Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2020, Music

Cosmopolitanism, in all its forms, shares a few common facets to its definition that can be applied to the modern day musical scene in the city of Prague in the Czech Republic. Since the Velvet Revolution of the 1990s, Prague has seen an explosive growth in cultural development and outreach, pulling in tourists and immigrants from all over the globe. The resultant mix of people in this city has resulted in a distinctly cosmopolitan place, where all kinds of cultures are able to flourish freely in a stable and welcoming environment. Amidst the flourishing cosmopolitan scene in Prague is also a deep desire to keep the Czech identity alive and growing. However, it is not clear exactly what that Czech identity is, and what kinds of music get to be a part of it. In this thesis, I examine the ways that cosmopolitanism manifests itself in Prague through a musical lens that focuses on the question of authenticity. Throughout the following chapters, I present three case studies of ethnographic fieldwork conducted during a summer visit to Prague in 2019. During that time, was exposed to several spaces where Czech and non-Czech musical elements swirled and combined with one another. I also met and spoke with close Czech and non-Czech interlocutors who willingly shared their ideas with me concerning what it means to be a Czech or non-Czech musician in Prague. Alongside a presentation of these events is a thorough analysis of the different kinds of cosmopolitanisms that are occurring in Prague's musical scene. This all culminates in a broad analysis of what it means to make or create “authentically Czech” music and an in-depth look at how the category of “Czech music” is expanding considerably in the Czech Republic's relatively new era of democracy

Committee: Ryan Skinner (Advisor); Daniel Shanahan (Committee Member); Arved Ashby (Committee Member) Subjects: Music

MFA, Kent State University, 2012, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of English

The proposed thesis, entitled Grabbing the Beast by the Throat, is a collection of original poems that explores the theme of resistance while also delving into the ways in which threats against loved ones, family members, homeland, and lifestyle can transform individuals in negative as well as positive ways. Most of the poems are written in the voice of an invented Czech poet who is a partisan during World War II; however, the collection also includes poems from other perspectives as well as poems set in the American Midwest in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The collection, which incorporates real and imagined events, is divided into four sections of primarily free verse poems and a smaller number of prose poems. The structure of the free verse poems creates a sense of unrestrained independence and spontaneity; however, the poetic content suggests the heavily controlled atmosphere in which the invented poet writes. The persona poems are often narrative, allowing the collection to move through historical events while inviting the reader to fully engage with the idea of resistance and its connection to contemporary issues.

Committee: Maggie Anderson (Committee Chair); Mary Biddinger Dr. (Committee Member); Steven Reese (Committee Member) Subjects: European Studies; Holocaust Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 2012, Musicology

This dissertation focuses on Czech national hero Bedrich Smetana whose life and works have long been associated with Czech nation-building and notions of idealistically Czech sounds. The purpose of my project is to examine how Smetana came to occupy this position: Who was responsible for this construction? Who gained from it? And what role did Smetana himself play? Answering these questions requires the examination of not just the composer, but the powerful organization he helped found in 1863 called the Umelecka beseda (“Artistic Society,” or UB). The UB was at the center of Czech artistic and political life during the nineteenth century and still exists today. Its members used the organization's influence throughout its history to publish writings on Smetana that have profoundly shaped modern understandings of the composer. Beginning in the 1870s, UB members produced carefully curated collections of materials related to Smetana (criticism, editions of the composer's letters and diaries, and even scores), which they harnessed as tools in a series of political campaigns. During the twentieth century, UB critics selectively published Smetana studies to suit the ideologies of the Communist administration. Today, UB scholarship and the political circumstances surrounding its production make understandings of the composer inseparable from political advocacy. Here, I use UB publications along with those of the organization's critics to reveal Smetana as a figure whose biography has been appropriated for deliberately political ends since the organization's founding. Doing so opens a window onto the wider complexities of Eastern European nationhood and reveals how music, scholarship, and Smetana have shaped political ideologies through the twentieth century.

Committee: Francesca Brittan Dr. (Advisor); Daniel Goldmark Dr. (Committee Member); Mary Davis Dr. (Committee Member); Martha Woodmansee Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: Music

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2018, Political Science

Party switching, or changing one's political party affiliation, is a surprisingly widespread and persistent phenomenon among members of parliament (MPs) in old and new democracies alike. Switching gives voters the impression of a lack of legislator accountability and representation, and may indicate weak parties or government instability. Why do some MPs risk their careers, prestige, and chances of reelection for oftentimes uncertain payoffs? Extant research on party switching frames this behavior as an individual phenomenon, based on rational calculations to further goals of vote, office, or policy-seeking. Yet in the new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe, I find that party switching is largely a group phenomenon, which has heretofore received little attention. Building upon established research on political parties, party systems, and legislator behavior, I develop a theory of group-based defection that addresses this gap in the literature. I argue that MPs pursue political ambition in groups in which they share political goals—the pursuit of collective ambition is thus an alternative means to achieving their objectives. These groups are formed around, or defined by, social identities that are common or shared among individual MPs. By switching political parties as part of a group, individual MPs are able to more effectively pursue their political ambition. After presenting the theory and hypotheses of group-based party switching as a function of the pursuit of collective political ambition and the importance of shared social identities in Chapter 2, Chapter 3 lays out the dissertation's multi-methodological approach. I present novel biographical and legislative data used to test the theory and hypotheses, discuss the variables used in statistical analyses, and describe the administration of semi-structured interviews. Chapter 4 presents the quantitative analyses of the patterns of group switching in Poland from 1997 to 2011, and the influence of indivi (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Anthony Mughan Ph.D. (Advisor); Goldie Shabad Ph.D. (Committee Member); Thomas Nelson Ph.D. (Committee Member); Sara Watson Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Behavioral Psychology; Behavioral Sciences; Comparative; East European Studies; European Studies; Political Science; Psychology; Social Psychology; Sociology

DMA, University of Cincinnati, 2015, College-Conservatory of Music: Violin

The purpose of the proposed study is to explore selected quarter-tone music for solo violin, as per the techniques of Czech composer Alois Haba (1893–1973). I will first introduce quarter-tone compositional techniques generally, focusing on how violinists can identify and perform quarter-tones. I will then proceed to discuss the elements and construction of Haba's quarter-tone techniques, as developed in two works for solo violin: Fantasy for Solo Violin, Op. 9a (1921) and Suite in Quarter-Tones for Solo Violin, Op. 93 (1961-62).

Committee: David Berry Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Lee Fiser (Committee Member); Piotr Milewski D.M.A. (Committee Member) Subjects: Performing Arts

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2015, Theatre

Theatrical design is difficult to exhibit as Art. During the course of the twentieth-century, prominent theatre designers have sought ways to share their revolutionary ideas and remarkable work with an outside audience. In this dissertation, I examine the boundaries, struggles and methodologies found within contemporary design exhibition at the Prague Quadrennial. More specifically, I explore a philosophical shift taking place between the 2007 and 2011 Prague Quadrennials, as the event's artistic leadership repositions the scenographic underpinnings toward a more inclusive theory of performance design. This resultant shift occurs due to several trends throughout the Prague Quadrennial's history including: decentralization, the inclusion of performance and the contextualization of scenographic artifacts. I examine the significant impact of this philosophical shift on the event's curatorial visions, audience interactions and connections with the city of Prague.

Committee: Michael Ellison PhD (Advisor); Ashutosh Sohoni PhD (Committee Member); Jonathan Chambers PhD (Committee Member); Steve Boone MFA (Committee Member) Subjects: Design; Theater; Theater History; Theater Studies

DMA, University of Cincinnati, 2009, College-Conservatory of Music : Piano

This document examines Bedrich Smetana's Czech Dances, Book 2, for piano, through the lens of nineteenth‐century Czech nationalism. This work is relatively rare in Smetana's output for its overt quotation and paraphrasing of Czech folk tunes. The historical background of Czech nationalism is explored, incorporating its cultural antecedents and the conflicts and divisions that resulted as the movement expanded. To examine Smetana's role in creating a conscious national style, this document will investigate the role of music in contributing to national identity and how “Czechness” is expressed in music. After considering the circumstances surrounding the composition of the Czech Dances, the collection will be analyzed for its varied usage of folk material, employing recent scholarship on the fashioning of national music as a framework.

Committee: Jonathan Kregor PhD (Committee Chair); Elizabeth Pridonoff MM (Committee Member); Eugene Pridonoff MM (Committee Member) Subjects: Music

Master of Liberal Studies, University of Toledo, 2009, College of Arts and Sciences

With the Russian revolutions of both February and October, the United States was in fear of losing an ally in the war with Germany. Most importantly, to some around Wilson, was the eventual assumption of power by Vladimir Lenin. Wilson did not believe, at first, it was his duty to interfere with the choosing of a government in a revolutionary country, but he continued to get pressure from those around him to join in and crush Bolshevism before it got too large to control. Wilson made several poor attempts at intervention, but could never commit himself to an all out intervention that was necessary to avoid the Bolshevik control of power.This project will show the ways in which Wilson made poor attempts at intervention and how his mind was swayed by those around him including the Secretary of State, the Ambassador to Russia and even former presidents. In the end, Bolshevism achieved the power they sought and the U.S. did nothing to interfere with this power struggle.

Committee: Dr. Michael Jakobson PhD (Committee Chair); Dr. Lawrence Anderson-Huang PhD (Committee Member); Dr. Patricia Murphy PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: American History; European History; Geography; History; Political Science; Russian History

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2007, Linguistics

This dissertation has three interrelated goals: The main goal is an analysis of Czech clitics, units of grammar on the borderline between morphology and syntax with rather peculiar ordering properties both relative to the whole clause and to each other. We examine the actual set of clitics, their rather rigid ordering properties, and finally the properties of so-called clitic climbing. The analysis evaluates previous research, but it also provides new insights, especially in the position of the clitic cluster and in the constraints on clitic climbing. We show that many of the constraints regarding position of the clitic cluster suggested in previous research do not hold. We also argue that cases when clitics do not follow the first constituent are in fact not exceptions in clitic placement but instead unusual frontings. The second goal is the development of a framework within Higher Order Grammar (HOG) supporting a transparent and modular treatment of word order. Unlike previous versions of HOG, we work with signs (containing phonological, syntactic and potentially other information) as actual objects of the grammar. Apart from that, we build on the simplicity and elegance of the pre-formal part of the linearization framework within Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar. Finally, the third objective is to test the result of the second goal by applying it on the results of the first goal.

Committee: Carl Pollard (Advisor) Subjects: Language, Linguistics

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2006, Linguistics

Morpho-syntactic tagging is the process of assigning part of speech (POS), case, number, gender, and other morphological information to each word in a corpus. Morpho-syntactic tagging is an important step in natural language processing. Corpora that have been morphologically tagged are very useful both for linguistic research, e.g. finding instances or frequencies of particular constructions in large corpora, and for further computational processing, such as syntactic parsing, speech recognition, stemming, and word-sense disambiguation, among others. Despite the importance of morphological tagging, there are many languages that lack annotated resources. This is almost inevitable because these resources are costly to create. But, as described in this thesis, it is possible to avoid this expense. This thesis describes a method for transferring annotation from a morphologically annotated corpus of a source language to a corpus of a related target language. Unlike unsupervised approaches that do not require annotated data at all and, as a consequence, lack precision, the approach proposed in this dissertation relies on linguistic knowledge, but avoids large-scale grammar engineering. The approach needs neither a parallel corpus nor a bilingual lexicon, and requires much less linguistic labor than the standard technology. This dissertation describes experiments with Russian, Czech, Polish, Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan. However, the general method proposed can be applied to any fusional language.

Committee: Chris Brew (Advisor) Subjects:

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2005, History of Art

This dissertation explores the exile period work (1979-1999) of the Czech-born writer and artist Jiri Kolar, with particular focus on his two series Kafkova Praha (Kafka's Prague) and Haskova Praha (Hasek's Prague). These two series are examined in the context of Kolar's role in the development of Czech modernism in the twentieth century, his dual status as a poet and visual artist, the series' connections to the writers for which they are named (Franz Kafka and Jaroslav Hasek), and the artist's complex relationship with his homeland during his absence from it. Both series illustrate aspects of Kolar's struggle with his cultural and national identity, as well as his pursuit of a means of expression that could combine characteristics of poetry and visual art. The motifs of concealment, revelation, displacement, ubiety, language, and identity emerge with powerful clarity in Kolar's work during the two decades around which this dissertation revolves. Although Kolar created Kafka's Prague just after his forced separation from Czechoslovakia and Hasek's Prague just after his return home twenty years later, I argue that these two sets of manipulated photographs are not clear brackets around the artist's exile period. When studied together and with the historical circumstances and events that surround them in mind, they provide important insight into the experience of the displaced east European during and after the Communist period.

Committee: Myroslava Mudrak (Advisor) Subjects:

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2005, Political Science

The project tests the hypothesis that individuals who see themselves as members of multiple social groups (for example, groups based on profession, class, ideology, gender, or any number of other ties) that “cross-cut” each other—rather than solely as members of mutually exclusive groups (such as those structured along ethnic, religious, or regional lines)—will be more willing to support democratic practices, including cooperation with erstwhile opponents, tolerance of dissent, and willingness to compromise. As a result, countries where more individuals perceive identities as cross-cutting will be more successful as democracies and implement policies that benefit their citizens. This theory has much in common with early theories about the importance to democracy of “cross-cutting ties” in society, but the emphasis is less on the objective ties, and more on the ways in which different individuals perceive identities based on those ties. A quantitative study focuses on the first hypothesis in the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Slovakia, and Ukraine. Ethnic and regional identities and support for democratic behaviors are measured through secondary analysis of social surveys, including the New Democracy Barometers and a number of other polls from 1988 to the present. Structural equation modeling is used to analyze the interaction of demographic variables, identity, democratic attitudes, and voting behavior. A qualitative study focuses on the second hypothesis by examining two policy areas in Latvia, Poland, and Ukraine. I conducted interviews with activists in women's and environmental NGO's. If the hypothesis is correct, women's and environmental issues—issues that by their very nature invoke identities that cross-cut ethnic and regional identities—should find more sympathy in countries where identities are not viewed as mutually exclusive. The two parts of the project provide considerable support for the hypotheses. If these hypotheses are indeed correct, an (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Goldie Shabad (Advisor) Subjects: Political Science, General

Master of Music (MM), Ohio University, 2008, Music History and Literature (Fine Arts)

The Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu (1890-1959) looked to the past for inspiration for many of his works. Although Baroque forms were most often used, there exist seven madrigal compositions: three for unaccompanied choir, Ceske Madrigaly, Five Czech Madrigals, and Madrigaly; and four for various instrumental ensembles, Quatre Madrigaux, Madrigal-Sonata, Five Madrigal Stanzas, and Three Madrigals. The author gives an overview of Martinu's use of Baroque forms and discusses the compositions titled madrigal, calling attention to the composer's use of modes, folk rhythms and free polyphony. The study concludes with a comparison of Martinu's madrigals to those of the Renaissance.

Committee: Richard D. Wetzel (Advisor) Subjects: Music

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2005, Theatre

This thesis explores the connections between theory, praxis and rehearsal in the preparation and execution of the Miami University production of Vaclav Havel's The Memorandum. By examining the historical and sociopolitical contexts surrounding the playwright and the play, certain aesthetic and thematic devices were identified that served as a critical framework for the formation of a rehearsal praxis. This praxis allowed for the assessment of potential acting methods upon which the rehearsal process could be built, leading to the adaptation of Jerzy Grotowski's via negativa acting method as the foundation of the rehearsal process. Based upon the overall success of the rehearsal process in preparing the performers for the production of Havel's The Memorandum, this thesis also discusses the possibilities and limitations of similarly adapting Grotowski's via negativa to future productions.

Committee: William Doan (Advisor) Subjects: Theater

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2004, Theatre

The purpose of this thesis is divided into two parts. The first deals with constructing a historical context within Czech theatre history for the creation and evolution of the character, Vanek, and the plays that he is in. The second half establishes the dramaturgical implications of having eight plays by four different playwrights that continue along the same story line.

Committee: Howard Blanning (Advisor) Subjects: Theater

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2003, Political Science

The present dissertation examines the bargaining relationship between host country governments (HCGs) for foreign direct investment (FDI) by multinational corporations (MNCs) and managers of those internationally active enterprises in the context of transitional economies. Specifically, the study focuses on the Czech government on one side of the negotiating table and the German Volkswagen AG as well as U.S. brewer Anheuser-Busch as two of the MNCs that have been bargaining for investment in the country since the collapse of communism on the other. From 1990, Czechoslovakia started to accept bidding for most of its enterprises. It succeeded in privatizing – among other strategies – by having foreign MNCs invest in national companies. The car maker Skoda automobilova was the first major sale in December 1990. However, Anheuser-Busch was not able to purchase Czech brewer Budijovicky Budvar during nearly four years of negotiations that followed its bid in 1991. This observation leads to the question for the reasons of the Czech government's reluctance to sell one of its breweries, given the previous sale of its economic flagship Skoda automobilova. The study suggests answers from three perspectives: First, the expectations of the Czech government as recipient of FDI were focused on. Next, the situation was approached from the points of view of Volkswagen and Anheuser-Busch as two foreign MNCs interested in investing in Czechoslovakia/the Czech Republic. Finally, the study looked at the bargaining process itself, to see whether the two partners could carry out their intentions and how they were able to achieve their objectives. Understanding the politics of bargaining between the HCG and the MNC will enable both actors to better evaluate their relative bargaining position and predict a possible outcome. It also allows them to shape the negotiations in a favorable manner, if they know the motivations of their opponents and it will help either side to achieve its goals. B (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: John Rothgeb (Advisor) Subjects: Political Science, General

Doctor of Musical Arts, The Ohio State University, 2013, Music

Abstract This study presents the pedagogical methods of Horn Professor Zdenek Divoky' at the Prague Academy of Performing Arts and defines indicators of a Czech Republic nationalistic style of horn playing by comparing specific techniques observed in Prague with the standard horn pedagogy in the West. The results of observations and interviews suggest contradicting perspectives between the perceived and actual current traditions in the Czech Horn School. In addition, an examination of available scholarly articles, books, and recordings reveals key players and innovations within the horn traditions in the Czech Republic that provide context for the developments of these techniques. As an outcome of these interviews and observations the document presents indicators for Czech style including, but not limited to: phrasing, vibrato, tonal concepts, articulations, eartraining, dynamics, left hand technique, and exercises for embouchure development. The art of horn playing continues to develop as globalization creates an environment of collaboration. This research aims to extend an invitation to Czech scholars and pedagogues to share their core methods and philosophies with English-speaking audiences. Czech cultural perspectives and horn playing techniques benefit amateur enthusiasts, students, and professionals. The pedagogical skill set in the West is enriched with richer context as the basis for musical expression with access to these methods.

Committee: Bruce Henniss (Advisor) Subjects: Music