“I applied for a university. And I was rejected because of my aunt in America. My parents had a friend at the Technical University and he saw to it that they opened what they called the zero year - this was at the time the Czech Technical University campus was being built in Dejvice. I got accepted into that zero year and worked with the cement machine. I worked on the construction site from eight to half past four, at five I went to lectures. You can imagine what it looked like. I did five cubic metres of concrete and went to hear a lecture. But my parents’ friend was sacked and the zero year closed. I was transferred to Poděbrady among the normal students. But I was unable to cope so I spent three years at a university in vain.”
“I was used to such a way of working with the musicians that they studied a composition and we recorded it. And if anything went amiss, we made another recording, and if there is still some failure, we record again, for example, the second part. And the final recording was edited out of this. As the technology evolved with the advent of computers and editing software, which makes it possible to edit it note by note, what happened was that the musicians were not that ready and relied on the computer to do everything for them. Suddenly music was recorded by bits: four tact, then another four tacts. And then it was edited. I hate this. When you edit it in this way, it is technically perfect but it quite loses that whole arch and I cannot listen to it.”
“The old sound engineers did not want to do it. They said – we can’t do it and we won’t learn this. I had free hands and could do what I liked. And I can hardly imagine today that when I recorded the organ – one of the first – in the temple of St James in Prague, that I moved the large sound mixer alongside the big tape recorder. Or I recorded the drama part of an operetta in Dvojka, which was not stereo ready. I had my stereo tape recorded but two mixers. Each was different, as were the speakers – one big, the other small. The was the way we started. Time to time I listen to it – and it sounds pretty good.”
“In Jičín there is this nice street called Hus Avenue – today it is pedestrian area – and we were taken there by our school teachers. I know there was a store of a tradesman and in the window, there were things that he did not report to the authorities and that were found in his cellar. There were about three rolls of a cloth, then about two sacks of flour and – what stuck in my memory – a terracotta pot with fat. We were told at school that he hid those things, did not give them to the people and in fact stole it from the people. I wanted my parents to explain this to me and they said they would explain it to me later…”
Tomáš Zikmund was born in February 1944 in Jičín. Since his childhood he was interested in technology, namely in radio as a medium. His family listened to the radio namely on Sundays, mainly broadcasts of classical music. At the turn of the 1940s and 1950s Tomáš Zikmund went to the primary school, then to a grammar school. It was already during undergraduate studies that he showed a great gift and love for technical specialisations. He was not accepted to university out of political reasons (his aunt and all of her family emigrated to the United States prior to February 1948), but he had a chance to try sound engineering during his military service at a tank battalion in Milovice, Central Bohemia, where he was the sound engineer of the garrison band. Just after his military service he joined the Czechoslovakian Radio, first as the recording technician, later as the sound master. He stayed on his job until 2016. He is the pioneer of digital recording in the radio, works with HAMU university, where he teaches students sound engineering; he also served as the head of the trainees department at the Czech Radio. A recording of all organs in Czech and Moravia, recorded since 1989, is his chef d’oeuvre.
