Page:The music of Bohemia.djvu/19

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THE MUSIC OF
BOHEMIA

IT is the aim of this sketch to set forth the comparatively unfamiliar facts of the musical life of the Czechoslovaks, that people who for so long lived submerged, or, as the old Czech proverb has it, "mixed in the same bag with Germans and Hungarians." The various terms, Bohemian, Czech, Slovak, Czechoslovak, used in this book would probably puzzle an American reader if not defined; thus, to save the long historical and geographical explanations, we may be thoroughly assured by the fact that all these different names mean one nation only, that of the most western branch of the Slavic race in Europe. "Czech" is the Slav name for the Slav people and language in Bohemia,Moravia, and Silesia.The terms used to designate the whole country, the state, are "Bohemia" and "Bohemian." The Czechs themselves do not employ this distinction, but use the word "Czech" in both senses. Slovaks