Editorial.

Dear Reading,

Czech Music is of course a magazine devoted to music--given its title it could hardly be anything else. Only there have been disputes over the definition and content of the word "music" for quite a long time, and the 20th century has more or less condemned the various categorical statements of the type "this is music and this isn't" to oblivion or ridicule. Why am I talking about this? Milan Grygar is someone whose inclusion in a magazine about music might raise a lot of eyebrows, but in my view he belongs in such a magazine much more than routine "exemplarily musical" cliche-mongers. Certainly, Milan Grygar is first and foremost a famous artist. This is an apparently self-evident (and of course true), but it conceals one very important dimension of Grygar's work--sound. With his acoustic drawings Grygar has moved into an area that might be identified as sound art, although even this categorisation is somewhat lame. This is not all, however, since if we bear in mind that in the music of the 20th century it is the originator of the idea-instructions that lead to the sounding music who is considered the composer, then there is no reason not to consider Grygar a composer too. All the more so when composers, as is well-known, usually do not create music but write notes. In this sense in a large part of his work Grygar is a composer-creator of scores par excellence.

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I would also like to draw attention to the interview with the Czech-American composer Karel Husa on the occasion of his 85th birthday (coincidentally, Husa and Grygar are of the same generation) and Lukas Matousek's article on the music of the Bohemian Middle Ages. I think the present issue of Czech Music is full of variety, and wish you pleasant reading.

Until the next issue ...

PETR BAKLA

EDITOR