The Poetics of Unism in Music

Zygmunt Krauze is the founder of a new current in art: unistic (unitary) music. He developed this concept in the first period of his artistic work, inspired by the unistic paintings of Władysław Strzemiński. Traces of this style are also detectable in Krauze’s later post-unistic works. Unistic music is characterised by a paradoxical unity in diversity. Most of the composer’s statements collected in this paper refer to specific features of unism in music. Other, more general comments concern the essence of music, the composer’s personal stance, the creative process, the autonomy of the composer, the audience and the performers, etc. Two longer texts by Zygmunt Krauze have been quoted in full. One can be considered as a unistic manifesto, while the other is a kind of personal credo.