ABSTRACT
In this chapter I approach Moravian violinist-vocalist Iva Bittová’s distinctive creative output, focusing on the albums she has recorded featuring the Bartók Duets for Two Violins (with Dorothea Kellerovó), and Bartók’s Slovak songs in arrangements for string quartet and voice by Slovakian composer Vladimór Godór. I analyse these interpretations of Bartók with reference to Lawrence Lessig’s concept of Read/Write culture, but ultimately these and Bittovó’s overall output through the lens of post-revival. What notions of improvisatory expression could music help to construct in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Czech Republic, a post-communist dispensation still affected by complex and sometimes conflicting regional histories of nation and ethnic make-up?
