Rajko Maksimović and the ‘Polish School’: A Case-Study of Tri Haiku

Abstract

While the so-called Polish School of the 1960s has received considerable attention in musicological literature, there has been little consideration to date of how this phenomenon might relate to the avant-garde music of other European countries, particularly those on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain. Although there has been much debate about how to define and evaluate the ‘Polish School’, the question of its impact has largely focused on emphasising the significance of its institutional basis, represented by the Warsaw Autumn Festival, as well as on aesthetic matters. This article considers a number of issues relevant to Polish avant-garde compositional devices and offers an insight into Serbian new music of the 1960s through an examination of Rajko Maksimović’s Tri haiku for two female choirs & 23 instruments (1967) as a case study. The aim is to assess how these presumed ‘Polish School’ influences contributed to the overall and detailed musical design of Tri haiku, as well as how their creative reception led to the emergence of a highly individual character in this composition, contributing to the shaping of the identity of Serbian avant-garde music at that time. The conceptual and analytical tools proposed by Józef M. Chomiński’s theory of musical sonology will be used for this purpose.