The Songs on One Page - seven songs to words of Moravian folk poetry - were composed only a year later, in them Martinů again set to music texts from Sušil's collection of folk songs, which, along with the collections of Bartoš and Erben (and the Holy Bible), was part of his library wherever he lived - in France, the USA, Italy, and Switzerland. The seven miniature songs, of which none lasts more than ninety seconds, are named according to the seemingly unimportant outward fact of their size. However, like Karel Čapek in his stories From One Pocket and Another, Martinů used this outward aspect only so that he himself as the creator would recede into the background and allow the almost anonymous beauty of word and music to stand out. The fact that the composer did not conceive them as a contiguous cycle gives us sufficient justification for selecting several songs from each of these two song collections.
Along with Nový Špalíček, H 288, and Songs on Two Pages, H 302, the Songs on One Page are among the gems of Czech song literature of the twentieth century. Quite untypically for Martinů, they were written without any direct commission, but there is reason to believe that the composer wrote them for the purposes of cultural, political, and charitable events of organizations of American Czechs, in which they were indeed performed by the above-mentioned singer Jarmila Novotná of the Metropolitan Opera among others.
Like Antonín Dvořák in his Moravian Duets, Martinů took from the folk songs only the texts and some characteristic melodic and harmonic procedures. His musical conception is completely personal and independent. He bases his phrasing on the rhythm of the text, the bar line are only to serve the performer for better orientation. Martinů once said of his songs to folk texts that he "wrote them when [he] wasn't composing". However, it is not very likely that he wished thus to designate them as second-rank pieces; probably this statement pertains to their experimental (and thus in Martinů's conception unfinished and provisional) nature. In their expressive economy and lack of outward effects, the Songs on One Page are one of the keys to Martinů's late style.
Aleš Březina, Bohuslav Martinů: Selected Masterpieces, © 2001 Supraphon Music a.s