By the term Team composition in music, we generally in music today understand artistic products created by joint forces. This genre, whose roots can be found in the European interwar musical avant-garde, became very popular during the 20th century also among composers from Brno. The trend of joint compositions began to develop slowly on the Brno scene from the 1960s, while the first experiments in this field are associated with the activities of Group A (Jan Novák, Miloslav Ištvan, Alois Piňos, Josef Berg, Zdeněk Pololáník). At the turn of the 1960s and 1970s, the so-called Brno Composition Team (Alois Piňos, Josef Berg, Miloš Štědroň, Rudolf Růžička) and some other related authors continued these activities. The newly established Exposition of Experimental Music[1] in 1969 became an important platform for presenting teamwork for this generation. In the course of the normalization 1970s, several other works were created in Brno, despite the establishment not particularly inclined to experiments. Authors from Alois Piňos's circle (two-member team Miloš Štědroň/Arnošt Parsch) continued the efforts that had been started, and also another two-member team Jiří Bárta/Leoš Faltus[2]. Jaroslav Šťastný comments these events on the Brno composition scene in the 1970s: "Despite all the obstacles and adverse external conditions, however, Piňos' team managed to create a number of compositions and what's more - to inspire other authors with the idea of ​​team composition..."[3] . In the 1980s, the development of teamwork on the Brno scene took on new impulses with the formation of the compositional group Camerata and the ensemble for New Music called Art Incognito (Ivo Medek, Jaroslav Šťastný, Daniel Forró, Zdeněk Plachý), from which the drum section called DAMA DAMA later became independent (Dan Dlouhý, Adam Kubíček, Martin Opršál, Josef Blaha). In the post-revolutionary 1990s, the formation of two independent trio teams is documented. The first of them (Alois Piňos, Miloš Štědroň, Ivo Medek) presented the chamber operas Annals of the avant-garde wide open or The Cage thing and Annals of the predecessors of the avant-garde or the meeting of the Slavic giants. The second trio (Leoš Faltus, Radomír Ištvan, Arnošt Parsch) presented a ballet called Meeting and Passing. The turn of the 20th and 21st centuries was subsequently carried in the echoes of previous activities and the development of new groupings. Teamwork was then developed in a new direction by, for example, Ivo Medek and his doctoral students at the time (Jan Kavan, Markéta Dvořáková) as part of the Marian ensemble. In the last 20 years, a number of larger compositions of this type were created, when the teams Medek/Dvořáková and then Zouhar/Medková/Medek staged several internationally successful operas (e.g. Alice in Bed, Věčná slečna bledá, respectively Tiamo, Sára smile etc.), created in a cooperative manner.

The development of Brno composition teams in the 1990s

During the 1990s, the development of artificial team compositions resulted in the creation of two new teams, both of which were presented at the New Music Exhibition festival[4] in 1995. I will add, that both teams were founded by some of the authors from group Camerata Brno. The Leoš Faltus/Arnošt Parsch/Radomír Ištvan team presented the ballet Meeting and Passing, based on the script and choreography of Jana Veselá. The team of Alois Piňos/Miloš Štědroň/Ivo Medek in turn presented the chamber opera Annals of the Avant-Garde Wide Open, or The Cage thing, which was created to a libretto by Miloš Štědroň. The team subsequently continued their cooperation, and in 1997 a free continuation of the opera called Annals of the Predecessors of the Avant-Garde or Meeting of the Slavic Greats was created. This work was also presented as part of the Exposition of New Music festival (year 1997). At the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries, this team created the orchestral composition There were times, there were… commissioned by the Brno Philharmonic. In it, the authors humorously reflected on the musical development of the past millennium. Jindřiška Bártová describes the themes and method of teamwork in the creation of these operas: "Both operas draw from the musical environment and are based on real events - Leoš Janáček's meeting with Henry Cowell in the 1920s in Brno and Antonín Dvořák's encounters with P. I. Tchaikovsky in the 1880s in Prague and Moscow. The author of both librettos is Miloš Štědroň, in the second case using the theme of Detlef Gojowé; the librettos are based on free fabulation and humorous exaggerations. In the first opera, the co-authors worked in such a way that each of them created parts of certain roles: Piňos Janáček and his pupils, Štědroň Cowell and the historian, Medek the part of Janáček's maid, dog and hens. At the same time, each of them composed music related to these roles. In Dvořák's opera, the authors divided the composition of certain scenes among themselves in advance. In both cases, detailed preliminary consultations preceded and agreed on the musical means, characteristics of people and scenes, expression, etc. The different methods resulted from the different nature of the librettos, but both proved successful, according to their statements, the final montages of contributions by all three authors were without problems."[5]

For the development of the Brno composition teams, the history of the Art Incognito group and the three development lines that arose after its breakup, were very important. The first of these lines was the evolution of the original Art Incognito group from the 1980s into a modernized form with a slightly changed name - Ars Incognita. In contrast to the original, more experimental format of the group, the new Ars Incognita was conceived more conservatively and was basically a chamber orchestra focused primarily on interpretation of composed works by Brno’s composers. The ensemble was initiated in 1994 by Ivo Medek, conducted by Petr Šumník and later from 1996 by Pavel Šnajdr. The core of the ensemble was more or less stable and consisted of clarinetist Libor Novotný, flutist Kateřina Novotná, cellist Pavlína Hluchá (Jelínková), violinist Lukáš Mrovjev (Šenk), violist Petr Pšenica, percussionist Martin Opršál and pianist Petr Hala. In addition to performances on stages in Brno, the ensemble also performed at specialized festivals in the Czech Republic, e.g. at Forfest in Kroměříž, Days of Contemporary Music in Ostrava, etc. One of the important artistic highlights of the ensemble was the release of a CD called Artificial Intelligence in 2001.

The second development line is represented here by the DAMA DAMA ensemble, which was founded in 1990 by the independence of the drum section from the Art Incognito group. Dan Dlouhý and Adam Kubíček performed together for the first time under the new name at the Darmstädter ferienkurse. DAMA DAMA soon emerged as a percussion quartet, when the original members were joined by Martin Opršál and Josef Blaha. In 1991, Blaha was replaced by Ctibor Bártek. Important performances in 1995 included the renewed premiere of the composition The Sun Gate by Vít Zouhar for solo percussion instruments and the symphony orchestra, which took part at the concert series of the Brno State Philharmonic, and also a solo concert as part of the Prague Spring festival. In October 1995 DAMA DAMA realized a full-length music-visual show by Dan Dlouhý The Wavefronts at the Exposition of new of music. In 1996, in addition to several dozens of performances in the Czech Republic, the ensemble performed a concert at the Days of Czech Culture in Jena, a celebratory final concert at the International Composition Courses in Český Krumlov, collaborated with the well-known firework ensemble Theatrum pyroboli, made guest appearances on several CDs with the music of Czech composers and recorded a number of radio and television appearances. In 1997, ensemble released three profile albums: DAMA DAMA 3, 4 and KONVERGENCE and, among other things, performed at the Wolfsburg festival in Germany.                                                                            In the 1990s, another former member of the composition group Art Incognito, Zdeněk Plachý, went in an interesting art direction. His works represents the third of the development lines. Plachý's work at that time was strongly related to the activities of the experimental and alternative oriented space in the Skleněná louka (Glass meadow) house at Kounicová street 23 in Brno. One of the very ambitious team projects, that Zdeněk Plachý initiated, was also the presentation of the composition Hard beats without tact, which was realized on 5 June 1997 in the Husa na provázku (Goose on a string ) theatre. Plachý collaborated on this composition with the artist Josef Daňek, and according to the available data, it was conceived really generously - the Brno Military Band led by Jiří Volf, the alternative rock band Morodochium, the singer Luisa Rzymanová, the guitarist Peter Varso and the poet Marian Palla performed together. Julo Fujak says in the Ticho magazine about the premiere of the project: "It is certainly not by chance that its authors Zdeněk Plachý and Josef Daněk chose the combination: "concert use of military music" - that is, enjoying the way anyone from us able to deal with the fact of the existence of this absolutely purposeful music and how it can be enjoyed, for example, even in the unexpected contexts that appear within the framework of this truly remarkable project. Although primarily theatrically and populistically, only its absurdly parodic concept is imposed in connection with the topic of military service, Z. Plachý and J. Daněk go much deeper and somewhere completely different in their "Hard times without tact". If in previous events such as "Listening to the Habrovský forrest" or "Dusk in the Quarry" their starting point was a certain "place of crime" and communication with it, in this case the basic concept of the project lies in the established situation and its (all) possible life reflections.[6]

Team composition is a phenomenon which started to groove in Czech lands in 1960s and as a viable genre, it is actively developing even today. It will be interesting to see, where will this creative trend go in the future.

[1] The Exposition of Experimental Creation dissappeared in 1971 after the death of Josef Berg..

[2] For the sake of completeness, it should be added that in the 1970s - 1990s several, rather non-artificially focused team compositions were created on the Brno music scene at the initiative of Pavel Blatný (e.g. film music in collaboration with Milan Slimáček, several compositions with Dalibor Spilka and later also with his son Marek Blatný).

[3] ŠŤASTNÝ Jaroslav: Questions of creative thinking of composers Alois Piňose and Roman Berger, JAMU, Brno, 2000. (p. 71)

[4] The New Music Exposition festival was founded in Brno in 1987 as part of the MHF Brno (Moravian Autumn, New Music Exposition, Easter Sacred Music Festival). On the organizational level, it has nothing in common with the original Exposition of Experimental Music, which took place at the turn of the 1960s and 70s at the initiative of the authors of Group A, the Studio of Authors and the Brno Composition Team. However, the name and idea partly refers to the original festival.

[5] BÁRTOVÁ Jindřiška: Camerata Brno, JAMU, Brno, 2003. pp. 36-37

[6] FUJAK Julo: Hard times without tact, Silence contemporary music 6-7/97, ​​p. 29; Glass Meadow, Brno, 1997.