Interview with composer Olga Ježková

I come from a broadly musical family where playing and singing were just taken for granted, even though nobody was actually a professional (mother is a sculptress, dad a radiochemist); but all of us needed music in our lives.

There were problems with me from the start, as (unlike my brother and mother) I was bad at reading music and I didn’t like practising the piano. Therefore in order for the piano to make some sound I made up my own compositions. In time there were so many that I forgot one after the other. That was during my grammar school studies, and I said to myself that I would ask my former piano teacher Mrs. Šimková to give me advice as to how to write compositions. She sent me to her husband, Mr. Šimek, a violinist with the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra, who gave me a quick course in music theory, and by the time I graduated from grammar school I had written several instrumental and choral compositions.

With them I went straight into the second year at the department of composition at the Prague Conservatory under Professor Kovaříček. Throughout my studies, I had an incomprehensible characteristic that was tolerated by some (Prof. Kovaříček) though it angered others (Prof. Klemens): I was kind of dyslexic when it came to notes, which was very stressful. The possibility of writing notes directly onto a computer and get around using the piano was a huge help, and relieved my problem.

To me, all instruments have beautiful colours for painting in time. Only the piano strikes me as somewhat uninteresting and awkward. I had my first son even before I finished my sixth year at the conservatory. He is a professional musician and plays my favourite instrument, the violin. My second son played the cello, and I started teaching at an arts-focused elementary school. There I tacked the problem of how, as early and as effortlessly, as possible to teach children to read music – to have the skill that I was denied. I worked on it with such verve that I even won second prize for new curricula of music theory and I was sent abroad, specifically to Parma, with sample lessons. I established two choirs in the school and conducted them, as well as writing compositions for them and the school’s orchestra and chamber ensembles.

For whom do I write? For everybody who is willing to lend an ear and to listen attentively with an open heart in such a way that he could be changed by the content. I always keep my fingers crossed that through the music I will at least make a mark on the listener and cause him to listen one more time. After all, we’ve all had the experience that we start liking the music that we already know, or we’ve even had to work our way through it.

I write whenever I’m not overly tired from my work at a publishers, but it must be said that composing fills me with energy and I experience the most beautiful moments of my life when I’m doing it. As soon as a piece is written, the worry about whether it will be well received follows, as does the shame if perhaps somebody doesn’t like it. In essence, composing is a very impractical activity; after all, other types of art don’t need so many intermediaries and to the majority of people a completed score for a grand symphony is just a piece of written-on paper. Maybe that’s why there are so few women composers; women are less playful than men. For me, it’s an escape into a world of beauty where I’m in charge of what is heard and when. If some event, artefact or literary work makes an impression on me I’m happy when I can transform it into music. But for me the greatest inspiration is belief. That’s the terra firma from which I reverberate; at the same time, I draw every idea from above, and I sincerely don’t even know if it’s really mine. I believe that I just receive it.

Working at a music publishing company is interesting because it allows me to wade through unfamiliar scores, and that is useful. Thanks to the selection of compositions for the station D dur I get to know a huge amount of unfamiliar music, the old and the latest, and I’m also forced to form an opinion and to express it on the airwaves. But if I made a living from composing, I’d jack everything in and conceive music from morning to evening and in the end experience a feeling of tiredness from that activity. That hasn’t happened to me yet.