Tom 20 (2022): Zeszyt 1 (December 2022)

Nadia Boulanger and Her Role in Polish Music – in the Light of Zygmunt Mycielski–s Writings

Zygmunt Mycielski (1907–1987), a composer and writer on music, was one of the pupils of Nadia Boulanger (1887–1979). In his writings he often stressed the role which this eminent French teacher played in the development of a whole generation of Polish (and not only Polish) composers. Not only did Mycielski owe a lot to her personally, but he also clearly saw the significance of her teaching to the further fate of Polish music. He remained her friend, introduced her to Poland, and often mentioned both his education under her wings and the importance of her teaching. The article presents the figure and role of Nadia Boulanger in the light of the writings of Zygmunt Mycielski.

Female ballet composers. A Reconnaissance

While Polish theoretical and musicological reflection seems to treat ballet music as a poor relation, ballet works composed by women appear as a complete tabula rasa. The present author decided to contribute to filling it by analysing works of Polish female composers of the 20^th and 21^st centuries. Statistical calculations based on three databases including Polish Music Information Centre (POLMIC), polishstage. pl (e-teatr) and taniecpolska.pl portals as well as own research have revealed 35 Polish female composers of the 20^thand 21^st centuries have written at least one or more works whose subtitles contain the words “ballet” or “ballet music” or have been composed particularly for a dance theatre, pantomime or dance performance. Out of 122 compositions, twenty ballets have not been staged. The works composed for other types of “dance shows” were written in collaboration with specific choreographers, therefore they have all been staged, except for three compositions. The first Polish female composer to write ballet music was Anna Maria Klechniowska. Her two earliest ballets, Bilitis and Juria were composed in the interwar period, and the third one titled Fantasma in 1964. The most successful female composer was Jadwiga Szajna-Lewandowska who composed ballets for children. Her most popular work was ballet Pinokio [Pinocchio]. Another question refers to stage productions of ballets composed by women. Eighteen of the ballets staged were choreographed by men, and fourteen by women. In the case of music composed strictly for “dance shows” (dance theatre, pantomime or dance performance) female choreographers prevail (47): only twelve male choreographers decided to collaborate with a female composer. Two performances were the result of collaborative work. The findings to date constitute a point of departure for further research into music composed “for dance” (ballet, pantomime, dance theatre and dance performances).

Through Play to Sound Sources—A Contribution to Research ofLidia Zielińska’s Sound Installations

Sound installations have been present in Polish music since the 1960s when the first “spatial-musical compositions” were presented by Zygmunt Krauze. His innovative activities hadn’t found followers in the Polish musical community for quite a while, but in the 1980s composers started to be more and more interested in multimedia forms engaging recipients into an active participation. Among these artists was Lidia Zielińska—a composer willingly exploring the sonoristic possibilities of both traditional instruments and electroacoustic ones. A big importance into the formation of her individual composition language was getting familiar with Raymond Murray Schafer’s ideas, meetings with this Canadian composer and promoting his thought into the polish community. An important current of her creative activities were also the actions focused on children. All these mentioned aspects can be seen in her installations that—according to the assumptions of Łukasz Guzek, a researcher of 20^th and 21^st-century art—inextricably combine the questions of space and presence. In terms of sound, these projects and not-installation Zielińska’s creations merge into a coherent whole: a space to explore problems related to sound’s essence and sources, as well as acoustic ecology. This article describes in more detail the following sound installations of Lidia Zielińska, including their composition assumptions and way of realizing the elements characterising the installation forms: Muzyka potencjalna [nr 1]. Spiskowa teoria dźwięku (1988), Projekt dla końca korytarza (1994), Alles gab’s schon mal/Wszystko już było (2006), Lutosławski DIY (2013), Plasterki muzyki (2013), Looks Chinese, Sounds Polish (2013) and Polish Sonorities (2014).

Karol Szymanowski’s Little Solemn Litany

Musical Heritage, Alterity, and Transnational Migration: Wanda Landowska’s Musical Lives

In 1925 Wanda Landowska bought property in the genteel town of Saint-Leu-la-Forêt, northwest of Paris, and built, between 1926 and 1927, “a temple to music” in her garden. Famous across the musical world as a performer, composer, teacher, consultant and scholar, Landowska was ready to find a home for her gynocentric household after decades of cross-border movement. She had lived in Warsaw, Paris and Berlin, and was traveling extensively through Europe, the Middle East, Argentine and the United States. Throughout all her years of mobility, however, Landowska carried with her a constant sense of musical heritage to be preserved, cherished, and revived through performance and creation, through study and through joyful conviviality. She assembled a distinguished library and instrument collection that included such prized items as Chopin’s upright piano that he had used in Mallorca in 1838. Yet what Landowska had envisaged as her “ forever home” was overrun by Nazi plunderers in 1940 who stole her belongings as Landowska moved, once more, to save her life—this time across the Atlantic, to New York where she arrived on the day after Pearl Harbor. Here, too, her deep investment in a transnational musical heritage became a lodestone that guided her through exile. I address the complex issue of musical heritage in the musical lives of Wanda Landowska as it relates to matters of identity, gender, race, displacement, and creativity. By engaging caringly with the core values of a displaced woman-identified, queer musician of Jewish Polish descent, I propose to rethink how musical heritage might be thought from Landowska’s unique and vulnerable positionality.

Sara Levy and Her Music Collection. Keyboard Concertos by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach from the National Library ofPoland The paper discusses musical sources kept in the National Library of Poland, namely a collection of handwritten copies of ten keyboard concertos by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, made by Georg Amft based on materials that originated from the music collections of Sara Levy and Zippora Wulff. This paper primarily focuses on the Concerto in A Minor Wq 26. Amft’s copy of that piece was likely made based on a Bach’s autograph kept in the Royal Library in Berlin (Königliche Bibliothek). Seeing as Amft’s Vorlage is now lost, the Warsaw document appears to be an important indirect source for an early version of Wq 26.

19^th-century Warsaw Salons — “Institutions” ofCulture or Sophisticated Chambers?

Warsaw’s social and cultural life in the 19^th century was focused in its social form — mainly for political reasons — around the institution of the salon. This forgotten phenomenon, seen today as a bit grotesque, became so popular that salon regulars could turn up at a different house every evening. Interestingly, the ringleaders of this form of social activity were women, and we need to bear in mind that we are dealing with a phenomenon occurring over a century before universal franchise.

The aim of the article is to demonstrate the diversity of cultural topics, particularly those relating to music, tackled by salon society gathered in private homes. Incidentally, it should be noted that two main paths of development can be discerned in the social life of the period: official, associated with the Russian authorities, and salon-related, within which national and patriotic themes played a significant role. Given the activity of the salons of, among others, Katarzyna Lewocka, Nina Łuszczewska and Paulina Wilkońska, this goal is particularly clearly associated with women.

The author of the article provides a general characterisation of salon life, its main trends and issues debated, and discusses the main areas of activity, using selected examples.

Female composers occupy and important and visible place in Poland’s contemporary musical culture, which they co-create thanks to their versatile activity (creative, organisational, didactic). They include Katarzyna Kwiecień-Długosz (b. 1978), a composer from Zielona Góra with a substantial oeuvre (67 works), who for some time has devoted herself to carillon music (e.g. Epitafium for Paweł Adamowicz). Kwiecień-Długosz has an excellent compositional technique and is a master of the form, the structure of which is based on a fluctuation of tensions and releases easily discernible to the listeners. For eighteen years composing has been a piece of artistic reportage from her life, which is signalled in three scenes from her oeuvre. The first—Inclinations — suggests the artist’s predilection for some musical-technical issues (including “translating” techniques, e.g. Memories from VN for cello and piano). The second — Reflections — presents the therapeutic objective of the composed music, seemingly defined in the titles and the author’s commentary, but opening itself up to the listener in a very emotional layer (e.g. Punctum for string orchestra). The third — Understatements — reveals the composer’s introvert and contemplative nature (e.g. Ad fontes for carillon). Katarzyna Kwiecień-Długosz is the initiator and organiser of a series of chamber academic concerts presenting the oeuvres of artists from the University of Zielona Góra, Poznań Academy of Music and Szczecin Academy of Art. She includes her students from the University of Zielona Góra in this type of activity, thus safeguarding further development of the musical culture.

In the work of Hanna Kulenty, a string quartet appears as a significant form of artistic expression. Its successive incarnations (6 quartets created in 1983-2014) illustrate the evolution of the musical language of composers, her approach to the problem of form, time, space, and sound. The article is an attempt to capture the idiomatic features of this music, presented in the context of Bakhtin’s theory of genre as a representative of creative memory, and to indicate the place of quartets in contemporary chamber music by Polish composers.

Erinnerung an Danzig—Women in the Musical Culture ofDanzig in the First Halfofthe 20^th Century in the Polish Academy ofScienc-es Gdańsk Library Collection

The pre-war musical culture in Gdańsk / Danzig developed mainly in the Gdańska, kultura muzyczna Gdańska environment of German-speaking Gdańsk residents. After World War II, traces of this musical life remained to a limited extent in the collections of the Polish Academy of Sciences in the Gdańsk Library. The preserved materials relating to the pre-war period, apart from books and scientific publications, include documents of everyday life, as well as scores. The testimonies of female musical activity in the city have survived to our times in these collections. In this article, I present the profiles of three women - composers, teachers and performers, who, in the light of the collected materials, can certainly be said to be significant figures in the pre-war musical and social life of Gdańsk. They are: Martha Re-incke, Ella Mertins and Lotte Prins. Their creativity and artistic activity fit into the wider historical perspective of the city, they are also an excellent contribution to the study of social moods for which musical culture was of fundamental importance.

“I don’t like it.” That Is Social Issues in the Work of Lidia Zielińska

Lidia Zielińska is said to be “a master of combining classical instruments with electronics”, but it would be equally appropriate to say that for several years she has also been a master of combining/associating her compositions with important social problems such: hate speech, pollution and degradation of the planet, failure to respect woman’s rights, dividing societies for political reasons or the issue of leaving, death taking its toll with increasing intensity recently. This article concerns a work I do not like it by Lidia Zielińska from 2018, which touches on a particularly difficult social problem, which is the growing aggression spreading, among others, in social media, having tragic consequences in the form of suicides of young people, stigmatized, excluded and ridiculed by their peers. The composer, deeply moved by this problem, wants to develop, in young people, but also in society in general, the awareness of the processes involved in the emergence of aggression, hatred and the awareness of what effects they can cause.

Zofia Lissa and Vladimir Ivannikov — A Polish Musicologist and Soviet Composer Fighting Together for a New, Better Order

Zofia Lissa’s biography contains many well-documented facts, but there are also numerous gaps. These are periods described the least in the known sources: childhood (including her stay in Austria during the First World War) as well as the escape and first months after leaving Lviv (following Germany’s attack on the USSR in 1941). Let us hope that material that will enable us to fill these gaps will be found. However, in addition to complete gaps there is also a lot of incomplete information. It concerns, for example, the period Lissa spent in Moscow. There are more sources dealing with that time, but they have not been studied in detail and this has paved the way for sensational rumours. The present article is an attempt to disperse the fog and clear the atmosphere of mystery surrounding the matter.

The thesis of the article is as follows: throughout her stay in Moscow Lissa, with her customary naivety, worked as best as she could for the benefit of Polish music. Her interests were wide-ranging — from early to contemporary music, with the latter being a subject with which she was particularly familiar. In addition to promoting professional music, Lissa tackled questions relating to the dissemination of music in general. She believed that as a musicologist she had a mission and that the best way to accomplish it was to collaborate closely with composers who would “implement” her guidelines in their music. In this context Lissa’s return to Poland may seem as an attempt to put similar ideas into practice on a much broader scale: from then on she would no longer represent herself but the entire Polish musicology, and one composer would be replaced by the entire Polish Composers’ Union.