Awangarda: Tradition and Modernity in Postwar Polish Music. Lisa Cooper Vest.

Abstract

The anglophone musicological literature concerning twentieth-century Polish music has been reenergized in the twenty-first by the emergence of outstanding scholars. These include a trio of AMS ‘Cold Warriors’, each of whom has recently produced a major study: Andrea Bohlman (Musical Solidarities: Political Action and Music in Late Twentieth-Century Poland (New York and Oxford, 2019)), Lisa Jakelski (Making New Music in Cold War Poland (Oakland, Calif., 2016)), and Lisa Cooper Vest, the author of a new monograph on the naissance of Poland’s musical avant-garde. Exploring music and context in twentieth-century Poland has always demanded a palette of approaches, and the supple interdisciplinarity evident in work by the new generation’s forerunners—scholars including Cindy Bylander and Adrian Thomas—continues in publications by the aforementioned trio and others (for example, Daniel Elphick, Music Behind the Iron Curtain: Weinberg and His Polish Contemporaries (Cambridge, 2019) and J. Mackenzie Pierce, ‘Zofia Lissa, Wartime Trauma, and...