abstract: For those familiar with the name of Bohumir Kryl, he may be known simply as a cornetist who regularly utilized the extreme pedal register of his instrument. However, his life was much more complex than that. Born in 1875 near Prague, Kryl was trained by his father as a sculptor, and, for a brief stint in his childhood, he was a circus tumbler. Returning to his family vocation, he traveled with them to America and spent much of the 1890s sculpting the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument and busts on the English Hotel in Indianapolis, as well as the friezes adorning the Lew Wallace study in Crawfordsville, Indiana. In the late 1890s, he left sculpting to become a professional cornet soloist, touring with the bands of John Philip Sousa and Frederick Innes, among others. Kryl soon garnered the title of World’s Greatest Cornetist. He formed his own band in 1906 and continued to solo and conduct well into the 1930s, eventually becoming known as one of the five greatest bandmasters in the world. He stopped soloing in the 1930s, but continued to conduct various orchestras until the late 1940s, gaining notoriety for his women’s orchestra. He also became infamous in the way he chose to parent his two daughters. He was financially successful, spending a short time as a bank president in the 1920s and amassing a significant art collection over the span of his life. When he died in 1961, he was worth nearly $2,000,000. This document is the first comprehensive biography of the extraordinary life of Bohumir Kryl. Many documents were reviewed in preparation for this biography, including thousands of newspaper articles, telegrams, and letters. Much of Kryl’s personal correspondence used for this study was acquired through the Redpath Chautauqua Collection, located in the University of Iowa Library in Iowa City. Because there are few secondary sources, this biography of Kryl is based on these primary sources, which were carefully organized, reviewed, and documented. Their wealth of information has allowed this study to offer a complete and multifaceted picture of the life and times of Bohumir Kryl. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Music 2019

102 17 Abstract The presented work deals with the strong personality of Czech folk music - Karel Kryl. It investigates the differences in the poetry of his lyrics and poems, and its development in the years 1968 - 1989. The first chapters outlines the situation since the sixties of the 20th century around the sung poetry and songsters to the present. Karel Kryl is compared with the Czech singer, he differed from them not only his work, but also his live, beliefs and appearance. His poetics is developed over twenty years, both in songs and in poems. This period is divided into four stages at the songs, according to which they are assigned to each of poetry collections. By 1971, one can speak only about the songs, because Karel Kryl has not paid poems in this period. At this time, the young author wrote a texts, in which disagreed with the occupation troops of the Warsaw Pact, the texts are uncompromising. Due to emigration in 1969, he began the songs express longing for home. Kryl speaks for all and all. The second stage of Kryl's production is between 1972 - 1975 - "happy period", especially the theme of love appears, the song (more than in poetry) the Bible theme here together in poems and songs. Primal screams took turns telling silence. After 1975, the author resorted for humor to in all his work, but it...