Warsaw Autumn Research Articles

Международный музыкальный фестиваль «Варшавская осень» — преодоление границ между Востоком и Западом

In the late 1940s — early 1950s, a huge gap appeared between the development of musical cultures of Western and Eastern Europe, and it was Poland that initiated bridging it. Therefore, the emergence of the Warsaw Autumn Festival of contemporary music, which has become the largest, was not coincidental. The article is devoted to studying this cultural phenomenon, which has a significant scientific novelty, because the Warsaw Autumn has not yet been subjected to a detailed scientific analysis in Russian musicology. According to the organizers of the new festival — young Polish composers Tadeusz Baird and Kazimierz Serocki, — Warsaw was to become a center of contemporary music, no less important than the avant-garde music festivals in Darmstadt, Donaueschingen, Cologne or Milan. However, the purpose of the Warsaw Autumn is more ambitious — to provide a complete aesthetic and stylistic picture of modern music, and not just avant-garde music, as was the case in Western European countries. The repertoire policy of the festival covered several areas: avantgarde music, more traditional music, the classics of the 20th century, and promotion of Polish music. The festival laid claim to being a reliable display of contemporary music in the world, reacted to the changes in global music, and soon became the largest music arena of the 20th century. It was attended by the most prominent composers of the East and West. For the socialist countries, it became a true “window on Europe” and a platform for mastering new techniques of composition. Without the Warsaw Autumn festival and its profound influence on composers of socialist countries, it would be utterly impossible to imagine the development of musical art of the entire region. This article suggests focusing on the early period of the festival, from 1956 (when it was established) to the early 1980s.

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

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.

Karol Szymanowski’s Vision of New Polish Music

Abstract In 19th-century Poland — under Russian, Prussian and Austrian rule at the time – the main goal of music was to promote revival and to stimulate patriotic feelings. Patriotic Polishness drawing on the country’s glorious past was to be the essence of music; modernity of the composer’s language was of secondary importance. Karol Szymanowski unceremoniously criticised this patriotic music as turned towards the provincial Polish tradition. According to Szymanowski, the criterion of Polish and at the same time “civilised musical art” was met only by Chopin. With the regaining of independence Polish art should free itself from patriotic didacticism and pay attention to aesthetic qualities, which was to eliminate the discrepancy between Polishness and Europeanness, between what was national and what was international, universal and European. The figure of Karol Szymanowski links our musical present, symbolised by the Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music, with the first years of independent Poland, for Warsaw Autumn realized Karol Szymanowski’s vision of modern Polish music. In this vision Polish music was a rightful element of European culture.

Kohlrausch , Martin Brokers of Modernity: East Central Europe and the Rise of Modernist Architects, 1910–1950 (review)

REVIEWS 561 BogusławSchäfferformsanimportantcasestudyforthebook,asacomposercritic who divided opinions: crucially, he ‘was not eager to adapt lack language as the foundation for an aesthetic program because he rejected the notion that catching up could be achieved by imitating an external example’ (p. 119). From Schäffer’s obsession with experiment for experiment’s sake, a younger generation took up the mantle to eventually be proclaimed the Polish avantgarde group (including Górecki and Krzysztof Penderecki). In the context of recent studies (see especially, Jakelski, Making New Music in Cold War Poland: The Warsaw Autumn Festival, 1956–1968, Oakland, CA, 2016), Vest achieves an impressive new contextualization for Polish music: that the actual discourse was composer-led, with multiple agents debating what ‘modernity’ meant to their particular situation. The book is well-suited for a non-specialist readership, though music analysts might prefer to have had more in-depth appraisals of key works. Music examples help to illustrate Vest’s argument, particularly with the more visual scores of the later avant-garde group. Perhaps the most revealing message of Awangarda is its illustration of just how much Western scholars have reinforced Cold War stereotypes in their writing on Polish music: since this detailed study will surely be required reading for any scholar on the subject, I would hope that such attitudes will be put to rest in future. Royal Holloway, University of London Daniel Elphick Kohlrausch, Martin. Brokers of Modernity: East Central Europe and the Rise of Modernist Architects, 1910–1950. Leuven University Press, Leuven, 2019. 399 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. €55.00; open access e-book. A review of this book must begin with the problems of the title: ‘East Central Europe’ is very misleading as the book is devoted entirely to Poland, with the occasional brief comparison with matters in Czechoslovakia and Hungary. The long table of contents does not make this situation clear either. The list of periodicals consulted cites exclusively Polish and Western titles. Taking something like the author’s own position on this, one could claim that the very broadly ventilated issues relating to Modernism would apply to all the new East European states in like manner. Much is made of Polish international contacts, the membership of the CIAM (Congress International d’Architecture Moderne)andthepersonalrelationshipsbetweenitsmembersandLeCorbusier in particular; but all this is far from sufficient to justify the exclusion of Poland from the title. SEER, 99, 3, JULY 2021 562 The use of ‘the term ‘brokers’ in the book’s title is intended ‘to evoke a group at the interface of state and society, a group which negotiated Modernity from a central position as a new reality and a desirable goal’. Martin Kohlrausch holds that ‘the architects [in Poland] were ‘almost sought out by society as epitomes of modernity’ (pp. 25, 26). Indeed, architectural Modernism appeared to suit the new and aspiring post-1918 nation states particularly well, with Warsaw appearing especially ‘mouldable’ (p. 209), especially when the ‘Plan Warszawa Funkjonalna’ was formulated in the early 1930s. Kohlrausch studiously avoids what one may call a monographic approach: there is no comprehensive, detailed and rounded treatment of the issues. There are patches of greater detail, for example, on the workings of state patronage, on the processes of professionalization, on journals and on the planning for Warsaw which includes information about the relatively benevolent German regime during World War One. Kohlrausch eschews any kind of a more detailed biographical approach, stressing, instead, the task of evaluating group work, chiefly by Syrkus, Lachert and Brukalski. Furthermore, he underlines that the book is not about buildings as such, though there are good number of illustrations, for example of the 1929 Poznań Exhibition, which have so far not been overused. Furthermore, the author did not see it as his task to take on board recent Polish historical investigations. Regarding the crucial question as to who and what exactly should come under Modernist architecture it appears that Kohlrausch is interested only in the most narrowly circumscribed circle of International Style protagonists. How then does one characterize the author’s approach? It consists chiefly of an array of general perceptions, conducted freely and discursively from a seemingly elevated position, which is meant to...

This Thing of Darkness: Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible in Stalin's Russia by Neuberger Joan (review)

SEER, 98, 2, APRIL 2020 370 Elphick finds in the music, his Weinberg emerges as a resilient figure. Like Witold Lutosławski, a Polish contemporary Weinberg reportedly considered ‘one of the greatest musicians of our century’ (p. 203), Weinberg helps to exemplify the diversity of post-traumatic aftermaths behind the Iron Curtain. Not to suggest Elphick’s study does not capture the intensity of Weinberg’s life experiences. The fifth and most poignant chapter in the book, ‘Return and Retreat’, documents the composer’s single return visit to Poland as part of a Soviet delegation attending the 1966 Warsaw Autumn Festival. Two body blows ‘shattered his illusions of his lost homeland’ (p. 175) on this trip: learning the exact fate of his sister and parents (who perished in the Trawniki labour camp), and being shunned by most Polish composers, who knew little of his work. The former is tragic, the latter ironic. At the time of Weinberg’s visit, many Polish composers were beginning to consider a rapprochement between the avantgarde experimentation of their post-Stalinist period and earlier traditions. The fruits of Weinberg’s reactionary modernism offered templates for such music — as the composer himself could be read to suggest, albeit inadvertently, in his ‘Word to My Polish Friends’ (1969), which Elphick translates in full (pp. 271–73). Weinberg suggested that ‘common ideals and similar creative tasks’ for Polish and Russian composers amount to a ‘solidarity of the artists’ — ‘a great force in our complex but remarkable era’ (p. 203). Elphick’s fine study invites one to revaluate such complex commonalities. Royal Northern College of Music Nicholas Reyland Neuberger, Joan. This Thing of Darkness: Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY and London, 2019. xvii + 404 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $48.95: £40.00. Joan Neuberger notes that, at least in the United States, Sergei Eizenshtein’s Ivan the Terrible ‘has been relegated, for the most part, to the museum of film studies: acknowledged as a masterpiece but rarely watched in general film history classes’. One of her objectives in writing this book is to make Ivan ‘watchable and watched again’ (p. 7). If inclusion into an American film history course is an indicator of success to the author, then her criteria for evaluating the impact of a film is surely in dire need of reconsideration. As for making the movie ‘watched again’, in this case the aim of an academic monograph, however worthy, certainly exceeds its possible reach. The author need not overly worry about the continuing reception of Ivan the Terrible, because for filmgoers interested in Eizenshtein’s oeuvre, or more generally, Russianlanguage films of the Soviet era, Ivan the Terrible remains vital. REVIEWS 371 Despite the rather maladroitly expressed goals of the author, the fine monograph under review is an excellent addition to both Eizenshtein studies and to studies of Stalin-era Soviet films. If only Neuberger had revised much of her overwritten and repetitive introduction, though. Neuberger spends rather too much time engaging in long historiographical asides on the reception of the film by various scholars which really belong in the endnotes. Nor does she have to demonstrate to anyone the seminal, ‘radical’ qualities of either Ivan the Terrible, or its director; generations of moviegoers and films scholars have long celebrated the film as a masterpiece. Ivan the Terrible (part one released in 1945; part two in 1958; part three was unfinished at Eizenshtein’s death in 1948) is an extraordinary film; the story of its production, during the Second World War is itself astonishing. With the Soviet Union facing a war of extermination against the Germans, Eizenshtein was in Kazakhstan working hard to complete his study of the reign of Ivan IV. Alternatively, the film can be seen as his attempt to understand Stalin’s violent transformations of Soviet society. Eizenshtein’s collaboration in creating Ivan with figures such as Sergei Prokof´ev constitutes merely an aspect of the complex vicissitudes of the production process, from literary scenario to ‘director’s script’ to filming and laborious editing, splendidly detailed by the author in her first chapter, ‘The Potholed Path’. The remaining chapters of the book analyse...

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

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.

Making New Music in Cold War Poland. The Warsaw Autumn Festival, 1956–1968

Making New Music in Cold War Poland. The Warsaw Autumn Festival, 1956–1968

The Need for Otherness: Hispanic Music at ‘Warsaw Autumn’

In 2008, the 51st International Festival of Contemporary Music ‘Warsaw Autumn’ featured music by Spanish, Portuguese, and Hispanic-Luso American composers, the largest review of this music that has ever taken place in Poland. More than half of the 82 composers selected came from the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal) and Latin-American countries (Mexico, Argentina, Cuba, Ecuador, Chile and Brazil). The festival organisers also invited several orchestras and ensembles from Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking regions. In their descriptions, the festival’s organisers often referred to Hispanic cultures as ‘exotic’, ‘mysterious’, ‘dynamic’, ‘sensual’, and ‘spiritual’. In this article, I analyse how this music was contextualised, and how the notion of music from a ‘nation’ was constructed there, by means of the programme book of the festival, press reviews, and committee reports. I examine discourses accompanying the performances, the decision-making process within the repertoire committee, the collaboration with various national agencies, and other institutions funding the presence of Spanish and Hispanic-Luso American music. Finally, I look at the consequences and implications of such a broad exposure.

Cornelius Cardew behind the Iron Curtain

The article considers the reception of Cornelius Cardew’s music at the Warsaw Autumn festival between 1960 and 1970. At that time, the state-backed festival—organized since 1956 in the capital of the People’s Republic of Poland—was considered to be an important and liberal showcase of European avant-garde from both sides of the Iron Curtain. In the article, I primarily look at the consequences of programming Cardew’s music at the festival held in a country belonging to the Eastern Block of Soviet Satellite States. I discuss further, how music critics and polish intellectuals interpreted Cardew’s music, especially his Treatise, and The Great Learning, and condemned it for their allegedly communist, pro-Chinese overtones, and explicit Maoist and Confucianist references. The rejection of Cardew’s music in Poland resulted from a bias towards his socialist, collective, and emancipatory tendencies expressed by his music. The article is based on my archival research conducted in the archive of the Polish Composers Union, the Warsaw Autumn archive, Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel and Deutsches Polen - Institute in Darmstadt.

Making New Music in Cold War Poland: The Warsaw Autumn Festival, 1956–1968 by Lisa Jakelski

Reviewed by: Making New Music in Cold War Poland: The Warsaw Autumn Festival, 1956–1968 by Lisa Jakelski Siel Agugliaro Making New Music in Cold War Poland: The Warsaw Autumn Festival, 1956–1968. By Lisa Jakelski. (California Studies in 20th-Century Music.) Oakland: University of California Press, 2017. [xv, 245 p. ISBN 9780520292543 (hardcover), $65; ISBN 9780520966031 (e-book), $65.] Illustrations, music examples, tables, notes, bibliography, index. In recent years, scholars have devoted a great deal of attention to European festivals of contemporary music during the Cold War, including the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in Darmstadt (Martin Iddon, New Music at Darmstadt: Nono, Stockhausen, Cage, and Boulez [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013]), the Music Now concert series in London (Benjamin Piekut, "Indeterminacy, Free Improvisation, and the Mixed Avant-Garde: Experimental Music in London, 1965–1975," Journal of the American Musicological Society 67, no. 3 [2014]: 769–823), and the Biennale di Venezia (Harriet Boyd-Bennett, Opera in Postwar Venice: Cultural Politics and the Avant-Garde [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018]). Lisa Jakelski's book Making New Music in Cold War Poland effectively complements this growing scholarship by considering another, lesser-examined festival operating in the Eastern Bloc: the Warsaw Autumn Festival. While this festival still occurs today—it recently celebrated its sixtieth anniversary—Jakelski considers only the years between the festival's foundation in 1956 through 1968. During this period, the Warsaw Autumn worked not only as a site for the exercise of cultural diplomacy but also as a hub of a larger "network of people, involved with the composition, performance, dissemination, and reception of contemporary art music" (p. 5). As part of such network, Jakelski argues, an international group of composers and audiences contributed to a shared definition of musical modernism, well beyond the dichotomous division be tween Western modernism and socialist realism inspired by contemporary Cold War political discourse. The invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, however, dissolved the impression of the Warsaw Autumn as a politically neutral space, ultimately transforming the festival's original cultural purpose, as Jakelski briefly discusses in the epilogue to the volume. The book is articulated in two sections. In the first, Jakelski examines the negotiations that led to the creation of the Warsaw Autumn and defined its institutional agenda during its first decade. In the second, she considers the festival in the international context and discusses the processes of cultural exchange performed in Warsaw by audiences, composers, and performers. Chapter 1 examines the elements of continuity and change between the Warsaw Autumn Festival and previous festivals organized in the country. At the end of the war, state cultural investments led to the construction of new performing venues and to the formation or reestablishment of orchestras, opera companies, and other music ensembles. The Festival of Polish Music (held in 1951 and 1955)—a massive event involving numerous cities over eight months—was intended by the Polish United Workers' Party (Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza) to be a tool for social control and for the development and promotion of a socialist-realist aesthetic. But the death of Joseph Stalin and the ensuing Thaw created the need for a cultural institution that could increase Poland's visibility on an international level. Leaders of [End Page 290] both the Workers' Party and the Polish Composers' Union (Zwia˛zek Kompozytorów Polskich, or ZKP), were pushing in this direction, but for very different reasons. While the party was interested in the creation of a "site for cultural diplomacy" (p. 19), younger ZKP members, such as composers Tadeusz Baird and Kazimierz Serocki, were eager to overcome years of isolation and reconnect with international musical trends (and with the Western avant-garde in particular). Inaugurated in 1956 in lieu of the old Festival of Polish Music, the Warsaw Autumn Festival was planned to respond to these different—and often discordant—goals. As Jakelski explains in chapter 2, the Warsaw Autumn was conceived as an international festival of contemporary music presenting works and performers from both socialist and capitalist countries. Such a pluralistic approach to music programming entailed a vision of the festival as an "empty frame" (p. 36)— that is, as a politically neutral space in which different declinations...

Review: Making New Music in Cold War Poland: The Warsaw Autumn Festival, 1956–1968, by Lisa Jakelski

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 …

Lisa Jakelski, Making New Music in Cold War Poland. The Warsaw Autumn Festival, 1956–1968, Oakland 2017

Recenzja książki: Lisa Jakelski, Making New Music in Cold War Poland. The Warsaw Autumn Festival, 1956–1968, Oakland 2017

Muzički festivali kao odraz kulturne politike tokom hladnog rata - od Varšavske jeseni do Muzičkog bijenala Zagreb

Muzički festivali kao odraz kulturne politike tokom hladnog rata - od Varšavske jeseni do Muzičkog bijenala Zagreb

The Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music Transformations of Programming Policies

Abstract The present paper surveys the history of the Warsaw Autumn festival focusing on changes in the Festival programming. I discuss the circumstances of organising a cyclic contemporary music festival of international status in Poland. I point out the relations between programming policies and the current political situation, which in the early years of the Festival forced organisers to maintain balance between Western and Soviet music as well as the music from the so-called “people’s democracies” (i.e. the Soviet bloc). Initial strong emphasis on the presentation of 20th-century classics was gradually replaced by an attempt to reflect different tendencies and new phenomena, also those combining music with other arts. Despite changes and adjustments in the programming policy, the central aim of the Festival’s founders – that of presenting contemporary music in all its diversity, without overdue emphasis on any particular trend – has consistently been pursued. The idea of introducing leitmotifs, different for each Festival edition (such as: music involving human voice, mainly electronic, etc.) – is not inconsistent with this general aim since the selected works represent different aesthetics, and the “main theme” is not the only topic of any given edition of the Warsaw Autumn.

“It is my world, to which you are invited…”. Composers’ self-reflection in the programme books of the Warsaw Autumn (1999–2016)

Abstract Although we usually treat writing and speaking about music as a secondary activity in relation to creation and performance, discourse about the latest compositional output is now gaining considerable independence. The need for creative artists to work together with institutions and with a whole network of mediators means that in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, verbal discourse has played even a key role, and the search for a nuanced and original language that might attract potential listeners to new repertoire is proving a serious challenge. For contemporary music, festivals remain the most important – and at times almost the only – forum enabling works to exist in the social awareness. Hence an important area in which discourse linked to contemporary music is shaped consists of festival books and composers’ comments on their works. The latter help composers to forge their own image, at the same time helping or hindering the creation of an additional plane of understanding with potential listeners. This text represents an attempt to distinguish the main thematic areas to appear in composers’ self-reflection on the pages of the programme books of the “Warsaw Autumn” International Festival of Contemporary Music from 1999 to 2016, when Tadeusz Wielecki was appointed director of the festival. We will find here remarks on inspiration, creative process and musical language, as well as technology, nature and modes of listening. Notions taken from physics, chemistry and biology also frequently enter descriptions of music, and art becomes a sort of commentary to modern science. Finally, a separate strand consists of notes in which composers not so much shed light on the techniques they use or build contexts for their works, but rather seek to create plays on words as an alternative to musical compositions. From a broader perspective, analysis of composers’ comments may help us to answer the question as to how such comments shape the plane of communication with potential listeners, what they tell us about discourse on the subject of new music, and the extent to which they expand the categories of its interpretation.

Between Connotation and Denotation. Posters Announcing the Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music in 1956-2015

Abstract The posters that accompany the successive Warsaw Autumn Festival editions are a unique collection of works, mostly of outstanding quality. One might venture the thesis that their artistic value – living up to the high demands of the topic – exceeds the typical standards of representation characteristic of popular art. Formally speaking, they abandon the conventions of egalitarian iconographic art in favour of a more elite-oriented visual formula, addressed to a competent audience knowledgeable about contemporary music and its qualities. The authors of these WA posters include many artists associated with the Polish school, such as Jan Lenica, Jan Młodożeniec, Julian Pałka, Waldemar Świerzy, Henryk Tomaszewski, and Wojciech Zamecznik. Their graphic representations of the achievements of the musical avant-garde do not, however, situate this poster series within the well-sanctioned canon of the “Polish poster school”, mostly associated with the film and theatre – generally considered as more “democratic” and entertainment-oriented disciplines of art. The WA posters point to an evident polarisation of visual culture, corresponding to the division between high and low culture and between two types of audiences, differing in expectations. These posters form a largely autonomous collection and may be viewed as supplementary to the music they refer to, which determined the choice of expressive means appropriate to this topic. The whole collection is a display of its authors’ evident skills and their ability to live up to the high demands placed on these works. The task of translating one medium into another (in this case – a visual one) requires intellectual discipline. Some kind of (at least formal) similarity between the two media needs to be discovered, and shared semantic elements ought to be traced. On the verbal level, such similarities are presented in terms of related distinctive features, ways of describing phenomena, and intuitions. The 19th-century Romantic concept of the correspondance des arts was based on similar assumptions. The Romantics attempted to systematise the emotions accompanying the experience of different arts, looking for affinities and similar form-building strategies.

The Warsaw Autumn: the Origin and the Beginnings

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Bohdan Wodiczko’s Programming Policies at Warsaw Philharmonic (1955-1958). Toward the Warsaw Autumn.

Abstract As the managing and artistic director of Warsaw Philharmonic in 1955-58, Bohdan Wodiczko introduced an innovative programming policy which re-oriented the Philharmonic’s repertoire toward 20th-century classics and focused on the links between new music and that of other historical periods. The aim was to create a vast sonosphere of a “musical inter-age” (S. Kisielewski after M. Wańkowicz) encompassing radically different styles and genres and significantly transforming the axiology of the musical art. Wodiczko’s novel programming, though largely concentrating on the already waning neo-Classicism, laid the foundations for the phenomenon of the Warsaw Autumn and was a harbinger of the political-cultural thaw that would come after October 1956. This paper examines Wodiczko’s programming revolution in its political context, as well as the critical reception of Warsaw Philharmonic concerts, with particular emphasis on the aesthetic disputes arising around those composers whose works provoked the greatest controversies: Igor Stravinsky and Carl Orff.

From Restrictions to Freedom The Perilous Path to the First Warsaw Autumn Festival

Abstract The genesis of the Warsaw Autumn Festival was fraught with both potential and real complications. Musical life in Poland at the end of the first postwar decade was in a state of flux, if not turmoil, as ideological disagreements and material complications contributed to an atmosphere of dismay and distrust among musicians and authorities. This paper provides insight into the context in which the Festival’s organizers were operating, particularly the shortcomings of musical life in mid-decade that threatened to derail the Festival before it even began.

Reception of the Warsaw Autumn Festival in Lithuania: Cultural Discourse and Political Context

AbstractThis article aims to offer a broader understanding of the Lithuanian reception of the Warsaw Autumn festival in relation to the modernisation of national music in Lithuania since the late 1950s – early 1960s. Based on a micro-historical and comparative approach to the network of individuals and events, it is intended to explore the shifts of reception through analysis of musical criticism, composers’ work and discourse, and artistic exchange between the Lithuanian and Polish new music scenes. The author discusses the cultural and political factors which affected the changing role of the Warsaw Autumn festival and its impact on the modernisation processes in Lithuanian music. In addition, the asymmetries of mutual understanding and interests between the Polish and Lithuanian music cultures have been highlighted both during the Cold War and the post-communist transformation periods.