The paper is an attempt for reconstruction of coding (creative) and decoding (reading) process, both dependent on temporary collective imaginative patterns, which funded the historic-ontological status of two significant works of the Czech interwar music: Štafeta [The Relay] (1927), a string quartet by Janáček’s pupil Vilém Petrželka (1889–1967), and Sinfonietta (1926) by Leoš Janáček (1854–1928). It is based on two case-studies, which emphasize the relationships between both of these two works – but also other texts and discursive practices, which formed their historical creation and reception – and sports, typical cultural phenomenon of the 1920s. Both compositions are likely to be included in the temporary wave of compositions reflecting and representing sports, such as Honegger’s Rugby, Half-time and La Bagarre by Bohuslav Martinů, Start and Stadion by Pavel Bořkovec, because they use very similar musical-semantic methods. The paper also focuses on ideological aspects of creation and reception of these compositions, especially in the relation to the official ideology of the First Czechoslovak Republic and to the ideology of interwar avant-gardes, which was to a large extent subversive against the former one.

Methodological background of my paper is represented by the critical theories of Michel Foucault, “new historicism” in literary studies (Bolton 2007) and post- structuralistically oriented Anglo-American musicology after 1980 (Burnham 1995; De Nora 1997). While the methodological base of both case studies is the same, the concrete used methods are different: the case-study on Štafeta is focused on a semio-pragmatic analysis of the composition itself, whereas this substantially subjective interpretation is emended by the analysis of context; on the other hand, in the case-study on Sinfonietta I have focused on the analysis of textual traces of receptive acts (the context) and interpreted these traces with regard to the text of the composition.

Štafeta was a work of art belonging to the official “democratic” culture of the First Czechoslovak Republic, which was intended to consolidate different social classes of the young state. The popular potential of the composition depended on its three main qualities: (1) a realization of formal “relief” of Schoenbergian string quartet, in a way of song cycle with string quartet accompaniment; (2) the musicalisation of poetry by Jiří Wolker, the most popular temporary poet, whose posthumous cult, initiated mainly by upper-middle class, was culminating when Štafeta was composed; (3) the comprehensibility, based on such semantic and syntactic progressions which were cognitively amenable for relatively wide corps of temporary recipients. Štafeta had however also the potency to claim the status of avant-garde work of art, thanks to exploitation of typically avant-garde structuring methods and contextual circumstances of its origin, performance and reception.

In a close-up semio-pragmatic analysis, I have shown that the creation and reading of this composition was basically determined by two main imaginative factors, sports and collectivism, which were strongly bounded in temporary social discourses. The representations of sport, which is semantic relevant aspect of the historical content of Štafeta, is – similar to other expressions of 1920s mentality – jointed with the representations of unbounded sexuality. Just like in other temporary “sport compositions” (Bateman 2009), mainly the motional aspect of sport is represented here, using motorial music structures and other convenient methods of the late 19th century programmatic music. Structure of this composition contains intensive and extensive semantic impulses, which, as I will show, are the two conceptual patterns in the very basis of the process of creation and also reading of the piece. The intensive one relates to structural regularization by the dominant of “running model” and principle of rhythmic ostinato. The extensive one refers to public relay races, carnival feasts (Bachtin 1971; Gurevič 1996) of recycling of the collective national body of the First Czechoslovak Republic. According to these factors, the composition tended to be read as an ideological impetus to faith in collective “new man”.

Janáček’s Sinfonietta functioned in ideological practices of interwar Czechoslovakia mainly as an apotheosis of three important aspects of the official ideology: (1) the idea of paramilitary youth sport and gymnastic movement called Sokol [Falcon], (2) Czechoslovakian army and (3) the idea of “new man” and new republic – his Umwelt, which was produced by him as well as producing him. The composition was presumably created and read according to these intentions, and thence its temporary content oscillated between these three positions. According to a detailed analysis of the discourse on Sinfonietta and its author, the group of contents ascribed to this composition had a relatively coherent, systematic form in the interwar Czechoslovakia, whereas the dominant modus of reading of Sinfonietta was determined chiefly by premiere of the composition during the mass gymnastic action called Sokol-Rally in 1926. The composition was also created and read as a representation of sports, as a realization of “aesthetics of disinfection” (Česálková 2006), which was typical of both official and avant-garde culture of the 1920s. All these correspondences between intended and empirical content of Sinfonietta were in principle provided by the discourse of temporary music criticism.