Bernard Garaj

Prof. PaedDr. Bernard Garaj, CSc. is a Slovak musicologist and university professor. His research focuses on ethnomusicology, ethno-organology, and the study of Slovak folk musical instruments and instrumental ensemble music. He also explores Slovak folk music in the interethnic context of Central Europe and the transformation of traditional music in Slovakia. As a bagpiper from a family with a long-standing bagpipe tradition, he devotes special attention to Slovak bagpipe culture Gajdy a gajdošská tradícia na Slovensku (Bagpipes and the Bagpipers' Tradition in Slovakia, 1995).

He studied Music Education at the Faculty of Education, Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra. From 1992 to 2005, he worked at the Institute of Musicology of the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava, and since 1992 he has been active in both teaching and research at the Department of Ethnology and Folklore Studies of the Faculty of Arts, Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra (now the Institute of Cultural and Tourism Management, Cultural Studies and Ethnology), where he was appointed professor in 2005.

He is a member of several scholarly societies and unions, including the Study Group on Musical Instruments of the International Council for Traditional Music and Dance (ICTMD) – UNESCO, and a member of the Study Group on Multipart Music of ICTMD. He is also the president of the Slovak National Committee of ICTMD and a member of the Council of the Institute of Ethnology of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague.

Bernard Garaj has participated in numerous research projects supported by the Scientific Grant Agency of the Ministry of Education, Science, Research and Sport of the Slovak Republic: 1991–1992, European Traditional Instrumental Music; 1990–1992, Slovak Folk Dance Music; 1999–2001, Preserving Musical and Dance Tradition in Slovakia at the End of the 20th Century; 2002–2004, Musical and Dance Traditions of Slovaks Living in Ethnically Mixed Areas of Southern Slovakia; 2003–2005, Folk Musical Culture in Central Europe; 2006–2008, A Multimedia Project on Slovak Folk Music; 2007–2009, Corpus Musicae Popularis Slovacae. Folk Songs and Music from the Tekov Region; 2017–2019, Forms and Social Functions of Folk Music and Dance at Present; and since 2021, he has been researching Carnival Season in a Cultural-Historical Perspective and Its Current Forms in Rural Environments.

He has completed several international lecture and study stays (Hungary, USA, Austria, Poland, Norway, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Belarus, Russia, and others), produced professional radio and television programs at home and abroad, and led creative music workshops.

In the folk music ensemble Ponitran, Bernard Garaj plays the bagpipes and the cimbalom. Together, they have recorded several dozen audio albums.

In addition to the aforementioned awards, in 2002 he received the Walter Deutsch Prize – an award for outstanding contributions in the field of folk music research, presented by Elisabeth Gehrer, the Austrian Federal Minister of Education, Science and Culture.
He was also awarded the Daniel Gabriel Lichard Medal by the National Enlightenment Centre in Bratislava in 2015 for his significant theoretical, organizational, and artistic contributions to the development of folk culture in Slovakia and abroad.
In 2019, the Ethnographic Society of Slovakia awarded him the Adam Pranda Prize for organizing the international conference Traditional Music and Dance in Contemporary Culture(s) in 2018 and for co-editing the proceedings of the same name, published in 2019 in Nitra together with Jana Ambrózová.