the consequences of which must be taken into account. These are individual and group consumer tastes, which, according to Kotek, have the advantage of biological constancy as opposed to external and internal factors: ‘it is predetermined primarily by generation. This circumstance also conditions a certain regularity, even periodicity, of newly emerging style-genre waves’ (Reference Kotek, Zenkl and Chyba1982, p. 97). For their tidal rhythm, Kotek used the metaphor of a ‘generational pendulum’, the oscillation of which took place roughly over a period of 20–25 years. The generational moment played a significant role in Kotek's theory, and the researcher attributed to it the highest prognostic potential.

It is important to recall that Kotek traced the phenomenon of style–genre exchanges within predefined, chronologically ordered ‘generic lines’ of popular music: (1) social singing (patriotic songs, social choral singing of the 19th century, workers’ songs, engaged songs of the 20th century, etc.); (2) Central European popular music based on the theatrical tradition (broadside ballads, couplet productions, cabaret songs, operetta, songs of small-form theatres of the inter-war and post-war periods, etc.); and (3) dance, mostly imported popular music (jazz, swing, rock, disco, etc.). In this respect, Kotek recalled terms such as ‘swing generation’ and ‘rock generation’ but also the generation of the Liberated Theatre or the generation of Semafor – terms associated with the Czech tradition of small-form theatres (Reference Kotek, Zenkl and Chyba1982, p. 98).

The emergence of a new genre–style type, according to Kotek, did not automatically mean the demise of the previous one: ‘In popular music, at any stage of its modern existence, we encounter a number of style–genre types that exist symbiotically alongside each other and constantly exchange stimuli. In doing so, there can be the multifaceted coexistence of older and younger style–genre varieties within the same generic sequence’ (Reference Kotek, Zenkl and Chyba1982, pp. 91–2).

As already mentioned, Kotek's research into the universal laws of the evolution of popular music overlapped with the trend towards social prognostics during the normalisation period. In this sense, the musicologist, together with various other researchers from various scientific disciplines, participated in the extensive project Prognosis of the Development of Czech and Slovak Culture until the Year 2000, which was published in several volumes by the Institute for Cultural Research in 1978 (Cejp Reference Cejp1978). In 1979, Kotek presented a paper at a conference of the Union of Czech Composers and Concert Artists,Footnote ⁷ which was later published with the telling title ‘With the future at our heels: a handful of futurological reflections on Czech popular music – and not only about it’ (Reference Kotek1990, pp. 459–81). The paper, presented at a national forum on popular music attended by musicologists, music journalists, representatives of the state media and cultural policy makers, had several levels. Kotek, with the help of rigorous application of the above theories, commented on the state and future prospects of the main domestic style–genre types of popular music (folk music, brass music, jazz, rock, pop, disco, etc.). Largely in accordance with the original idea of social and cultural prognostics, he then addressed the practical issues and future tasks of music life management.

In this sense, Kotek called for greater integration of popular music into school curricula and research plans and spoke of ways to improve the work of art agencies, the search for amateur talents and the work of clubs, media, music publishers, popular music magazines, and so on. He also used his theories and his scientific authority to defend rock, which, after the advent of normalisation, became a target of repression because of its link to Anglo-American culture and its violation of the ‘principles of socialist ethics’, which meant non-conformist behaviour, substance abuse, rioting and such like. Accordingly, Kotek highlighted the necessity of early assessment and support of the positive components that the new style–genre types brought, arguing that this would accelerate the inevitable assimilation process. In the case of rock as a positive component, he referred to ‘the great development of active musicianship among young people – including in terms of their own creative activity and playing previously less frequented instruments, the resonance of rock songs with socially engaged themes, the interest in associated stage forms, the mass spread of electroacoustic DIY, etc.’ (Kotek Reference Kotek, Zenkl and Chyba1982, p. 101).