Making New Music in Cold War Poland: The Warsaw Autumn Festival, 1956–1968 , by Lisa Jakelski. California Studies in 20th Century Music. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2017. xv, 245 pp. It has become second nature for scholars of twentieth-century music to acknowledge that the “modern” of musical “modernism” was socially and culturally constructed, and that the meaning and valence of “new music” were contingent.1 Together with this insight has come the reevaluation of a historiography governed by teleologies of progress, greater interest in the power dynamics determining musical importance, and attention to the processes by which certain musical techniques were defined as “advanced.” Yet if “new music” was contingent, on what was it contingent? And if these other accompanying tropes were constructions, by whom, where, when, why, and how were they constructed? Lisa Jakelski's Making New Music in Cold War Poland: The Warsaw Autumn Festival, 1956–1968 is a strike against the passive voice and vagueness implied by the sentences above. Her resolutely historical approach and embrace of a wide array of archival evidence, types of witnesses, and reception documents result in a well-rounded and unusually specific account. The book argues that the Warsaw Autumn Festival was a particularly rich location for the exchange of ideas and the meeting of minds, and provides numerous examples of encounters and events that had both a local and a global impact on the practices of contemporary music. Rather than producing a year-by-year chronicle of the institution, Jakelski has focused her material differently in different chapters, while still maintaining an …