Jan Dismas Zelenka

This article aims to address the gap that exists in the evidence in the first thirty years of the life of Jan Dismas Zelenka, by drawing attention to the early stages of the Zelenka family, namely the lives of Jiřík and Maria Magdalena Zelenka. I explore briefly the relationship between Louňovice pod Blaníkem and the Archbishopric of Prague, who gain jurisdiction over the market-town from 1672. The relationship between the Zelenka family and the aristocratic family Malovec of Malovice, Kámen, Zvěstov and Libouň, is considered. This research draws from parish baptismal and marital registers and follows from the thorough study of these materials by Lukáš Vokřínek in Clavibus Unitis 2019. The study of registers has allowed some dates and statements made by Jaroslav Paleček in 1958 to be confirmed. Moreover, they have helped to reveal new information regarding Zelenka and his family, which will demand further investigation and discussion. Access to digitised files is thanks to State Regional Archives in Prague and Třeboň.

The impulse for this article was the emergence of the 1736 inventory of the archdeanery church of St James the Greater in Sokolov (Falkenau) with the previously unnoticed specification of "Musicalien und Instrumenten" in three places: in the collection of church inventories of the Prague Archbishopric, in the parish chronicle, and finally in the parish archives with significant additions and within the whole series of church inventories (1707, 1731, 1736, 1769, 1781, 1798, 1815, 1827). The article follows both the scope of the local music collection, which is lost today, and the evolution of music items in the inventories judging their changing information value. It comprises the edition preserving the dynamic character of the sources. Their contents indicate that in the first decades of the 18th century, printed music still formed the core of the music collection. It was also possible to outline the position of the church choir within the presumed streams of music circulation and trace the links with the music centres of Prague (especially with the music collection of the Knights of the Cross with the Red Star) and Dresden (Cozzi, Ristori, Vivaldi, Zelenka). The inventorying method often consisted in the copying of the previous inventory and the later lists obviously strive more to keep the continuity with the preceding lists rather than reflect the real situation.

Commissioned in 1722 for the Holy Week services at the Dresden Hofkapelle, Zelenka's Miserere in D minor (ZWV 56) demonstrates virtuosic handling of a wide range of contrapuntal techniques. Zelenka drew upon his deep knowledge of past musical traditions, honed through his earlier studies in Vienna with Fux and his circle, to provide individual sections of the Miserere with systematic explorations of freely imitative, canonic and fugal writing as well as subtle demonstrations of invertible counterpoint, retrograde motion and melodic inversion. The result is a work that offers insight into Zelenka's abilities to exploit the combinative potential of his motivic materials in settings that maintain expressive as well as technical originality. The present study adopts a range of analytical techniques to uncover the inner workings of Zelenka's counterpoint, thereby providing greater understanding of this composer's versatility and accomplishments.

Since the 'revival' of the music of Jan Dismas Zelenka (1679–1745) in the late twentieth century, most scholarship on the Bohemian composer has explored issues relating to the music in its eighteenth-century context. Much less has been written about the posthumous fate of Zelenka's music. This article will present evidence of some fascinating new sources, which can shed
further light on the nature and extent of the transmission of Zelenka's sacred music after he died, and will point toward some of the possible implications of these sources for our understanding of Zelenka reception in the nineteenth century.

The Fondazione Giorgio Cini, together with Fondation Concordance, Irma Merk Stiftung and L. + Th. La Roche Stiftung, offers scholarships to instrumental ensembles and young solo singers specialised in the eighteenth-century repertoire, to participate to next Early Music Seminar, directed by Pedro Memelsdorff, on: Jan Dismas Zelenka – Masses and sonatas (1720-30). The Seminar, to be held on 19-24 February 2018, will see the participation of renowned oboist Alfredo Bernardini and the vocalist-conductor Václav Luks.

Application deadline: 10 December 2017

Modern scholarly interest in Jan Dismas Zelenka (1679–1745) tends to focus on his compositional activities, while an understanding of his contribution as a contrabassist to the Dresden Hofkapelle dur- ing his first decade of service to Saxon Elector and King of Poland Augustus the Strong (1670–1733) remains substantially incomplete. This article examines how this second decade of the eighteenth cen- tury saw significant change to the Dresden bass section and orchestra as a whole, through a move away from engaging multi-instrumentalists to those specializing on a single instrument, the arrival of a new wave of internationally trained personnel and transition to new instrument types. Archival sources of the Dresden court record many details about individual employment and changes to the Hofkapelle’s size and administration from its reestablishment in 1709 (after being briefly disbanded). Drawing on these primary sources, this article reconstructs aspects of the careers of Zelenka and his colleagues in the contrabass section, and concludes that Zelenka’s activities as a contrabassist in Dresden should be viewed as a key part of a larger plan by the court to modernize the orchestra.

Background
The composer Jan Dismas Zelenka (1679–1745) has often been described as becoming a melancholic recluse in his later life. While the accuracy of these claims has been debated, the question of whether such claims influence the emotional responses of listeners to his music has not been explored.

Aims
The aim of this study was to investigate whether reading a neutrally worded or negatively worded biography about Zelenka prior to listening to his music would influence the emotional response of listeners.

Method
The study involved 179 participants in an online listening exercise. Participants provided demographic information before being randomly allocated into one of three conditions, in which they either read a negative biography of Zelenka, a neutral biography, or no biography. They then listened to two short excerpts of Zelenka’s music and responded to a series of 27 items concerning their emotional response (completed after each excerpt). Lastly, participants were asked to describe in their own words how the two musical excerpts made them feel.

Results
Two principal axis factor analyses with promax rotation identified five factors underlying the emotional responses of participants for each musical excerpt. For excerpt 1, the factors defining listeners’ emotional responses included “Aesthetic pleasure”, “Anxious fright”, “The extra-musical”, “The unexpected”, and “Peace and calm”. For excerpt 2, the emotional response factors included “Aesthetic pleasure, “Anxious sadness”, “The extra-musical”, “Surprise”, and “Calm and peaceful”. To test whether the condition influenced participants’ emotional responses to the two musical excerpts, a series of ten Generalised Linear Mixed-Model analyses were performed (one for each factor that emerged in the factor analysis). For both excerpts, the biography condition affected participants’ emotional response with regard to “The extra-musical” factor, which was concerned with the idea that music can induce emotion through memories, associations, and mental images. With regard to excerpt 1, participants who read the neutral biography reported significantly stronger “extra-musical” responses compared to the participants in the control condition. For excerpt 2, people who read the neutral biography reported a significantly stronger “extra-musical” response than participants who read the negative biography. Additionally, participants’ free-text responses explaining their emotional response to the musical excerpts were coded according to whether they described negative or neutral emotional states, or a combination of both. A Pearson’s chi-square test of contingencies evaluated whether the condition influenced the language used by participants, indicating that participants who read the negative biography of Zelenka were significantly more likely to use negative language or a combination of negative and neutral language to describe their emotional response to the music compared to participants who read the neutral biography.

Conclusions
Findings demonstrate that being primed by biographical information about a composer influences the emotional responses of listeners to their music in specific ways. It also highlighted that emotional responses to music are not only shaped by the listening context, but also by their position within unfolding reception histories.