• 1948 – 1953

    Comenius University Philosophical Faculty in Bratislava (musicology and aesthetics)

  • 1953 – 1989

    one of the first staff members of the Institute of Musicology at the Slovak Academy of Sciences (from 1953 in the Department of the History of Music in the Institute of Musicology of the Slovak Academy of Sciences; from 1973 in the Musicology Section of the Art Scholarship Institute of the Slovak Academy of Sciences; from 1979 head staff scholar)

  • 1988 – 1990

    head of the Musicology Section of the Art Scholarship Institute of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, concurrently external pedagogue at the Academy of Musical and Performing Arts and the Comeniius University Philosophical Faculty in Bratislava

In the field of research he focused on the field of musical history, addressing the topics of Great Moravia’s musical culture, musical medievalistics, renaissance and baroque music, questions of the genesis and basis of Slovak national music in the 18th and 19th centuries.

His studies on leading Slovak musicians, including Ján Šimrák, Samuel Capricornus, Štefan Monetarius-Cremnicianus, Zachariáš Zarevutius and Ján Kusser sen., became model scholarly monographs in Slovak musical historiography. In these he used his practical experience from his own archival research work with Slovak sources, which he compounded with a wealth of knowledge from his systematic study of the foreign professional literature in his book Vývoj európskeho notopisu (The Development of European Music Script, 1982), enriched with excepts from his transcription of sources of Slovak origin.

The culmination of his scholarly research was the project Dejiny hudobnej kultúry na Slovensku (History of Musical Culture in Slovakia), which he formulated in collaboration with colleagues in the Slovak Academy of Sciences at the beginning of the 1980s and presented in practice in a unique work of original synthesis, Dejiny hudobnej kultúry na Slovensku I. Stredovek, renesancia, barok (History of Musical Culture in Slovakia I. Middle Ages, Renaissance, Baroque 1984). He devoted himself also to the solution of theoretical problems of musical historiography. He elaborated a modern conception of Slovak musical historiography, based on a universalist and culturological conception of musicology as a philosophico-historical discipline. In his last synthetic work he presented an actual systematisation of musical historiography, and a characterisation of its subdisciplines and scholarly methods.  

He is the author of publicistic scripts, having worked on a number of radio and television music programmes.

He was a member of a number of Slovak and international musicological councils: the Academic Council of the congress Musica Antiqua Europae Orientalis; Academic Council of the edition Musicalia Danubian; member of the International Musicological Society and Internationale Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Hymnologie. For many years he was an academic editor and contributor to Slovak musicological symopsia and journals, including Hudobnovedný sborník, Hudobnovedné štúdie, Musicologica Slovaca, Hudobný archív and Slovenská hudba, and he was academic editor of the music text edition Stará hudba na Slovensku (Old Music in Slovakia).

Author of text: PhDr. Janka Petőczová, CSc., musicologist

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