Research
Dr. Kajanová has devoted 27 years of her musicological career to research in:
- Slovak jazz history
- the comparison of jazz and rock music, their rhythms and improvisations
- the application of postmodernist aesthetic to contemporary jazz, rock and pop music styles
and to the management of amateur, professional and global music.
She has also touched on the fields of music education and music sociology.
Yvetta Kajanova has researched and documented the Slovak jazz and gospel music scenes; her work on Slovak jazz music resulted in the monographs: The Dictionary of Slovak Jazz, NHC, Bratislava 1999 and The Book of Slovak Jazz, MC, Bratislava 2000.
Dr.Kajanova has applied new methods to the analysis of jazz and rock music using, in several studies, historical methods together with the principles of comparative and quantitative analysis. She emphasizes research into sources and sociological, aesthetic, stylistic and critical analyses. In the comparison she could not avoid a confrontation with classical music and centuries-old axiology. By comparing typical characteristics of jazz and rock, she confronted these genres as an entire entity and searched for a way of understanding the musical thinking in them.
She analyzed jazz and rock music examples, different kinds of rhythms, improvisation, tone creation, articulation and sounds that historically developed in these genres. Her research has particularly focused on the youngest generation of Slovak post-modernist composers (The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, http://www.grove.com, Macmillan, London 2000).