Naďa Hrčková

Prof. PhDr. Naďa Hrčková, CSc. is a Slovak musicologist, music publicist, university lecturer, and organizer. She has educated dozens of graduates in musicology at the Filozofická fakulta Univerzity Komenského v Bratislave (Faculty of Arts, Comenius University in Bratislava), where she also studied herself. She is a co-founder of the festival súčasnej hudby Melos-Étos (Melos-Étos Festival of Contemporary Music), organizer of several musicological conferences, and author of scientific studies and monographs. Her research focused primarily on early music, 20th-century music, Slovak music, music criticism theory, and aesthetics.

Besides her teaching work, she was an editor of the journals Slovenská hudba (Slovak Music) and Hudobný život (Musical Life). As a critic of the musical avant-garde of the 1960s, after 1968 she was expelled from the Zväz slovenských skladateľov (Union of Slovak Composers) for “incorrect aesthetic views” and banned from publishing activities.

After the political upheaval in 1989, Naďa Hrčková expanded her international activities, participating in symposia in Brno, Ljubljana, Warsaw, Krakow, and Vilnius. She published several studies in prestigious international collections and publications and lectured in Katowice, Rheinsberg, Vienna, and Hamburg.

In 1991, as the scientific guarantor of the symposium at the Melos-Étos festival, the Medzinárodná pracovná skupina Nová hudba / Arbeitsgruppe Neue Musik (International Working Group New Music) was formed (members included Naďa Hrčková, Vladimír Bokes – Bratislava; Jaroslav Šťastný – Brno; Tomáš Horkay – Košice; Maria Kostakeva – Essen; Elžbieta Szczepańska-Lange – Warsaw; Mieczyslaw Tomaszewski – Krakow; Hartmut Krones – Vienna; Frieder Reininghaus – Cologne; Danuta Gwizdalanka – Cologne/Poznań; Helmut Loos – Leipzig; Tibor Tallián – Budapest). From the symposium, they published a trilingual German-English-Slovak proceedings and later began releasing Texty pre súčasnú hudobnú kultúru (Texts for Contemporary Music Culture) in the Slovenskí skladatelia (Slovak Composers) series I–III. These contained studies and portraits of contemporary music and leading Slovak composers, as well as a sociological survey on the situation of the composer profession in Slovakia. Hrčková was also the editor of the online journal Melos, texty o súčasnej hudobnej kultúre  (Melos, publishing texts on contemporary music culture) related to the working group.

She contributed with her critiques and articles to journals such as Hudobný život (Musical Life), Slovenská hudba (Slovak Music), Literárny týždenník (Literary Weekly), Dialóg (Dialogue), Kultúrny život (Cultural Life), Hudební rozhledy (Music Reviews), Opus musicum, Národná obroda (National Revival), Nové slovo (New Word), SME, and others. After 2002, as the lead author and editor, she realized an extensive multi-volume (7 parts) project on the history of various epochs of European music from the Middle Ages to the present day (including CDs with musical examples). Besides European experts, Czech authors also contributed, and the work was published also in Czech.

In 2023, she received the Cena Jozefa Kresánka (Jozef Kresánek Award) for her lifetime achievement.