Pavol Tonkovič

Pavol Tonkovič was a Slovak music educator, conductor, composer, editor, theorist, and organizer. Throughout his life, he devoted himself primarily to Slovak folklore, which he collected, transcribed, and played a key role in its popularization and professionalization. On a national level, he contributed to the creation of several folklore ensembles and institutions with a professional character. He was also an active musician himself.

His professional life can be divided into several stages and areas. After graduating from the State Teacher's Institute in Banská Bystrica and completing two years of mandatory military service, he worked as a teacher at public schools in Filipovo, Pohronská Polhora, and later at the Secondary School in Brezno, Svätý Jur, and Bratislava.

This period included his pedagogical and choral activities. At the same time, he continued his musical education at the Academy of Music and Drama in Bratislava, at the Academy of Performing Arts (VŠMU), at the Pedagogical Academy in Bratislava, and also attended musicology and philosophy seminars at the Faculty of Arts of Comenius University in Bratislava. During World War II, he was a music professor at the Teacher Training Institute in Bratislava, thus concluding his teaching career.

The next stage of his life was focused on organizational and artistic work in broadcasting. At the invitation of Dezider Kardoš, he joined Czechoslovak Radio in Košice, where he was tasked with establishing the Folk Music Department. He searched for folk musicians and singers, recording them both in the field and in the studio, using his own transcriptions. From local musicians, he formed the instrumental ensemble Branisko with a mixed choir. He also composed for this ensemble himself (29 works with soloists and choir).

His cooperation with the radio was briefly interrupted in 1949, when he helped to establish SĽUK (Slovak Folk Art Collective) and became its first artistic director.

In 1951, however, he returned to broadcasting in Bratislava, where he began building the Folk Music Editorial Department of Czechoslovak Radio with a nationwide scope. He created a professional editorial team (Ľuba Pavlovičová-Baková, Vladimír Slujka, Edita Húthová, Jozef Laborecký, Ondrej Demo, Darina Lašiaková, and others), prepared programming, made recordings, conducted fieldwork, and trained new colleagues.

Tonkovič left his position as head of the editorial office in 1955, when he founded the ĽUT Ensemble and became its artistic director and conductor. This group was able to record more complex folklore-based compositions for the radio. While contributing compositions himself, he primarily involved other composers (such as Bartolomej Urbanec, Tibor Andrašovan, Zdenko Mikula, Milan Novák, and others).

His final professional period was as head of the Department of International Music. He was responsible for obtaining a large amount of valuable ethnomusicological material from Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas, and prepared 150 radio programs on the music of other nations.

Throughout all of his work, Pavol Tonkovič consistently engaged in collection and publication of folklore material. His transcriptions of folk songs from Terchová, Važec, Podkonice, and Zuberec were published in the Slovenské ľudové piesne (Slovak Folk Songs) series of the Institute of Musicology of the Slovak Academy of Sciences (volumes II–IV, published 1954–1964).

"At the turn of the second half of the 20th century, Pavol Tonkovič elevated folk music to the pedestal of an autonomous musical genre. Although his views were rooted in romantic and romanticizing perspectives, he strived to be its advocate within the context of national music."
– Ondrej Demo, Hudobný život, 2007