Page:Czecho-Slovak Student Life, Volume 18.djvu/419

ing. They were called “bonifantes”, and in return for their training were obliged to provide the music during the Divine Services. Until then the organ was the only instrument used for accompanying church singing, but at that time other instruments were introduced into the churches. Charles IV was very partial to the flute, and mention is made of a famous flute maker, Master Nicolas, who was attached to the Court. A new kind of love song was at that time introduced into Bohemia by a French Troubadour, Guillaume de Machant, who was a poet and composer and for some time secretary to King John of Luxemburg. It was called Rodellus, and was the same as the French Rondelle.

By the beginning of the seventeenth century, Czech literature reached its highest point of develoupment. A decline, however, set in with the Thirty Years War, which was the saddest epoch in Czech history.

For more than two hundred years after 1620, the language seemed to be entirely dead. The once renowned kingdom of Bohemia, crushed under the Habsburg rule, was reduced gradually to a population of peasants. Through the loss of independence and the determination of the Habsburgs to Germanize the people, the greater part of the cultured classes was forced to receive its education in the higher German schools. It was the Czech peasantry who, through the times of oppression and serfdom, clung tenaciously to their native tongue and kept up the old traditions, music, dances, costumes, and ceremonies. And with them the humble schoolmasters of those times retained within their their modest circles a little of the popular fondness for music, vocal and instrumental.

With the French Revolution in 1789 the spirit of revolt against oppressors found fertile soil in Bohemia. Some fervent patriots, in whose breasts the love of their father’s language could not be destroyed, set to work and began to realize their long cherished dream of a revival of all that has been trodden down so cruelly. They knew that first of all the language had to be revived and the race reconstituted. And the great mission to help in the resurrection of the Nation and in the revival of the native tongue, fell to the folklore and the folksong. From the crude dialect, as the peasants used in their folksongs and legends, the polished literary language as it is used in Czecho-Slovakia at the present day gradually developed. Prominent literary men took upon themselves the task of collecting, from old peasants in far removed parts of the country and the mountains, all the melodies which had been passed on to them from generation to generation. The result was quite amazing. In a few months they collected no less than about 2000 folk- and dance-tunes which now form our musical treasure and make the foundation of an entirely new musical school.

Music is, and had been ever since time immemorial, a part of the folk consciousness in Bohemia. The Czech likes to associate everything in life with music. He prefers song to speech. For almost every event in life, from birth to death, he had special folksongs and special music. According to the elimate and territory from which it sprang, the song has its characteristic properties. The folksong of Bohemia proper, for instance, is generally in the major with a favorite close on the third; the Moravian in the minor; and among the Slovak songs we find many in the old tonality, that is, the scale c, d, e, f#, g, a flat, b, c. The rhythm and modulation also vary greatly, according to the place of origin, and the alternating time of three quarters and two quarters occurs often, The texts are of the utmost naivete and naturalness. The plainest reality is coupled with great poetic feeling. Their richest source of inspiration is human love, but there is also much of the love for nature, the home, the grief to leave, etc. They also recount the smallest