| SVU |
CZECHOSLOVAK SOCIETY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES |
SVU Congress Honors Czech Musicologist Dr. Zdenka Fischmann
During the 20th SVU World Congress held at the American University, Washington, D.C. on August 9 - 13, 2000, a musicology panel was dedicated to the memory of Czech musicologist Dr. Zdenka Fischmann. Chair of the panel Dr. Dagmar White opened the session with a short biographical sketch about this remarkable woman.
Dr. Fischmann was a prominent musicologist of SVU. She dedicated her life to the research and study of Czech music, making it accessible and known to a large public through lectures and published articles. Her other intellectual pursuits included work in the field of psychology.
Zdenka Fischmann was born in 1923. She died at the age of 75 after a long illness at her recent home in Phoenix, Arizona.
She received a PhDr. in Musicology from Charles University in Prague in 1948. After the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia, she and her husband settled in Panama where she taught music at Panama University, eventually becoming Associate Professor at that institution. After relocating to California, she worked for many years as a music therapist for Patton State Hospital and published many works on psychotherapy.
But the bulk of her published and unpublished work is in the field of music. For example, Janacek-Newmark Correspondence, published in 1989, The Vixen Bystrouska and her Champions (dealing with Janacek's Cunning Little Vixens), published by Cross Currents 6 (1987)-a Yearbook of Central European Culture or Moravian Musicians; Identity of Acculturations in Czech Music During the Period of the National Revival and the First Republic; Janacek's Speech Melody in Theory and Practice; Some Musicological Sources of Czechoslovakia, etc.
Altogether her musicological work comprises 31 articles in English, published or delivered as lectures, 9 articles in the Czech language, and a number of works on Czech Jewish musicians, the Holocaust, and Terezin.
In the field of psychology, she published many works
on psychotherapy, among them are the following: Therapeutic Work with
Spanish-Speaking/Surnamed Penal Code Patients in a State Hospital (1990) and a work she
compiled Listen to Us: An Anthology of Creative Writing of Patton State Hospital Patients
(1991), including articles dealing with postraumatic stress, musical therapy and rhythm
tests.
She was a very active member of the Los Angeles Chapter of SVU. Since 1969, she was chief
editor of the Los Angeles SVU Bulletin. During the period 1980-92, she was the editor of
the SVU Bulletin, an English counterpart of the Society's newsletter Zpravy. She was on
the editorial board of KOSMAS and a frequent contributor of musicological articles.
During all of the past SVU Congresses she never missed participating in the musicological sections. But in recent years her health did not permit her to travel. She could not attend the Congress in Bratislava, but she submitted a very interesting paper Czech Master in Spain, which I read for her.
Her devotion to research and the study of her beloved Czech musical heritage made a very valuable contribution to the expansion of the knowledge of Czech music abroad.
~~~