Martinů spent almost the whole summer of 1920 with friends in Slovakia, from where he sent a postcard to his father on July 21 with the information that "today he is already going from the mountains to the villages" and "he already has songs." This note relates to a collection of folk songs, which he immediately adapted for vocals and piano. (By the way, this was not the composer's first encounter with Slovak folk music. Even before World War I, an undated song was created for the Slovak folk text Svitaj, Bože, svitaj, H 76, which has been preserved only in the form of an incompletely elaborated sketch from which the pianist Giorgio Koukl reconstructed the composition.) Martinů probably completed the harmonization of songs in August and already on September 8, 1920, he performed a selection of them under the title "Slavic Songs" at the Municipal Theater in Polička at the concert "To the Young Czechoslovak Social Democracy in Polička (...) to say goodbye to its member, the virtuoso Mr. Boh. Martinů." According to the program, the singing part was performed by a certain Kam. Samohrdová. In the case of the collection of thirty Slovak songs, it is not the author's work of Bohuslav Martinů, and the composer himself never marked it as such. The misleading title "Nové slovenské písně", under which they are presented in professional literature, was given to them only by the editor of the first edition in 1970. In Bohuslav Martinů's work, the songs form a very diverse group. Most of them come from the composer's early period. Inspiration from Czech and Moravian folk music permeates the entire work of Bohuslav Martinů, but in this context, it is necessary to emphasize that the still surviving myth of a composer surrounded by childhood music in his childhood, which influenced him throughout his life, is now difficult to sustain. He knew folk songs practically exclusively from printed collections, except for those of Janáček and Bartoš especially from the collections of Karel Jaromír Erben, František Bartoš and František Sušil, but also from the magazine Český lid and ethnographic publications by Čeňek Zíbrt. Martinů also expressed his opinion on folk music in writing, for instance in the text dedicated to the mid-1920s of jazz and its use in classical music: “I often think of a wonderfully pregnant rhythm of our Slavic songs, to Slovak songs, to their characteristic rhythmic instrumental accompaniment, and it seems to me that we do not need to resort to jazz. ” Martinů put it even more clearly in his Autobiography of 1945, written in the third person, in which he emphasized that "after the epochs of Half-Time, he suddenly returns to Czech speech, namely directly to folklore. [...] universal opinion in order to get close to the folk Czech feeling [...] and create a new simple, almost national song, without all the orchestral embellishments, without all the complications of modern music, by means of ordinary music, which follows directly on the Czech classical production. "
Aleš Březina, Martinů Revue, 3/2020