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

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.