Pohľad muzikológa Jozefa Kresánka na hudbu 20. storočia

The core of the legacy of the founder of the modern Slovak musicology Jozef Kresánek (1913-1986) was a long refined interdisciplinary explication of the problem of musical thinking in the interest of a complex comprehension of music as product of man for man. Kresánek related the genesis of music as an ordered structure, its development from the point of view of historical determinants, regional specificities, social functions, and psychological effect to the research of European composed music although he, as an ethnomusicologist, also noticed peculiarities of the traditional folk music. Awareness of historical links led him to paying attention also towards changes of the musical thinking in the twentieth century. In contrast with his 11-year younger colleague, J. Vysloužil, the professor at Masaryk's University in Brno, Kresánek followed his musicological schooling at Charles University in Prague and he took a more reserved position towards the directions and styles of European music of the twentieth century because he viewed them as a destruction of the established unity of his three layers of musical thinking - thematicism, dynamism, and sonority. While J. Vysloužil built his objective relation to these tendencies and styles informed by a study of actual material on a monographic penetration into the work of two Czech composers Leoš Janáček and Alois Hába, Kresánek who was also trained in composition in the master class of Vítězslav Novák saw an accomplishment of the development of Slovak music in the twentieth century in the creative foundations of the interwar compositional generation of Slovak modernism, namely Eugen Suchoň. He was not interested in other alternative or historically mediated tendencies in European musical avant-garde and their infusion into Slovak music, or he considered them an expression of constructional tendencies bringing in question the "healthy" foundations of musical thinking. He formulated his critical standpoint towards these tendencies also in the particular volumes of the trilogy crowning his long elaborated conception of musical thinking - Základy (Elements, 1977), Tonalita (Tonality, 1983), Tektonika (Tectonics, 1994).