Ivan Mačák

PhDr. Ivan Mačák was a Slovak ethnomusicologist, ethnoorganologist, music museum curator, and organizer of musical life. He graduated in musicology at the Faculty of Arts, Comenius University in Bratislava, with a diploma thesis on folk songs in Turzovka. He specialized in traditional musical instruments and was a pioneer in the documentation and research of musical instruments in Slovakia, especially Slovak folk instruments. He designed and implemented an original system for documenting instrumental traditions in Slovak organology. He studied the typology of musical iconograms for organological research, musical acoustics, and musical museology.

“[...] he belongs to the type of active, restless, dissatisfied, and thoughtful person who searches, struggles, looks forward, and strives to realize his visions. He is most of all a man of diverse interests, with impressive breadth of scientific and organizational skills; he works in the fields of basic research, documentation, collecting, editing, publishing, and creative activities,” wrote Oskar Elschek about Mačák.

As a founding staff member of the Music Department of the Historical Institute of the Slovak National Museum, he collected and established one of the largest depositories of musical instruments in Central Europe, which he presented in the SNM exhibition "Musical Instruments in Slovakia" (1975 – 1985). By 1985, the collection had grown from a few dozen (in 1965) to about two thousand exhibits of Slovak folk musical instruments and instruments from the European art instrumentarium. He contributed dramaturgically to preparing a concert series held within the exhibition’s premises. Together with Miroslav Filip, he also established and developed an acoustics laboratory in the Music Department of the SNM, focused on sound analyses and their graphical representation.

Ivan Mačák undertook study visits to Canada (1971), where he researched the instruments of Indigenous peoples and Eskimos, and to India (1972), focusing on the study of historical and iconographic sources of Indian traditional musical instruments. From these trips, he brought a large amount of photographic material, which formed the basis of a collection of musical instrument photographs in the SNM numbering around ten thousand items.

Between 1977 and 1986, Ivan Mačák prepared the Competition for Makers of Folk Musical Instruments for the Dr. Ladislav Leng Award in Detva. Here he conducted music-sociological research focused on the musicality of the Slovak countryside (1970s and 1980s). The results of these interdisciplinary studies (psychological, sociological, technological, biological-medical aspects) were published in the "Slovak Folk Musical Instruments" edition and in several monographs, which he edited or co-authored for the Opus publishing house. He also produced various catalogs (musical instruments, instrument makers, representations of musical instruments).

Ivan Mačák established professional cooperation with several leading international scientific figures and organological organizations, especially the Comité International de Musée et Collection d'Instruments de Musique (CIMCIM, the museum community of musical instruments) and the Study Group for Folk Musical Instruments within the International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM). He also worked in the musical instruments commission of the International Council of Museums (ICOM). Together with CIMCIM, he organized professional meetings in Dolná Krupá in 1984 and 1986. From 1966 to 1980, under the patronage of ICTM and jointly with other institutions (including SNM), he editorially led the publication of the European annual ethnomusicological bibliography "Annual Bibliography of European Ethnomusicology" (11 volumes). He frequently published in foreign journals and proceedings and participated in scientific conferences and forums.

He contributed to the publication of the Musicologica series (2 volumes), collections, catalogs, the publication Osobnosti európskej hudby a Slovensko (Personalities of European Music and Slovakia) and also cooperated on editing the Prameňov slovenskej hudby (Sources of Slovak Music) which was published also in English.

Ivan Mačák taught at the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava, where he lectured on the introduction to ethnomusicology. He was editor of the journals Ľudová tvorivosť (Folk Creativity) and Naša práca (Our Work). He held various functions in the Union of Slovak Composers, advisory boards, commissions, and editorial boards. He was also an external collaborator at the Music-Folklore Department of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, focusing mainly on non-European music. He cooperated with radio and television as well.