all this , the great corpus of Russian song , remains almost unknown - or known by its least fine and subtle examples . and not only Russian song ; Poland has produced at least two remarkable song-writers , Moniuszko in the last century and Szymanowski in the present one , of whom Szymanowski is known only in German translations and Moniuszko not at all , for his songs have never been translated into English and the wretched French selection is a hundred years old . instrumental music , of course , penetrates the curtain with no difficulty , with the result that we think of Russian and Polish music as mainly instrumental . this is a false picture . it is less false , I think , of Czech music . the Czechs ( among whom I include the Moravians and Slovaks and Ruthenians , beside the Czechs proper ) are an intensely musical people but , whether because they nearly lost their language as a culture-language under the Habsburg monarchy ( so that even Smetana had to learn it as a foreigner ) or from deficiencies in the language itself ( e.g in vowel-sounds ) , for some reason their vocal literature is less rich than their instrumental . the language-curtain obstructs much more than the free passage of Slavonic vocal music . it obstructs our knowledge of a great deal of music that would present no difficulty at all if we could only hear it : the older instrumental music of the Czechs and Poles , and their Latin church music . for - and here I come at last to the very heart of my subject - the Czechs and Poles have always shared the culture of western Europe , including its music , whereas the Russians began to do so only in the second half of the eighteenth century . not only were the Russians Christianised from Byzantium , either directly or through Bulgarian missionaries , and left with a different alphabet , a different liturgy and a different liturgical language , for two centuries in the later middle ages they suffered under the Tatar yoke and the Princes of Moscow were mere tributaries to Mongol khans . on the other hand , whatever the penetration of central Europe by the old Slavonic liturgy , whatever the nature of the conflict there between eastern and western churches ( and on this there are many important points on which the experts still disagree ) , whatever the political vicissitudes of the western Slav states , they were never detached in this way from the influences of western Christendom ; the Roman alphabet conquered the Cyrillic and in the church Latin conquered old Slavonic . Polish and Czech chapter and monastery libraries at Gniezno and Vy&amp;scaron;ebrod possess Gregorian missals from the eleventh or early twelfth century , and although these no doubt came from the west - the Gniezno missal has St Gall-type neumes - manuscripts of Polish and Czech origins were compiled before long . the Prague Troparium of 1235 is only the earliest of a number of Czech and Moravian musical codices of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and the Poles claim the composition of a plainsong antiphon which can hardly be later than the twelfth century : Magna vox , laude sonora in honour of St Adalbert , who played such an important part in the Christianisation ( or Romanisation ) of both Poles and Czechs . and there is a significant parallelism in the appearance of the earliest religious songs with Czech or Polish words ; both the Polish Bogurodzica ( hymn to the Mother of God ) and the Czech Hospodine , pomiluj ny ( Lord have mercy on us , a vernacular kyrie ) are more or less centos of plainsong motives . moreover the earliest preserved sources for both date from the same period ; the oldest known manuscript of the Bogurodzica dates from about 1407 , that of Hospodine , pomiluj from just ten years earlier , though the words are found without the music as early as c 1380 . I have no intention of inflicting on you a potted history of western Slavonic music , beginning with the middle ages . I wish , by these facts , only to drive home two points : the essential oneness of this musical culture with that of Europe generally - and the differences . the western Slavs shared in the common stock but often drew from it elements which they put to their own special uses . standing on the outer edge of western culture , they developed all the fascinating peculiarities one expects to find in peripheral cultures . one finds similar things in the music of Portugal and at some periods of history in our own . peripheral cultures naturally tend to be backward ; even in a country the size of England , provincial architecture has often been half-a-century or more behind the style fashionable in London ; as we all know , even Germany was very late in developing polyphony . but there are wonderful compensations in the variety , in the range of dialects ( as it were ) . sometimes political or other non-musical factors play a part ; the Hussite wars of the fifteenth century gave a tremendous stimulus to vernacular Czech song just as the two centuries and more of Habsburg domination after the battle of the White Mountain overlaid and even seemed to extinguish the peculiarly Czech elements in the music of Bohemia . but the Slavs were quite capable of developing special musical characteristics without the help of extra-musical circumstances . even in the field of notation , Czech neumes evolved with certain differences . in the thirteenth century the Czechs were still using non-diastematic neumes ; in the fourteenth they progressed to the stave - and their neumes began to assume peculiar rhomboid forms . but let me remind you again how much more different things were in Russia , where liturgical melody had developed - and developed quite a long way on its own lines - from Byzantine chant but was stuck fast in a primitive notation which is still unreadable up to the late fifteenth century , although comparative study with Byzantine notation is now showing how it may be deciphered . as for the five-line stave , it reached the Ukraine only in the seventeenth century and Russia proper in the eighteenth . genuine polyphony was impossible though a very primitive form of three-part polyphony - in the so-called troestrochnoe style , noted in three rows of neumes - begins to appear about the middle of the sixteenth century : the liturgical cantus firmus in the middle part is supported at first in unison or octaves by upper and lower voices which branch out from it and close in again to the unison in the manner of the podgoloski of Russian polyphonic folk-music . it is not until the mid-seventeenth century that one begins to find four-part polyphony , with the cantus firmus in the tenor and the added parts in note-against-note style producing common chords in root position . at this period , when Russian liturgical polyphony was in its earliest infancy and Russian secular music reached no higher level than the songs and dance music of the skomorokhi ( buffoons ) , Poland and Bohemia were enjoying what modern Polish and Czech historians claim as a golden age of polyphony . it may at first strike us as no more than a pale reflection of the golden age that was being enjoyed at the same time by all Europe , but that is not the whole truth . a great deal of this music deserves not only intensive study but performance . two difficulties confront the western student of this music . one I have already mentioned : the language curtain . it does not conceal so much of the music itself , for a great deal of it is Latin church music , but it makes it difficult for most of us to get at the information about it , the existing stylistic research , and so on . Czech and Polish musicology have fairly long traditions and very high standards , as indeed has Soviet musicology , and the amount of study devoted to the western Slav polyphonists - to say nothing of the instrumental composers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries , and early Czech and Polish romantic piano music - is enormous . it exists in print , in books and monographs and learned periodicals , but it might be in Etruscan or Cretan linear B for all that most of us can make of it and it would be well worth the while of some of the young musicologists now studying Russian to make Polish or Czech their second Slav language . the second difficulty is that of actual scores . it has at times seemed as if western Slav musicologists were more interested in studying their old masters than in getting their texts published . Josef Syrzy&amp;nacute;ski made an excellent start in 1885 with his Polish Monumenta but succeeded in bringing out only four volumes ; the later Polish series , Wydawnictwo dawnej muzyki polskiej , edited by Chybi&amp;nacute;ski and begun in the 1930s , has produced nearly forty numbers but many of them are very slim , containing only a single work or a selection of short pieces . ( the editorial prefaces were from the first provided with a French translation and the post-war numbers are translated into English , French , German and Russian . ) the somewhat similar Czech series , musica antiqua Bohemica , has been devoted almost entirely to instrumental music of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries ; it is only in the last few years that the Czechs have begun to publish the work of their classic polyphonists - with trilingual r&amp;eacute;sum&amp;eacute;s of the prefaces , but not of the critical apparatus . a third difficulty is the paucity of surviving material . Poland and the Czechoslovak lands have provided innumerable battlefields during the last four centuries ; the thirty years war and the two world wars were only the worst of a series , and the total destruction of music , both manuscript and printed , must have been enormous . ( incidentally , these countries began to print music quite early ; a Czech-printed catholic Kancion&amp;aacute;l appeared in 1529 and a Polish music-publisher , L&amp;symbol;azarz Andrysowic , was active at Cracow from 1553 onward ) . one reads of a Polish master such as Wacl&amp;symbol;aw Szamotul - or Szamotulczyk , as he is often called - who was obviously a very considerable figure in the middle of the sixteenth century ; two of his psalm-motets were published by Montanus and Neuber at Nuremberg in 1554 and in 1564 in collections of works by the leading French and Netherland masters , and what survives of his music justifies the high esteem in which he was held . yet one finds so little that does survive : these two motets , another preserved only in organ tablature , some songs with Polish words - a very small proportion of what he is known to have written . his eight-part mass for the wedding of King Sigismund Augustus is lost ; his office settings are lost ; of his lamentationes , printed at Cracow by Andrysowic , only the tenor part has been preserved . another , rather later composer Tomasz Szadek - a member first of the king &apos;s private chapel and later of the royal chapel of the Rorantists at Cracow , the two chief centres of the Polish golden age - survives in only two works , other than fragments , and of those two masses one lacks the Agnus . technically these works are more or less in the late Netherland style . what distinguishes them and gives them special interest is the infusion of Polish melodic elements , here a phrase from a Polish devotional song , there a pseudo-plainsong found only in Polish sources . Marcin Leopolita , composer and organist to the king in the early 1560s , composed a five-part missa paschalis or missa de resurrectione , the earliest complete setting of the ordinary by a Polish composer that has come down to us , which is based on four Easter songs current in Poland and Germany . the Polish golden age was finally submerged by a flood of Italian musicians brought in by Sigismund 3 . there had of course been foreign musicians at the Polish court before ; Heinrich Finck was a chorister in the royal chapel in his youth and returned there for fourteen years , perhaps as director , from 1492 to 1506 . and there had been Italian musical influence . but Sigismund 3 was a fanatic for the counter-reformation and for everything Italian ; he moved his court from Cracow to Warsaw , enticed Marenzio to go there ( but failed to keep him ) , invited Giovanni Gabrieli ( also in vain ) and appointed a whole series of Italians as directors of his chapel , including Asprilio Pacelli , an ancestor of the late Pope ( Pius 12 ) , and Giovanni Francesco Anerio . 