“The Warsaw Autumn” of the 1950s though 1960s and Ukrainian communicative context

Abstract

The specifics of the Ukrainian–Polish cultural relations during the late 1950s and early 1960s were outlined in the article. The area of research covers the strategies of development of the European festival movement, in particular the festival form of popularization of contemporary art and performing concepts of the well-known avant-garde music festival The Warsaw Autumn, established in Poland in 1956. Special attention was drawn to the importance of the communicative processes that accompanied the dissemination of the innovative music of the time from West to East, and to the role of Boris Lyatoshinsky in this discourse. Being a pillar of Ukrainian modern music, he inspired the constellation of young composers who would later join the Sixtiers dissident movement; they were predominantly graduates of Lyatoshinsky’s composing class at the Tchaikovsky Kyiv State Conservatory.Boris Lyatoshinsky’s participation in the Warsaw Autumn as a member of official delegation was explored as well. The analytics was conducted based on the rediscovered letters from H. Batsevych and T. Okhlevsky, prominent Polish cultural figures, to B. Lyatoshinsky, as well as on the memoirs of O. Strashynsky, a Ukrainian-born conductor. Communication, established by Lyatoshinsky (which resulted in popularization of his oeuvre in Poland and, respectively, of the works by the Polish composers—in Ukraine), enabled to define the Ukrainian–Polish discourse of the time as virtually the most active period of the Ukrainian–Polish post-warcultural initiatives.It should be added that sheet music, audio recordings, study guides to the contemporary composing techniques, brought home from the Polish festival, as well as free, no-taboo or cliche atmosphere at Lyatoshinsky’s composing class prompted the expansion of the ideas of the avant-garde culture that captured his immediate students and the whole young Ukrainian composing generation of the 1960s. This may be traced in the first explicitly avant-garde compositions of V. Godziatsky, V. Guba, L. Grabovsky, etc. This musical and worldview shift within the Ukrainian musical culture later was identified as Ukrainian musical avant-garde, while its protagonists were labeled as the Sixtiers composers.