Jan Koláček

Personal life and education

Jan was born in Prague, Czech Republic as the youngest of three children of Jan Koláček and Vlasta Koláčková. His father RNDr. Jan Koláček, CSc. works at the Institute of Physics in Prague and focuses his work on Infrared and acoustoelectric study of vortex dynamics in superconductors. His mother Vlasta Koláček is an accountant and active traveler. Jan also has got two older sisters, Jana and Jarmila. In October 2013 Jan married Martina Ligocká and their daughter Anna was born on 11 January 2014.

Jan studied at the PORG (the first private school established after the collapse of Communism in the Czech Republic) high school in 1990-1998 where he became known both as a very smart and active student and a witty rebel too. He is a popular part of the school team, classmate and friend to these days. In 1999-2005 Jan studied Religious studies at the Hussite Theological Faculty of the Charles University in Prague, where he graduated in 2005 and received his first MA title. In 2003-2008, he studied Musicology at the Faculty of Arts of the Charles University in Prague, where he is completing his Ph.D. now. During all his studies and life, Jan demonstrated very strong hunger for knowledge in many different areas, being interested in the arts, literature, nature, ornithology, botany, culture, politics, history, theology, etc.

Cantus Index

Cantus Index is a central catalog of chants referenced in medieval music databases. Several years’ experience in the context of electronic tools and their application to musicology has led to the creation of this basic index of plainchant containing full texts of chants for Office and Mass. The CANTUS Index is a result of collaboration between the following manuscript databases:

Cantus Database

Cantus Database is a database that assembles indices of the Latin ecclesiastical chants found in early manuscript and printed sources for the liturgical Office, such as antiphonals and breviaries. This digital archive benefits scholars in a variety of fields including ecclesiastical monody, the sacred polyphony of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, liturgical drama, hagiography, paleography, philology, ecclesiastical history and the history of monasticism, as well as performers of this early music (including church musicians and directors of liturgy), librarians and archivists. The manuscript inventories are available at no cost. They are fully searchable by textual incipit, keywords, saints’ names or liturgical occasion, and “chant identification numbers” (drawn from standard chant research resources).

Global Chant Database

Global Chant Database is a searchable database of plainchant melodies and texts included in medieval sources and new editions. It serves as a simple tool for searching information on Gregorian chant and other medieval monody including sacred songs. The database contains almost 25 000 records of chant incipits that provide information about text, melody, genre, modus and concordances in new editions and other on-line databases. Some of the records include also hypertext links to facsimiles where a particular chant can be found.

Portuguese Early Music Database

Portuguese Early Music Database allows free and universal access to a large number of manuscripts with musical notation with music written before c. 1650 preserved in many different libraries and archives in Portugal and surrounding Spanish towns. Every manuscript is given in full-color reproduction and entered with a general description. Fragments are indexed in full. Selected codices with monophonic or polyphonic music are also fully indexed.

Slovak Early Music Database

Slovak Early Music Database - Cantus Planus in Slovakia focuses on making the oldest manuscripts accessible and fragmentary preserved notated sources from Slovakia in form of the full-text database in English language. From 1999 onwards basic source material of the medieval music culture from Slovakia from the time period of the late 11th century to the beginning of the 16th century is processed at the Institute of Musicology of Slovak Academy of Sciences, in collaboration with other scientific and educational institutions (Catholic University in Ružomberok, Comenius University in Bratislava). The Slovak Early Music Database - Cantus Planus in Slovakia allows free and universal access to a large number of manuscripts with musical notation, written before c. 1600, kept at many different libraries and archives in Slovakia. Selected codices with monophonic or polyphonic music are also fully indexed.

Gradualia Database

Gradualia is a Hungarian database that contains detailed inventories of Mass sources (Graduals as well as Missals). The sources were examined according to a liturgical framework, expressed by a fixed numbering system. Since this arrangement is not always identical with the actual layout of the sources, the sources can be viewed in two forms: according to the formalized liturgical system, on the one hand, and according to the original order of the content, on the other.

Cantus Planus in Polonia

Plainchant sources in Poland allows free and universal access to manuscripts and prints with musical notation, kept at many different libraries and archives in Poland. Manuscripts are entered with a general description. Selected codices are fully indexed. There are many search capabilities which are immediately available to a visitor.

Fondo de Musica Tradicional

Fons de Música Tradicional at the Institució Milà i Fontanals (CSIC-IMF) in Barcelona has more than 20 000 melodies, copied on paper, collected between 1944 and 1960 throughout Spain. Most of them were compiled through the 65 folkloric Missions and 62 notebooks presented to Competitions organized by the Folklore Section of the former Instituto Español de Musicología of the CSIC [Spanish National Research Council] in which 47 researchers participated. This website / database has now available for free consultation digitized materials of the music collected in the Competitions and Missions of Andalusia, Balearic Islands, Castile-La Mancha, Castile and León Region, Catalonia, Galicia, Murcia Region and Valencian Community; more materials from these and other regions from the rest of Spain will be incorporated later on. With this musicological Project of the CSIC, an important Spanish collection of traditional music heritage, known only in part, will be available to researchers and the general public, making possible comparative studies owing to the advantages of this database. During the process of gathering of songs, hundreds of men and women throughout Spain who sang or played these pieces were identified (with an informant’s card). The dissemination of this repertory through this website will make possible for the descendants of the informants to recover the historical music memory of their families. In the schools of villages and towns where these pieces were collected, children will be able to sing again the songs of the generation of their great-grandfathers; children’s songs in this Fons often incorporate a description of the play or actions that accompany the singing (see, for instance, the notebooks of the Competitions C05 and C14). This website can be of interest not only to researchers, but also to music teachers from primary and secondary schools who would like to select material for their students, to organizations interested in the revival of traditional music in their region, and to people who want to consult songs related to their place of origin or to a particular subject. Audio files of the melodies will eventually be added. This will facilitate the learning process and ensure their survival in Spain and Latin America.

Fontes Cantus Bohemiae

Fontes Cantus Bohemiae is a database cataloging plainchant sources in the Czech countries. It was founded in 2012 as a part of the growing CANTUS Index database network.

EasyPiano.cz

EasyPiano.cz is a piano teaching project website containing transcriptions of many famous songs for piano. There is over 120 music sheets created for the EasyPiano.cz students on this website at this moment (August 2014).

Research Contributions

Travels

In South America, Jan traveled Peru and in Asia, he spent 5 weeks in a work-camp in Indonesia in 2008 where he helped the community to build a playground for local children.

In Africa, Jan visited Senegal while participating in the Derbianus project which focuses on the conservation program of Western Derby Eland (Taurotragus derbianus derbianus).