Czech Traditional Music

Czech traditional music splits roughly between western Bohemia and eastern Moravia. Bohemian folk music favours brass band, polka and waltz tempos and a major-key tonality, with the dudy (Czech bagpipes) as a folk instrument and the accordion in widespread use. Moravian folk music is closer to Slovak and Hungarian neighbours — using the cimbalom dulcimer, more modal scales, and asymmetric metres in some regions. Singing is in Czech, sometimes in close-harmony women's groups, with regional costume often tied to specific village or county identity.

The polka itself was invented in Bohemia in the 1830s and became one of the most internationally successful European dance forms of the nineteenth century. Antonín Dvořák and Bedřich Smetana built their nineteenth-century classical works on Czech folk material, codifying a Czech national music identity. The Czech ethnographic museum network and the Strážnice folk festival in Moravia (running since 1946) preserve regional repertoires.

Bohemian polka uses a strict two-beat rhythm with a strong um-pah brass accompaniment. Moravian songs often use scales with raised fourths or flattened sevenths that sound distinctly different from Bohemian major-key tunes. The dudy bagpipes use a chanter with a duck-bill shaped end and produce a sound closer to a Polish koziol than to a Scottish Highland pipe.

The Czech Philharmonic Choir of Brno's recordings of Moravian folk songs cover the eastern repertoire. For Bohemian polka, Vejvoda's Škoda Lásky (1927) — the original Beer Barrel Polka — is the global crossover.

The Beer Barrel Polka (Škoda Lásky), written by Jaromír Vejvoda in 1927, became one of the most-recorded songs of the twentieth century after the Andrews Sisters covered it in 1939 — by 1940 the song had been recorded in at least a dozen languages and was a US wartime hit.