Jiří Čart (Georg Czarth) and his Flute Sonata in D minor
(2014)
author(s): Michaela Kouřilová
published in: KC Research Portal
Name: Michaela Kouřilová
Main Subject: Traverso
Research Coaches: Inês de Avena Braga and Donna Agrell
Title of Research: Jiří Čart (Georg Czarth) and his Flute Sonata in D minor
Research Questions:
What is the current status of research on the life of Jiří Čart as an émigré musician? Is it possible to establish bibliographic control of this research, and outline the major deficits in existing literature? By examining Čart's writing for flute, and in particular his D minor Sonata, is it possible to define the characteristics of his compositional style? Is there a further link between his output and his position in various European ensembles, suggesting a development in line with other composers?
Research Process:
Musical emigration was quite characteristic in Czech musical life in the eighteenth century, but was not a completely new phenomenon. Throughout history Czech emigrants, such as Jan Václav Stamic, František Benda or Josef Mysliveček, came to well-deserved fame, but others await a return to modern appreciation. This is surely the case when we consider the life and work of Jiří Čart (1708-c.1778). Despite the contemporary success and reputation, Čart’s name has fallen into insignificance. No thematic catalogue has ever been attempted, leaving performers with no basis for modern performance, and thus audiences with limited opportunities to hear and discover his music. This thesis is potentially a model for further extrapolation of his output and a beginning of a more developed research path. However, the scope of this current document is limited, and therefore centres on Čart’s flute Sonata in D minor.
Summary of Results:
This work provides detailed information about the professional life of the violinist, flutist and composer Jiří Čart, which has yet to be considered in English. This information is embedded in the historical context, providing an overall picture of the social situation in the eighteenth century for émigré musicians from the Czech lands such as Čart. The so- called ‘Czech Musical Emigration’ is a very important ingredient of European music history, which partly influenced the direction and the onset of classicism as we now see it. Čart spent his adult life following his musical talents and opportunities as an émigré. In doing so, he occupied several important posts in major European orchestras and establishments. New details about his life and compositions are uncovered in this work, which is accompanied by a critical edition of his ‘Solo à Flauto Traverso è embalo’ in D minor. This edition was prepared using several variant texts from the eighteenth century, as the sonata exists only in contemporary manuscript copies, as well as a transcription for violin. Disseminated throughout European libraries, the work shows a mature compositional style, with the idiomatic knowledge necessary to craft a showpiece for the flute, allowing the performer to engage with, and enlighten the audience.
The Collective Archive
(last edited: 2017)
author(s): Ana de Almeida
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The Collective Archive project starts from the personal photo collection of José Alberto Vidal de Almeida, my father, a Portuguese stipend student in former Czechoslovakia between 1978 and 1987 – an archive originally stored inside a shoe box.
Whilst this photo collection contents extensive documentation of a mix of both personal and historical events, the research conducted around this archive allows a parallel following of the final years of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia, before the 1989 Velvet Revolution, and the first years after the left wing Carnation Revolution in Portugal that allowed the end of 48 years of fascist regime, as well as the end of the Portuguese Colonial War in April 1974.
Forming a network of complex and indelible relations between personal and national histories as well as between local and global history, my father's photographs are the substrate upon which I seek to research about what meant the group of happenings for both countries and at the same time to investigate how the individual awareness of the witnessed events was formed, hence aiming to address the question of how are actually defined and transmitted important historical marks.
One cannot dispose of the collocation of the individual understanding in the building of an historical narrative, emphasizing the individual position clarifies history’s arbitrary character. Each individual act of image production is an act of significance.
What follows is the transformation of the shoe box as a depository of photos into an archive and the articulation of the lived and of the transmitted (inscribed) experience with the macro-political and historical processes.
Opening the box will necessarily means, in a first instance, to give a voice to my father, which means the transformation of the essay into a gradual quest for finding more voices within the archive.
The theoretical and the artistic thought must be problematized, made distinct and at the same time entangled, and importantly they must be taken to their limits in order to re-establish them. The future becomes the issue of the archive and the voice that should be finally found is the one of a collective practice.