Awangarda: Tradition and Modernity in Postwar Polish Music 9780520975422

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Awangarda

Awangarda Tradition and Modernity in Postwar Polish Music

Lisa Cooper Vest

UNIVERSIT Y OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press Oakland, California © 2021 by Lisa Cooper Vest Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Vest, Lisa Cooper, author. Title: Awangarda : tradition and modernity in postwar Polish music /   Lisa Vest. Description: Oakland : University of California Press, 2020. |  Series: California studies in 20th-century music ; 28 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2020016912 (print) | lccn 2020016913 (ebook) |   isbn 9780520344242 (cloth) | isbn 9780520975422 (epub) Subjects: lcsh: Music—Poland—20th century—History and criticism. |   Avant-garde (Music)—Poland—History—20th century. Classification: lcc ml297.5 .v47 2020 (print) | lcc ml297.5 (ebook) |   ddc 780.9438/0904—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020016912 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020016913 Manufactured in the United States of America 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

In loving memory of my mother, Evelyn Cooper

c onte nts

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments

ix xi

Introduction

1

1. Backwardness (Zaległość): Defining Musical Modernity in Poland before and after World War II

11

2. Lack (Brak): The Shifting Status of the Artist-Intellectual Class during the Thaw

35

3. The Dissemination of Culture (Upowszechnienie kultury): Rebuilding Elite Institutions and Educating Elite Audiences

63

4. Lag (Opóźnienie): Genius Construction and Looking Back to Move Forward

88

5. Modernity (Nowoczesność): Bogusław Schäffer and the Cult of the New

117

6. Awangarda: The Polish Avant-Garde as Tradition

155

7. Backward and Forward: The Polish Avant-Garde as Progress

190

Notes Bibliography Index

201 239 255

illustration s

1. "Mapa wyjazdów," (1948).  25 2. Zygmunt Mycielski, Silesian Overture (Uwertura śląska) (1948; published 1950).  39 3. Zbigniew Turski, Symphony no. 2, “Olympic” (1948; published 1967), page 8.  40 4. Zbigniew Turski, Symphony no. 2, “Olympic” (1948; published 1967), page 87.  41 5. Włodzimierz Kotoński, Etude for a Single Cymbal Stroke (Etiuda na jedno uderzenie w talerz) (1959; published 1963), opening pages.  72 6a and 6b. Scenes from A Stroll through Old Town (Spacerek staromiejski) (1958; dir. Andrzej Munk).  76 7. Ruch Muzyczny 1, no. 10 (1957), page 4.  81 8. Ruch Muzyczny 1, no. 10 (1957), page 1.  82 9. Witold Lutosławski, Funeral Music (Muzyka żałobna) (1958), opening.  108 10. Witold Lutosławski, Funeral Music (Muzyka żałobna) (1958), pages 8–9.  109 11. Bogusław Schäffer, New Music: Problems in Contemporary Compositional Technique (Nowa muzyka: problemy współczesnej techniki kompozytorskiej) (1958).  129 12a and 12b. Bogusław Schäffer, Quattro movimenti (1957; published 1960), pages 45 and 60.  134 13. Bogusław Schäffer, Tertium datur (1958; published 1962), Movement 2, harpsichord score for Variation 5.  137 14. Bogusław Schäffer, Monosonata (1959; published 1960), opening bars.  139 ix

x     illustrations

15. Bogusław Schäffer, Monosonata (1959; published 1960), distribution of performers.  140 16. Bogusław Schäffer, Monosonata (1959; published 1960), Variation 1.  141 17. Bogusław Schäffer, Monosonata (1959; published 1960), Variations 15 and 16.  142 18. Bogusław Schäffer, Monosonata (1959; published 1960), Variation 29.  145 19. Henryk Mikołaj Górecki, Symphony no. 1, “1959” (1959; published 1961), opening page.  161 2 0. Krzysztof Penderecki, Strophes (Strofy) (1959; published 1960), pages 10–11.  163 21. Henryk Mikołaj Górecki, Scontri (1960), Section 6.  172 22. Krzysztof Penderecki, Dimensions of Time and Silence (Wymiary czasu i ciszy) (1960/61; published 1962), page 7.  174 23. Bogusław Schäffer, Concerto per sei e tre (1960; published 1963), page 81.  186 24. Tadeusz Baird, Etude for vocal orchestra, percussion, and piano (Etiuda na orkiestrę wokalną, perkusję i fortepian) (1962), page 11.  187 25. Henryk Mikołaj Górecki, Elementi (1962), page 18.  187 26. Bogusław Schäffer, nonstop (1960; published 1964).  192

ack nowle d gm en ts

In many ways, this is a book about time, and about the many different ways that individuals may experience and respond to time’s passage. It seems fitting, then, to think back upon the twelve-year period during which I worked on this project. This span of more than a decade was a season of great personal change for me, including the death of my mother, multiple moves across two countries and four states, the completion of my PhD, and the start of a new job. In the face of so much change, time sometimes seemed to move very quickly—too quickly—and sometimes to creep forward in stretches of monotony and stagnation. It was only with the financial, intellectual, and emotional support of many institutions and individuals that I was able to develop my ideas, complete my research, and write this project. I began my study of Polish music, history, and language at Indiana University, where I had been encouraged to apply by my undergraduate mentors, Jan Wubbena and Shirley Forbes Thomas, without whom I would never have imagined attending graduate school or studying musicology. At Indiana University, the faculty of the Musicology Department and the affiliate faculty of the Russian and East European Institute challenged me to think critically about music in historical context. Halina Goldberg recognized something in me when I arrived in Bloomington as a green first-year graduate student. She gave me space to ask questions that were too big, too messy, and she encouraged me to keep going back to the sources, allowing them to lead me forward. Without her guidance, I never would have taken on such an ambitious dissertation project. J. Peter Burkholder, whose vast musical knowledge is only matched by his scholarly and personal generosity, listened to so much music and analyzed scores with me, and he urged me to contextualize postwar Polish xi

xii     acknowledgments

composers within a broader narrative of twentieth-century music. Phil Ford always challenged me to move beyond details to the bigger picture, and I certainly would not have found the path from the dissertation to this book’s narrative framework without his challenge. With Padraic Kenney I have discussed Polish history, and especially Polish interpretations and critiques of Soviet ideologies, and I am grateful for his insights. Daniel Melamed’s rigorous work with primary sources influenced my own methods very clearly, and Jane Fulcher’s perceptive questions about artists’ relationships to political power have energized my own investigations of Polish composers working under communism. In working on my dissertation project, my research and writing were supported by several institutional fellowships. First, in 2009–2010, I was able to complete my initial research with the support of the Fulbright-Hays Program, where I also benefitted from my affiliation with the Institute of Musicology at the University of Warsaw. Professors Zbigniew Skowron and Sławomira Żerańska-Kominek supported my work, arranging introductions, offering advice, and discussing my findings. At the headquarters of the Polish Composers’ Union (Związek Kompozytorów Polskich), union president Mieczysław Kominek, assistant director Izabela Zymer and archivist Beata Dźwigaj granted me full access to the union’s archival materials and to the extensive library of books, scores, and recordings. When I was working at the Archive of Twentieth-Century Polish Composers at the Library of the University of Warsaw, director Piotr Maculewicz and the archivist-librarians Magdalena Borowiec, Elżbieta Jasińska-Jędrosz, and Barbara Kalinowska were endlessly supportive, not only of my work, but also of my well-being during my stay. At Polish Radio, Waldemar Listowski, the director of the Recordings Archive, granted me access to a wide variety of rare recordings; I am also grateful to Paulina Zygier in facilitating my contacts with Polish Radio. The archivists and the director of the Center of Documentation (Ośrodek Dokumentacji) at Polish Television, Tomasz Bujak, allowed me access to archival materials related to Polish Radio. In addition, I had assistance from many archivists at the Archive of New Documents (Archiwum Akt Nowych), at the National Archive in Kraków (Archiwum Narodowe w Krakowie), and at the Annex of the Kraków National Archive, housed in Spytkowice. While I was in Poland, I had the great privilege to meet and speak with a number of the people whose names appear in my study. I learned so much from my interviews with Ludwik Erhardt, Alina Sawicka-Baird, Włodzimierz Kotoński, and Professors Michał Bristiger, Jan Stęszewski, and Mieczysław Tomaszewski. I want to extend particular thanks to the late Eugeniusz Rudnik, who generously met with me a number of times at the headquarters of Polish Radio, discussing his years as an engineer and composer at the Experimental Studio there, and even giving me tours of the facilities. Mr. Rudnik allowed me access to his private archive of materials, without which I would not have been able to write my case study of the studio in chapter 3. I am also extremely thankful to Bolesław Błaszczyk, who

acknowledgments    xiii

introduced me to Mr. Rudnik and who also invited me into his home to talk about (and listen to) Polish avant-garde music. After having collected so many materials, I received funding for subsequent reading and writing stages from PEO International, the Mellon Foundation, and from Indiana University. Beyond financial support, though, I depended on the intellectual and emotional support of friends and colleagues who were always ready to identify moments in my argument where I was making assumptions or taking logical leaps. Especially as I immersed myself in the world of Polish cultural politics of the late 1950s and early 1960s, reading reams of party-state documents, archival materials from the Polish Composers’ Union, and press debates, it was helpful to receive generous and intellectually rigorous critique from Katherine Baber, Daniel Bishop, Kunio Hara, Alison Mero, Kerry O’Brien, and Amanda Sewell. My PhD dissertation provided a foundation for further development, but it was certainly not yet a book. In identifying opportunities for development and thinking about ways to open up my argument for a broader audience—and to answer Phil Ford’s challenge in crafting a compelling narrative—I am thankful for fruitful discussions that I have had with Andrea F. Bohlman, Beata BolesławskaLewandowska, Cindy Bylander, Joy Calico, Lisa Jakelski, Katarzyna NaliwajekMazurek, J. Mackenzie Pierce, Marysol Quevedo, Nicholas Reyland, Adrian Thomas, David Tompkins, and my colleagues at the University of Southern California Polish Music Center, Marek Zebrowski and Krysta Close. In hearing their perspectives and responding to their questions, feedback, and advice, I was able to reimagine the project in important ways and to incorporate many new resources collected in a 2016 trip to Poland, funded by the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music. As I began writing the book in earnest, I found a wonderful writing partner in Martha Sprigge, who has read my work, discussed Cold War and postwar history with me, and been my accountability partner. Others who have generously offered their time and energy in reading and responding to my in-progress drafts include Andrea F. Bohlman, Deanna Day, Joanna Demers, K. E. Goldschmitt, J. Daniel Jenkins, Anna Krakus, Andrea Moore, Daniel Castro Pantoja, Douglas Shadle, Nate Sloan, and Nicholas Tochka. I am extremely grateful to my two peer reviewers, Danielle Fosler-Lussier and Kevin Karnes, whose constructive feedback at two different stages in the writing process reminded me to keep my logical through lines clear and to invite my audience to engage with my ideas. Richard Taruskin’s close reading and concern for my translations was extremely helpful; because this book’s argument is grounded in discourse analysis, I appreciated both his and editor Raina Polivka’s willingness to think through my translation choices with me, considering the shades of meaning that attended key concepts. I am also grateful to Josh Rutner for the care he took in preparing this book's index.

xiv     acknowledgments

Chapter 4 includes material from my chapter, “Witold Lutosławski’s Muzyka żałobna (1958) and the Construction of Genius,” in Lutosławski’s Worlds, ed. Nicholas Reyland and Lisa Jakelski, 15–37 (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell and Brewer, 2018). I am grateful to the publishers for their permission to reprint this material. I have also received permissions and support from a whole host of sources with regards to the musical examples that appear throughout this study. Specific crediting information appears in captions, but here I would like to thank Małgorzata FiedorMatuszewska and Katarzyna Zuber at Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne in Kraków, Poland; Monika Turska and Zofia Mycielska-Golik, the respective heirs of the Zbigniew Turski and Zygmunt Mycielski estates; Krystyna Gierłowska at the Aurea Porta Foundation; Caroline Kane at Schott Music Corporation; Shari Molstad at Hal Leonard; and Erin Dickenson at Concord Music Publishing/Boosey & Hawkes. Throughout the process of seeking and obtaining permissions, I received generous advice and assistance from colleagues in Europe and the United States: Marcin Bogucki, Beata Bolesławska-Lewandowska, Brian Head, Ted Hearne, Marcin Konik, and Urszula Mieszkieło. Finally, I want to thank my USC colleagues and students, my friends, and my family, who have provided a constant stream of support and encouragement throughout this long period of work and discovery. Above all, my husband Matthew Vest has been my closest companion, walking with me even during the darkest nights of the soul. He is always my first audience for every draft, every idea, and every argument, and his infectious enthusiasm and energy have buoyed my own spirits, even when they have flagged. I dedicated this book to my mother, but without Matthew, this book would not exist! I love him for that and for a million other things.

Introduction

T H E P O L I SH M U SIC A L AVA N T- G A R D E A N D NAT IO NA L T R A D I T IO N

This is a book about Polish musical culture during the Cold War, but it is not a book about the Cold War. This distinction is important because the musical movement known as the “Polish avant-garde” or the “Polish School” of post–World War II composition has very often been framed—especially by its West European and American audiences—as a direct response to Soviet political repressions and the subsequent cultural Thaw. This framing remains tenacious in the twenty-first century, decades after the conclusion of the Cold War. For example, in 2014 music critic Alex Ross described this period in Polish music history as a “remarkable surge of musical activity,” or a “Polish Renaissance,” that emerged after Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953. The Thaw that followed created a space for the “importation of avant-garde ideas.”1 This Polish avant-garde was distinct from its Western counterpart, Ross clarified. Thinking back to the 1961 premiere of Krzysztof Penderecki’s Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima (1960) at the Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music, Ross argued that the piece’s “psychedelic extravagance” reflected the Polish avant-garde’s difference: as a group, they tended to be “less studied, less process-driven, than [their] Western counterpart.”2 It was understandable that audiences heard (and are still hearing!) Penderecki’s unconventional timbres and textures as a gesture of resistance. In 1961, Threnody registered as pure reaction, a scream of horror. The visceral sonic qualities of Penderecki’s compositions from this period would later attract a whole host of film directors; his music accompanied Jack Torrance’s crumbling sense of self in 1

2     Introduction

Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), and David Lynch used Threnody to evoke the origins of evil in his 2017 return to Twin Peaks. The intense affective resonance of this music is undeniable, but this was not the only feature that caught international attention in the early 1960s. For many contemporary observers, Penderecki’s employ of key Western avant-garde techniques, including serialism and indeterminacy, signified his and other Polish composers’ rejection of the Soviet aesthetic doctrine of socialist realism. This doctrine had called composers working in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc to reject Western formalism, defined as an embrace of complexity and elitism at the expense of ideological communication with the mass audience. Together, then, both the sound and style of Penderecki’s Threnody (and many other Polish compositions at the 1961 festival, including Witold Lutosławski’s Venetian Games) indicated that Polish composers were separating themselves from the Soviet line and announcing a political affiliation with the West. This perception was not entirely wrong, certainly, but there is a more complicated story to tell here, because there were more than two available political and cultural positions in this period. Building on its specific national identity, Poland was blazing its own path. Even Cold War–era listeners picked up on this Polish in-betweenness. In attendance at the 1961 premiere of Penderecki’s Threnody was composer and critic Everett Helm, who had served after World War II as chief of the Theater and Music branch of the United States Office of Military Government in Germany.3 Helm was well aware of the contemporary political implications attached to both Western avant-gardism and Soviet socialist realism, and he played up those implications in his review for the American audience. He explained to his readers that Poland had long historical ties to the West, but since the war, it had been a “communistic” nation, and a “member in good standing of the East Bloc.”4 In describing the Warsaw Autumn Festival, though, he located Poland in an intermediate space, situated between West and East, past and present, and argued that this positioning had given rise to a new generation of composers who were ready to occupy “the front rank of the European avant-garde.” There is a curious redundancy in this formulation, suggesting that Helm was placing the Polish composers within the avantgarde of the avant-garde: they were pointed forward, as far into the future as they could go. That futurity was relative. When Helm discussed the music he was hearing, his language did not indicate that he was hearing it through a lens of its newness alone. In describing Penderecki’s “rather terrifying” Threnody, Helm explained that “there is no melody, harmony, or rhythm in the traditional sense. Yet the sum total is, remarkably enough, both music and art. The piece creates a strong atmosphere that is perversely romantic.” In response to Lutosławski’s Venetian Games, Helm praised the composer’s use of chance procedures in service of a “meaningful structure.” His definition of Penderecki’s and Lutosławski’s avant-gardism there-

Introduction    3

fore lay in their “perversely romantic” embrace of both technical innovation and the capacity of music to communicate meaning. This observation pops up again in Ross’s review fifty years later, in his acknowledgment of the fundamental “difference” that characterized Polish music in this period; it felt very new, but somehow it was also more intuitive, more expressive, than its Western counterpart. This music occupied a space between contemporaneity and tradition, between West and East, between formalism and realism. It sounded simultaneously new and old. For Western audiences, the liminal temporality of the Polish avant-garde was a sign of Poland’s progressive political position within the Eastern Bloc—an interpretation that neither Polish composers nor party-state officials were shy about exploiting when they wanted to promote their own postwar music culture on an international stage. Polish cultural actors were able to leverage the Cold War frame of their reception, as musicologist Lisa Jakelski has shown, to facilitate the cultural mobility of Polish music and musicians between different political zones and to build broad institutional support at home.5 Still, there are key questions surrounding the emergence and proliferation of the Polish avant-garde in the late 1950s and early 1960s that cannot be addressed fully within a Cold War frame, because they suggest the presence of longerbreathed historical trajectories and continuities. How did Polish composers build such powerful momentum so quickly after Stalin’s death? How were Poles so successful in resurrecting interwar intellectual networks after the war, and then in using those networks to support “elite” culture under communism? Why were they able to create and promote music grounded in aesthetic ideals and experimental techniques that should, logically, have incurred negative attention from the official sphere? And why in the early 1960s did so many Polish composers turn their attention to musical texture, timbre, and time, developing such a distinct sonic language? What kind of affective power did they intend their music to have, with its synthesis of old and new, and how did they interpret that power in relation to Soviet and Western aesthetic debates about meaning in music? To answer those questions in the following chapters, I employ discourse and music analysis to interrogate intellectual, political, and aesthetic histories, but there is a common thread running through my investigations: time. In twentiethcentury Poland, and especially after World War II, questions of national identity and of Polishness in music were bound up inextricably with the language of time. Progress and tradition, future and past, experimenter and epigone—these tensions animated the musical, cultural sphere in postwar Poland, calling into existence an idiosyncratic timeline against which the sliding scale between opposing coordinates might be mapped and measured. We cannot fully understand the specific arc of Polish musical avant-gardism through the periodicity of the Cold War, which was defined according to the logics of the Soviet and US political machines. While the conditions of Cold War geopolitical struggle shaped the reality in which Polish

4     Introduction

composers were working, they were not reacting exclusively to the conditions of that struggle. In articulating a more expansive temporal frame for postwar Polish cultural life, I draw on precedents set by historians Tony Judt and Timothy Snyder, but I do not use that frame to trace the regional, supranational rhythms of war and its aftermath.6 Neither am I primarily concerned with the transnational, global networks and exchanges that flourished under the social, cultural, and political conditions of the postwar years.7 Instead, I turn inward, to the nation’s interior experience. Philip Gentry makes a similar turn in his study, What Will I Be? American Music and Cold War Identity, arguing that the “search for global cultural coherence can sometimes erase important local particularities.”8 Even within the United States (which was, in many ways, the epicenter of Cold War discourse), Gentry asserts, the threats and challenges posed by the postwar era were felt primarily as domestic, not international, ones. Such a turn to the national perspective can be especially revealing in exploring the power dynamics that activated the interstices between the Soviet and US empires; for instance, in her study of musical sound and political action in later twentieth-century Poland, Andrea F. Bohlman proposes that “local and everyday experiences shaped the symbolic work, discursive nuance, and aural cultures of Solidarity.”9 Paying attention to these local experiences provides insight into the work that national identity can do, interrupting and rendering contingent the political—and temporal—forces that might otherwise seem all-encompassing. A turn to the national perspective in my own study uncovers the internal conditions that enabled postwar Poles to imagine a uniquely Polish musical avantgarde: the generational, institutional, political, and aesthetic affiliations that shaped cultural actors’ definitions of Polishness and progress in music. Although their definitions were not always compatible, composers, musicians, and intellectuals after World War II shared a desire to generate Polish cultural progress—and a belief that cultural progress was linked to national progress writ large. To achieve those goals, they had to negotiate terms for moving forward, and then to renegotiate when political conditions and power relationships shifted. The musical avantgarde movement, as a symbol both of Polishness and progress, was therefore an expression of a tenuously held consensus, grounded in shared experiences and a desire to establish continuities between past aesthetic and intellectual traditions and contemporary Polish experiences. W HO SE M O D E R N I T Y ?

Historian Reinhart Koselleck has argued that in Western Europe, a new understanding of time emerged in the late eighteenth century, one that erected a firm boundary between past and present. This happened as individuals stopped think-

Introduction    5

ing about the passage of time in relation to eschatology and the rhythms of the natural world and instead entrained to forces of modernization: secularization, industrialization, colonial expansion, and scientific experimentation. With this shift, the space between experience and expectation widened, and “progress” was mapped upon chronology in a straightforward, diachronic line.10 Koselleck’s historical argument cannot account, however, for the emergence of modernity in nations or groups who were repressed by or excluded from those same historical forces of modernization. In such contexts, the connection between experience and expectation, past and future, often remained strong.11 During the period covered by this study, extending roughly from 1930 to 1965, Poles used historical experiences of rupture and loss as reference points in interpreting present realities and developing goals for the future. They looked to the partitions of the late eighteenth century (1772, 1793, 1795) that had removed Poland from the European map for over a century, dividing its territory among the Russian, Prussian, and Austrian Empires. They remembered failed uprisings—the November Uprising (1830–31) and the January Uprising (1863–64)—and the waves of repression and exile that followed each one. The reestablishment of an independent Poland in 1918 provided an opportunity to imagine what a Polish future might look like, but World War II brought yet another partition, this time between the Nazis and the Soviets. The extreme devastation and loss of life during the war and the Holocaust traumatized the surviving Polish citizens, and the gradual solidification of Soviet power after the war and the Yalta Conference left them, again, without a fully independent nation. All of these losses, all of these erasures and gaps, led to an urgent collective sense that Poland had become disconnected from the chronological passage of “normal” time, and, as a result, the nation was not yet modern. It was in the context of this sense of temporal displacement that Poles worried about their national backwardness (zaległość) and their progress (postęp) toward modernity. Many different words became attached to the language of national backwardness in this period; speakers might alternately address Polish lag, delay, lateness, isolation, deficiency, or ignorance (willful or otherwise). Each of these words had its own set of implications, but two main discursive frames for thinking about national backwardness emerged. One was related to chronological time: if modernity was fixed to a homogenous world-historical timeline, then Poland’s position outside of modernity located the nation at some earlier chronological point, previous to the contemporary moment. The other frame was defined by accumulation: if modernity existed as a balance sheet, with certain economic, intellectual, cultural, or experiential benchmarks, then Poland’s backwardness could be measured in terms of its deficiencies or gaps. Following historian Maria Todorova, I use the terms lag and lack in relation to these two different conceptualizations of national displacement from modernity.12

6     Introduction

Artists, intellectuals, and party-state officials wielded these twinned forms of backwardness as both a specter and a threat, adjusting their language when necessary in response to new challenges or goals. Because lag and lack each presumed different parameters for measuring modernity, their deployment stimulated different kinds of progress. In the context of lack (brak), the act of “catching up” was one of acquiring missing elements. Throughout the 1950s, cultural and political actors constantly invoked various forms of national lack, and they spoke of remediating this problem by “filling the gap” (zapełnienie luki). Their language implied that Polish cultural backwardness was confined to specific lacunae and that its reversal would be a simple matter of addressing those quantitative deficits. For lag (opóźnienie), on the other hand, “catching up” became an imaginative act of quickening, of propulsion, spinning out connections between past histories and future visions.13 Maria Todorova cautions that Western scholars have wielded backwardness discourse in the past to affirm Cold War–era stereotypes about the “real” economic, political, and cultural backwardness of Eastern and Central European nations. Such narratives have routinely presented Eastern Europe as the late inheritor of developments originating in the West. Todorova traces this thread from Hans Kohn’s 1944 division of Western and Eastern nationalism into “civic” and “organic” forms, to studies such as Daniel Chicot’s collection The Origins of Backwardness in Eastern Europe (1989) and even to Benedict Anderson’s influential work of nationalism theory, Imagined Communities (1983), which, although it disrupts Eurocentric narratives about the origins of nationalism, still puts a premium on firstness in nations’ attainment of “horizontal-secular, transverse time.”14 In his Time and the Other (1983), Johannes Fabian identifies a similar problem in the field of anthropology, arguing that the entire discipline was founded on an unequal power relationship between the West and its Other, and that this relationship had been expressed in terms of time. Anthropologists displaced their objects of study from the present moment, locating them at an earlier point on a developmental timeline.15 This problem, in both Todorova’s and Fabian’s view, grew out of the presumption of a neutral world-historical timeline. If scholars imagined that their notions of development, progress, and modernity functioned outside the ideological power structures of colonialism and imperialism, then they were bound to reinforce those power structures. One problem with both Todorova’s and Fabian’s arguments, despite their crucial disciplinary correctives, is that they do not leave space for thinking about why individuals or nations might designate themselves as Other, or why they might aim the language of backwardness at themselves.16 Wielded reflexively in midtwentieth-century Poland, the language of backwardness was not necessarily disempowering, nor did it rely exclusively on the comparative mode; on the contrary, this discourse generated agency for its speakers and allowed them to advocate for

Introduction    7

their own personal and national goals. Important signs of progress—such as an internationally recognized avant-garde movement—could then be interpreted as evidence that the caesuras in national tradition had been remediated, and that the vital arc between past, present, and future had been reestablished. It was in embracing an internal national timeline that artists and political leaders were able to instrumentalize Poland’s spatial, geopolitical position within the East-West divide, leveraging their in-between status to attract support from domestic and international audiences alike. Polish cultural actors used backwardness discourse to think about modernity and time—its durations and even its directionality—in radically relative terms. In the fields of indigenous studies, postcolonial studies, and queer studies, scholars have long argued that time does not run along a homogenous, chronological line, and that modernity exists not as a monolith, but as a plurality of modernities. Indigenous studies scholar Mark Rifkin, for example, proposes a decolonized, phenomenological understanding of time that acknowledges the effects of “collective histories and anticipations” on contemporary experiences of time. Rifkin reminds readers that indigenous communities may purposely inhabit “tradition” in a manner that seems anachronistic or conservative in order to push back against the hegemony of settler culture, articulating their own “distinctive way of beingin-time.”17 Queer theorist Heather Love argues similarly that in the case of many queer modernist literary figures, “backwards turns” and an embrace of the past allowed them to relive painful experiences of loss, laying bare the contingencies and the costs of modernity. They reclaimed the past “as something living—as something dissonant, beyond our control, and capable of touching us in the present.”18 Although I want to avoid drawing facile equivalencies between the Polish national-historical experience and postcolonial, indigenous, or queer experiences, the theoretical principles underlying Rifkin’s and Love’s work are resonant in the case of Poland (and also other Central and East European nations). Their critical lenses allow us to imagine historical subjects who traversed timelines that were not always linear. For Poles, a perpetual state of historical displacement collapsed the space between past, present, and future, allowing them to look simultaneously backward and forward. The realization of future potential was not necessarily linked to the chronologically new; in a qualitative sense, it might also represent the successful manifestation of the past within the present.19 The Polish manifestation of avant-gardism therefore did not bear a clear connection to other models of avant-gardism with which we may be more familiar. It did not resemble literary scholar Peter Bürger’s well-known characterization of early twentieth-century European avant-garde movements as a rejection of the late-nineteenth-century, bourgeois foundations of artistic modernism, or Renato Poggioli’s location of avant-gardism at the intersection of activism, antagonism, nihilism, and agonism.20 Both of those definitions refer to the ephemeral, reactive

8     Introduction

quality of early twentieth-century avant-garde movements. Bürger and Poggioli presume the avant-garde artist’s rejection of tradition and, along with it, notions of the autonomy of the artwork and of romantic creative genius; however, the Polish avant-garde did not participate in that act of rejection. I am not the first scholar to note that Bürger’s definition does not hold when applied to avant-garde movements arising after World War II. British historian Perry Anderson has argued, in fact, that this incompatibility invalidates the existence of postwar avant-garde movements; the increasingly hegemonic power of late-stage capitalism has, in his view, left contemporary Western artists “without an appropriable past, or imaginable future, in an interminably recurrent present,” doomed to replicate the economic and political structures that surround them.21 Anderson’s pessimistic perspective hardly leaves room for thinking about the proliferation of avant-garde movements after the war on both sides of the Iron Curtain.22 His words are particularly inaccurate or unhelpful, though, in unpacking the shades of meaning that adhered to the Polish postwar musical avant-garde within the context of state socialism, or in noticing the destabilizing effect of the movement’s investment in pastness and futurity upon the experience of the present moment, which might alternately feel as if it were lagging behind or rushing ahead in chronological time. The antithesis of German Stunde Null (Zero Hour) narratives, which required collective forgetting in service of a new national beginning, Polish narratives about time and cultural identity after the war depended on continuities, and the avant-garde movement became, in that context, a manifestation of the endurance of Polish national tradition.23 BAC K WA R D A N D F O RWA R D

I have retained the Polish-language word awangarda in the title of this book, in place of its more common French form, because I want to emphasize the specificity of the discourses that anchored Polish avant-gardism to its national context, in which notions of progress, modernity, and tradition took on very particular social and political meanings. Those meanings were not fixed; they shifted flexibly according to the needs of their speakers, allowing them to navigate the constantlychanging power relations between party, state, and cultural spheres and to perform their identities differently in public and private spaces. The shared referent of the nation facilitated productive conversations and mutual investments in cultural progress, even when speakers envisioned divergent national futures growing out of that progress. I use each chapter to explore the specific terms that motivated debates about Polish tradition and Polish modernity between the interwar period and the emergence of the avant-garde in the early 1960s. Each of these terms relates to temporal movement, but the differences between them reveal the shifting political and

Introduction    9

aesthetic tensions that characterized the period. In chapter 1, I will consider narratives about Polish modernity and attendant concerns about Polish backwardness (figured as zaległość) that arose in the 1930s and then again after the war in the late 1940s. Steeped in intellectual history, this chapter articulates the division between interwar so-called “conservatives” and “progressives,” whose debates would establish many of the key aesthetic definitions of musical progress and musical Polishness that remained in place throughout the postwar period. In chapter 2, I argue that members of the artist-intellectual class during the Polish Zhdanovshchina wielded language of lack (brak)—lack of materials, lack of experiences, lack of knowledge—to advocate for the continued value of their specialized expertise in determining the cultural future of the nation. To do that, they relied on continuities with interwar intellectual networks—networks to which they themselves had belonged, before the war—to link the past and present in a manner that was relatively resistant to external Soviet interventions. The vitality of Polish national identity as an alternative political-cultural position in this moment would also motivate the Polish October Revolution of 1956. The institutional repercussions of the post-1956 Thaw play out in chapter 3, in which I trace strategies for aiming cultural outreach (upowszechnienie kultury) at “elite” audiences, thereby filling the gaps in knowledge and experience left by Stalinist-era cultural controls in the early 1950s. Those strategies were only partially successful, requiring constant renegotiations between institutional leaders and the partystate cultural apparatus, which demanded that elite culture serve the needs of the mass audience. In chapters 4 and 5, I interrogate opposing strategies for realizing cultural modernity in Poland. First, I examine the logic of lag (opóźnienie) as a generative conceptual space for imagining a national future that grows directly out of a national past. I read the reception of Witold Lutosławski’s Funeral Music in these terms, and argue that his subsequent “elevation” to the status of national genius allowed his colleagues and audiences to articulate the specificity of Polish modernist achievement while simultaneously asserting the value of this music on an international stage. By contrast, in chapter 5, I follow the rise of the first major representative of the postwar compositional generation, Bogusław Schäffer, whose definition of modernity (nowoczesność) relied on technical innovations that pointed forward, ineluctably, into the future. The tension between the two generations led to conflict, as middle-generation artists and intellectuals felt that this new temporal frame negated their own modernism, which was predicated on a synthesis of tradition and innovation. Finally, in chapter 6, I turn to the question of the Polish avant-garde movement (awangarda). In its initial appearance, critics hewed closely to Schäffer’s understanding of progress as a function of newness, but the discourse shifted as the composers gained prestige and experience. After 1960, new narratives presented the Polish avant-garde as a manifestation of national

10     Introduction

tradition, wrapping the new generation of composers into the same narratives that had arisen around Lutosławski a few years earlier. The result was a robust discourse that framed Polish avant-gardism as a sign of Polish cultural forwardness, remediating the historical traumas that had previously displaced the nation from its rightful place as a European leader in the contemporary music community.

1

Backwardness (Zaległość) Defining Musical Modernity in Poland before and after World War II

B E I N G BAC K WA R D

In 1929, composer Karol Szymanowski granted an interview to the weekly paper Świat (The World), in which he complained that Polish contemporary music was underdeveloped in relation to other European nations. He laid blame on his nemeses, the “conservatives” (konserwatyści), whose plans for the future of Polish music reflected their investment in the aesthetic and formal signifiers of nineteenth-century German musical tradition. On the opposite side of the debate, Szymanowski’s adherents, the “progressives” (postępowscy), were more interested in exploring the available range of European modernisms. Ten years after achieving Polish national independence, it was time to start thinking forward instead of backward. “I have a sense,” Szymanowski explained, “that every artist in Poland is oriented today toward contemporaneity and the future, looking back to the past as little as possible. It is in this [orientation to the future] that I see a solution to the problem of Polish art, and especially music, in which . . . we have to make up for [our] enormous backwardness (zaległość).”1 The struggle between the conservatives and progressives must have felt very real to Szymanowski in this moment. He had just agreed to leave his position as the head of the Conservatory in Warsaw, in part due to critique from the conservative group, led by composer-critic Piotr Rytel.2 At stake was not only Szymanowski’s gainful employment (about which he felt rather ambivalent, even though he needed the money), but also the definition of Polishness in music and the authority to lead the next generation of composers in building a new national tradition. Instead of looking back to the nineteenth-century German example and 11

12     backwardness (Zaległość)

attempting to create a derivative Polish version of that tradition, Szymanowski argued that Polish composers should be educating themselves about contemporary European music culture, and they should become active participants in the musical developments that were happening all around them. This was a definition of musical Polishness predicated on synthesis: like Chopin before them, Szymanowski argued, Polish composers should cultivate both their “Polishness” and their “Europeanness.”3 In combining national traditions with contemporary modernism, they would create something new and exciting. Szymanowski pointed to the younger generation coming up behind him as the group of composers who were beginning to navigate this balance, and, in so doing, producing music “of a very Polish character, which also testifies to [their] thorough acquaintance with the high level of European music; that is to say, with [its] great sense of cultural responsibility.”4 The invocation of cultural responsibility here suggests that, for Szymanowski, the question of Polish cultural backwardness was not only a musical one. On the contrary, his push for modernism in music was closely bound up with Polish national progress writ large. Poles in the interwar years shared a perception that modernity was a desirable goal, but members of the music community did not agree about the nature of that goal or about the role that they should play in pushing the nation forward. Some embraced the institutional mechanisms of modernization, which kept everything moving along a timeline toward an ever-vanishing point of “progress,” while others invested in modernism as a set of imperfect strategies for interpreting, critiquing, and exploiting that progress in an attempt to shore up some measure of (personal or national/collective) agency.5 Rytel’s conservative group adopted the modernizationist impulse: they wanted to strengthen Polish cultural institutions, to educate Polish audiences about the German canon, and to encourage Polish composers to build a contemporary Polish musical tradition in relation to that canon. Such acts of modernization would propel Polish artists and audiences in a straight line toward the desired goal, imagined as full participation in a Western art music tradition that had previously, with certain notable exceptions, left Poland out of its narrative. Szymanowski, on the other hand, used the aesthetic and stylistic languages of contemporary European modernism to disrupt modernizationist definitions of progress. In his early career, Szymanowski had cultivated a Straussian style, but in the 1910s his travels put him in contact with a host of modernisms, especially those in the French and Russian orbits. His music reflected his interest in Stravinsky, Bartók, Debussy, Ravel, North African musical traditions, and many more influences. His was not a vision of one singular Polish modernism; rather he recognized a kaleidoscopic array of responses to the modern world, and he believed that it was his task, as a composer, to filter those responses through his own creative vision in each new work. When he returned to Poland in 1919, Szymanowski

backwardness (Zaległość)    13

embarked on the so-called “nationalist” stage in his musical output, but this did not indicate a change in his approach to modernism and to modernity; it simply meant that his efforts in synthesis shifted focus from the personal to the national. In the remainder of this chapter, I will trace the debates between the conservatives and progressives—the modernizationists and modernists—across the interwar, wartime, and immediate postwar periods. Although these two decades contained undeniable ruptures, it is crucial to note the lines of continuity, maintained by the people who lived through the ruptures and brought their experiences and convictions with them. The durability of the conservative-modernizationist and progressive-modernist visions for Polish modernity depended on their perpetuation by the post-Szymanowski generation of composers and critics, who came of age before the war and took on leadership of the Polish cultural sphere afterward. Despite the trauma of the war and the subsequent imposition of new Soviet ideological frameworks, representatives of this oft-forgotten “middle generation” clung tenaciously to the same goals they held in the 1930s: they wanted to usher Poland into a state of modernity. The old conservative-modernizationist and progressive-modernist divisions were not immediately evident after the war; cultural actors with competing commitments found themselves working together toward a shared goal of rebuilding Polish musical life. When party-state power consolidated in the later 1940s, that tenuous consensus shattered. The modernizationist position became aligned with Stalinist Marxism, thus achieving official sanction as the legitimate path to the Polish musical future, but modernist-minded artists and intellectuals drew on twenty years of experience in instrumentalizing language about backwardness to defend their vision for an outward- and forwardfacing Polish musical tradition. NAT IO NA L I N D E P E N D E N C E A N D N EW P O S SI B I L I T I E S

The interwar years in Poland were politically volatile, and the question of national identity was a fraught one. After finally regaining national independence in 1918, Poles worked to reclaim and reunify their long-divided territories and to assert authority against encroaching Soviet power in the east. Marshal Józef Piłsudski’s assumption of power via a military coup in 1926 lent a new stability to the political landscape, but under the surface of this stability, divergent regional experiences and competing political affiliations fueled debate about Polish national identity.6 During Piłsudski’s so-called “healing” (“sanacja”) period (1926–1935), the liberal left built a coalition with centrists to govern the Second Polish Republic, which they generally modeled upon the federalist precedent of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1569–1795). The greatest challenge to Piłsudski’s rule, which combined both democratic and authoritarian measures, came from the National

14     backwardness (Zaległość)

Democrats on the right. Led by Roman Dmowski, this group envisioned an ethnically homogenous Poland, bound by religious, national, and conservative political tradition. Piotr Rytel, the leader of the conservative group in the Polish music community, was aligned with the protectionist-xenophobic agenda of Dmowski’s National Democrats; in fact, Rytel was the regular music critic for that group’s press organ, the Gazeta Warszawska (Warsaw Gazette). Members of the “progressive” group, by contrast, were much more diffuse and difficult to pin down in terms of political affiliations. As a rule, following Szymanowski’s example, members of this group were oriented toward the liberal values of cultural cosmopolitanism. However, while some members of this group wrote for press organs on the liberal left, some of them also wrote for organs associated with the right. In some cases, critics contributed to journals from both sides; for instance, Szymanowski’s student Zygmunt Mycielski contributed in the later 1930s to both the liberal Kurier Poranny (Morning Courier) and the cultural journal Prosto z mostu (Straight from the Bridge), which tended toward the right. Given this flexibility of political affiliation, then, it is more fruitful to characterize the two groups according to their definitions of progress and their convictions about the shape that Polish music should take in the future. As mentioned above, the conservatives located the future of Polish music in a rediscovery of the nation’s past, and in forging a connection between national tradition and the BeethovenWagner trajectory. It might seem counterintuitive that these nationalist critics desperately wanted Polish composers to tap into the cultural capital associated with German musical tradition, but, as Richard Taruskin has argued, the German canon has often been framed as a universal tradition, stripped of its specific national context.7 Proximity to this tradition therefore served as a marker of prestige and mastery, both highly desired qualities within the conservative group. With such goals, it was not surprising that Rytel and his colleagues had strong feelings about the music conservatory in Warsaw, as they envisioned this institution as a site for inculcating the next generation with an appreciation for Western art music.8 And it was equally unsurprising that the conservatives reacted with horror at the appointment of Szymanowski to the leadership of that conservatory in February 1927. As Alistair Wightman has noted, an anonymous notice (probably written by Rytel) appeared in Gazeta Warszawska on the same day as the announcement of Szymanowski’s appointment, reminding readers that Szymanowski had no experience as a composition teacher and that he had not completed his own conservatory training.9 The conservatives’ narrative was already in place: Szymanowski lacked a grounding in tradition, and he would lead Polish musicians and composers away from the true national path. In response, Szymanowski laid out his vision for modernist music education in an interview for Kurier Czerwony (The Red Courier). He would shift the conserva-

backwardness (Zaległość)    15

tory’s focus to the current moment: “After all, our aim is not ‘yesterday,’ but ‘today’ and ‘tomorrow’: creativity is the word, and not a retreat to achievements already exhausted.”10 Szymanowski’s compositions from this period translate these goals into sound. For example, his Stabat Mater, op. 53, completed the year before he accepted the conservatory post, exemplifies his notion of synthesis as the foundation for a contemporary Polish musical language. Szymanowski joined a long musical tradition when he decided to write a Stabat Mater, but he signaled his intention to depart somewhat from that tradition by adopting Józef Jankowski’s early twentieth-century Polish translation of the text, which he prized for its “unusually primitive, almost ‘folk-like’ simplicity and naivety.”11 In a 1926 interview, Szymanowski explained that using the Polish-language text had allowed him to break from convention and to reconsider its dramatic content, and therefore to build a musical narrative that revealed the urgent “psychological intonation of the words.”12 The musical narrative of Stabat Mater synthesized influences from Polish early music, Polish folk music, and contemporary European modernism. Richard Zielinski has identified motivic connections to plainchant and to the Polish hymns Święty Boże (Holy God) and Gorzkie żale (Lenten Psalms) in the Stabat Mater, alongside Górale (Highland) textural and modal inflections.13 In building the longrange musical and dramatic structure, Szymanowski employed organic motivic development that resonated with nineteenth-century tradition, but he deployed such techniques in conjunction with Debussyian planing and nonfunctional harmonies, Stravinskian ostinatos, and his own predilection for bitonality and textural accretion. The Stabat Mater could not have been a clearer statement of Szymanowski’s belief that to generate progress in Polish music, composers would need to turn simultaneously inward and outward, backward and forward. They could not find the solution to their current backwardness if they barricaded themselves within the nation, ignoring modernist aesthetics and compositional techniques. The premiere of Stabat Mater took place in Warsaw in January 1929, at a moment when the controversy surrounding Szymanowski’s leadership of the Conservatory was coming to a head. Rytel wrote about both of these topics in Gazeta Warszawska, using the opportunity to attack modernism in Polish culture. He opened his review of Stabat Mater in a pose of admiration for the other composer’s talent, but he quickly professed himself to have been unmoved by its expressive content. Szymanowski’s embrace of “primitivism” in the piece, and his rejection of functional harmony, meant that the composition suffered from a “lack of line, of breath.” The overarching effect, he argued, was of “a sketch, a group of [different] ideas thrown onto a piece of paper, rather than of a powerfully constructed composition, [intended] to endure through the ages.”14 For Rytel, meaning emerged from logical, linear progressions and careful development, from organicism.

16     backwardness (Zaległość)

Szymanowski’s synthesis of styles, time periods, and influences was not, in his estimation, an acceptable image of Polishness in music. Although the anti-Semitic, xenophobic implications of Rytel’s anti-cosmopolitanism, anti-synthesis stance would become more explicit in the later 1930s, his audience would have drawn a straight line between his vision of a unified, enduring Polish national tradition and the right-leaning politics of the Gazeta Warszawska (and, if they could not hear that resonance, perhaps the presence of an anti-Semitic article questioning the place of Jewish people in Polish society on the same page as the review would have rendered the connection more obvious).15 A month later, Rytel wrote a lengthy piece diagnosing the “Decline of Musical Culture” in Poland, and his language here was more direct: various “demagogues” (read: Szymanowski) in Polish music had abandoned their faith in the “ideal mission [of art], in its beauty and value.”16 Contemporary composers were turning away from the needs of the audience, and therefore, the audiences had turned away from them, leaving concert halls empty. These losses would not soon be repaired because they were not only musical, they were “moral in nature.” Finally, he called for the destruction of the “cliques” that were controlling Polish musical life and for a renewed focus on reuniting society and art, art and nation. Ill and frustrated, Szymanowski resigned from the conservatory post, but the debate about Polishness in music raged on, with both sides struggling to control the definition of musical progress. The stakes shifted higher in the early 1930s because a new generation of composers was beginning to move into the public sphere, and therefore the conservative and progressive groups were no longer fighting only about their own music. Instead, they sought to prescribe norms and goals for the future. Writing in this prescriptive mode, Szymanowski produced a treatise, The Educational Role of Musical Culture (Wychowawcza rola kultury muzycznej), in which he argued that Polish composers and critics were not playing a sufficiently active role in undoing the conditions of Polish cultural backwardness.17 Turning Rytel’s accusations around, Szymanowski argued that it was the isolation and inward focus of the Polish contemporary music community that had rendered Polish music irrelevant to its own modern audience. Composers were only writing for themselves, creating a closed loop of influence that could never hope to have any resonance outside Poland. Szymanowski’s closing comments are notable here: Music fills its most beneficial role, not as a source of powerful joy . . . but rather as the great educator of man. [Music] opens his eyes to the enchanting, exclusively creative world of the Supraindividual Idea. . . . The unifying and organizational power of music can, through the robust bonds of collective experience, bring even a group of loosely affiliated people together. . . . In the future, the Polish Soul will resound in an atmosphere of absolute Freedom . . . all over the world with the powerful, most harmonious chords of national culture.

backwardness (Zaległość)    17 Then, it will be possible for us, Polish musicians, to declare with pride and joy that our efforts, our work, and our dreams (which have been fulfilled at long last) have supported the achievement of national power.18

This manifesto drew together the forces of musical modernization and modernism in advancing Polish society toward modernity. Szymanowski here referred to the “Polish Soul,” a trope that Maja Trochimczyk has traced to the rise of language about “the Polish race” in music criticism after the Chopin centennial in 1910; it was a term that would have been equally at home in one of Rytel’s reviews.19 Contra Rytel, however, Szymanowski suggested that this Soul could not find its expression in art that was exclusively national. It was only in looking beyond Poland’s borders, taking advantage (as Chopin did) of contemporary musical developments, that artists would express the “Supraindividual Idea” in their music. In synthesizing the national with the universal, composers would take the lead in providing “spiritual food” to fight the “ignorance and barbarism of the mass audience,” thereby fostering national progress while simultaneously allowing the Polish Soul to “resound all over the world.”20 In line with his desire to foster connections between Polish culture and the outside world, Szymanowski encouraged the younger generation of composers to travel to Paris, where many of them studied with Nadia Boulanger. When these young composers and critics returned to Poland in the mid-1930s, they brought a new confidence with them and a commitment to neoclassicism that set them apart aesthetically from Szymanowski.21 Although the older conservative-modernizationist group retained considerable institutional influence, especially after Szymanowski lost his leadership role with the newly established Academy of Music in Warsaw in 1932, the young modernists no longer felt that they had to justify themselves to the conservative group. They were more independent; they shared Szymanowski’s commitment to increasing the international standing of Polish music, but their definitions of musical modernity began to diverge from those of their elder mentor, and therefore these younger composers conjured different forms of modernism to support their efforts. The de facto leader of this generation was composer-critic Konstanty Régamey, whose biography and career exemplify this group’s engagement with a diverse set of aesthetic and technical influences. Born in Kiev to a family of Polish and Swiss heritage, Régamey was surrounded by music as a child; his father was a music teacher, his mother was a pianist, and young Konstanty took a few composition lessons from Reinhold Glière.22 As an adult, he pursued degrees in Oriental studies in Warsaw and studied for a year in Paris (1933–34). Upon his return to Warsaw, Régamey’s music criticism began appearing both in the musical and general press. As one of the leading organizers of the 1939 ISCM festival in Warsaw, and a frequent contributor to Polish Radio, Régamey had a powerful voice in the contemporary music community.

18     backwardness (Zaległość)

With that voice, Régamey turned to the same aesthetic criteria for cultural progress that had motivated Szymanowski; he was concerned, above all, with questions of synthesis, expressivity, and communication. Drawing on recent scholarship in musical psychology and phenomenology from German theorists Ernst Kurth and Hans Mersmann, Régamey became interested in how people heard and understood music.23 From art historians Aloïs Riegl and Heinrich Wölfflin he derived questions about the relationship between artworks and the culture that produced them. Within a Polish context, Régamey’s modernist aesthetic philosophy was also heavily influenced by the work of the artist-philosopher Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (known as “Witkacy”).24 In 1933, Régamey published a treatise, Content and Form in Music, building on Witkacy’s conviction that artistic content existed on a metaphysical plane.25 As scholar Lech Sokół has explained, Witkacy believed that, when filtered through artistic form, artistic content manifested “the experience of a unity within the multiplicity of everything that exists, present in the form of the art work.”26 Régamey applied this belief to the question of musical meaning: it was through the act of synthesis, he argued, that composers communicated with their audiences. Alongside Régamey, there were many other young composers and musicologists who shaped contemporary Polish music culture in the 1930s, and they brought with them a panoply of different regional, disciplinary, and personal experiences. Three of the most vocal members of this group were Stefan Kisielewski, Zygmunt Mycielski, and Zofia Lissa. Kisielewski had been at the conservatory in Warsaw, center stage for the debates between the conservatives and progressives, before going to Paris in 1938–39.27 After studying with Szymanowski, Mycielski lived in Paris and attended the École Normale de Musique; he worked with Paul Dukas and Nadia Boulanger before returning to Poland in 1936.28 Zofia Lissa attended the university in Lwów, where she studied with musicologist Adolf Chybiński (a student of Guido Adler) and associated with Polish phenomenologist Roman Ingarden (a student of Edmund Husserl).29 In defining musical progress, Mycielski was probably the closest to Szymanowski, Witkacy, and Régamey in his modernist convictions, although he was more pessimistic; he despaired that the dehumanizing, mechanizing pressures of the modern world were robbing people of the ability to experience artistic content.30 Both Mycielski and Régamey picked up Szymanowski’s thread from The Educational Role of Musical Culture about the responsibility of artists to challenge audiences and to lead them toward enlightenment. In 1937, Mycielski responded to a survey distributed by the journal Muzyka Polska (Polish Music) about the atrophy (zanik) of Polish musical culture. Mycielski mirrored his mentor’s concern about Polish backwardness, and his belief that artists should direct the “musicalization” (umuzykalnienie) of their audience. “It is hard to know,” he argued, “if environment shapes the artist, or if [the artist] molds [environment] by creating an elite.

backwardness (Zaległość)    19

Because it always comes down to the elite. Bartek Zwycięzca [the titular peasant character in Henryk Sienkiewicz’s 1882 novel] is not going to lift up our musical culture.” The reason that there had been no great Polish composers between Chopin and Szymanowski, Mycielski explained, was that Polish artists had forgotten their responsibility to lead the way forward—something they could not do if they thought only about the “accessibility” of their music. “[Szymanowski] was the first in one hundred years to show us whose opinion was the most important [in relation to cultural uplift]. We shall only bow our heads before artistic integrity (artystyczną uczciwością).”31 Within the post-Szymanowski generation, the Régameyan-Mycielskian line was not the only available “progressive” position. For example, while Stefan Kisielewski respected Régamey (calling him “the king of critics”), he polemicized with the metaphysical premise underlying his elder colleague’s aesthetics, which privileged content over form.32 Kisielewski stubbornly held to the opposite premise, that form preceded content.33 He argued that musical progress arose from purely technical, formal experiments, and he embraced the apocalyptic possibility that humankind might be nearing the end of what was possible in art; catastrophic destruction was the logical next step.34 On the other end of the political and aesthetic spectrum, Zofia Lissa’s Marxist politics and her research in cognition, perception, and phenomenology inflected her understanding of musical progress. Although she wrote her doctoral dissertation about Scriabin’s extended harmonic language, indicating an appreciation for the sounds of musical modernism, Lissa was less convinced that the path to the future lay in modernist aesthetics. She believed that composers had a responsibility to tap into the revolutionary currents of the age and to produce innovative musical forms that would meet the needs of the audience.35 After Szymanowski’s death in 1937, disagreement about the nature of the modernist project intensified within this younger generation, which also meant that Szymanowski’s own legacy was subject to contrasting interpretations. As a group, these composers were not interested in perpetuating their predecessor’s compositional style. Rather, they took inspiration from his restlessness, his dissatisfaction with the state of cultural affairs in Poland, and his sense that modernity lay ahead as a goal to be earned. Witold Lutosławski, one of the youngest members of this generation, perhaps said it best in 1937. He and his colleagues did not want to walk along the stylistic “path delineated by the great Dead [Master],” but Szymanowski had provided something more important: a cultural foundation. “Amid the chaos of artistic phenomena that surrounds us, the existence of this foundation, from which the longed-for breath of greatness flows, allows us to look with confidence toward the future for Polish music.”36 It was this sense of a shared foundation that facilitated fruitful discussions about what modernity in Poland might look and sound like, even across ideological and aesthetic lines.

20     backwardness (Zaległość)

World War II and its aftermath, however, disrupted these discussions. The immediate needs of the present moment overwhelmed questions of backwardness and debates about modernization and modernism, and Poles shifted their focus to cultural preservation. The question of modernity persisted, but with a new weight: the act of imagining Poland’s cultural future became an expression of faith, presuming the nation’s survival. T H E T R AUM A O F WA R

On 1 September 1939, Germany invaded Poland, and about two weeks later, the Soviets invaded from the opposite side. By the end of the month, the Germans and Soviets had formally partitioned Poland, fulfilling plans laid out in the MolotovRibbentrop Pact. Each empire absorbed roughly half of the interwar Polish territory. The Soviets took over large parts of eastern Poland, absorbing them directly into the Soviet Union; within their territory, they incorporated many ethnically and culturally diverse centers, such as Lwów, which had been especially important as sites of education and political debate before the war. The Germans absorbed parts of western Poland into the Reich, but, importantly, they also designated a large part of central Poland as an occupied zone, distinct from (but overseen by) the Nazi government. This zone was known as the Generalgouvernement (the GG), and it included both Warsaw and Kraków, which the Nazis designated as the capital. In the aftermath of the new divisions, mass population shifts and incredible violence marked all three territories.37 The Germans moved many Polish and Jewish people out of the western territories and into the GG, and the Soviets deported and resettled more than three hundred thousand people between 1939 and 1941, moving them farther east into the interior.38 There were also many people, especially in the Polish-Jewish community, who sought refuge in the Soviet Union; among their number were Zofia Lissa (who traveled first to Uzbekistan and then to Moscow) and composer Mieczysław Weinberg.39 Historian Jan T. Gross has pointed out that narratives about Polish national history and culture became even more important during the war than they had been in the preceding decades. Under Nazi occupation, which was under no obligation to legitimize itself to its Polish subjects, the inhabitants of the GG faced a vacuum where the structures—the norms, values, and conventions—governing culture and society should be. In the face of that vacuum, then, “a multitude of initiatives from a variety of social milieus combined to establish a framework of organizations and patterns of behavior that allowed the Poles to pursue their self-interest and try to fulfill their basic needs.”40 In the musical sphere, the challenge lay in making music when the occupiers desired only Poles’ silence. Musicologist Katarzyna Naliwajek-Mazurek reminds us that, unlike in Nazi Germany, in the GG music was not often used as propaganda.41

backwardness (Zaległość)    21

After January 1940, Poles were not allowed to have radios, and, in Warsaw, all official performance institutions had been disbanded. Several major institutions functioned in Kraków, such as the Philharmonic Orchestra, but these were meant to serve the needs of the occupying forces. With special permission, cafés were able to host musical performances, mostly featuring light dance music; as J. Mackenzie Pierce has shown, Nazis “took particular aim at ‘high’ culture, while leaving what [they] saw as ‘lower’ forms of art intact.”42 These café concerts became sites not only for music making, but for political organizing; many Polish composers and musicians (including Régamey and Kisielewski) were involved in the underground resistance movement.43 There was also a provisional music conservatory functioning in Warsaw under the observation of the German authorities, which enabled representatives of a new, younger generation of musicians (including Tadeusz Baird and Kazimierz Serocki) to pursue their education.44 Many Polish composers, including Régamey, Lutosławski, Andrzej Panufnik, and Bolesław Woytowicz, worked in the public sphere as café performers, but privately they also continued to compose. At clandestine concerts held in private homes, performances of music by Chopin and Szymanowski brought the national past into the present, and performances of new works evidenced composers’ continued commitment to realizing the nation’s modernist future.45 Szymanowskian synthesis characterized Régamey’s Persian Songs (1940–1942) and Quintet for clarinet, bassoon, violin, cello, and piano (1944), both of which created an audible bridge between Szymanowski’s sound world (with echoes of Debussy and early Stravinsky) and the neoclassical and dodecaphonic interventions of the interwar years. Much as Szymanowski had done in the Stabat Mater, Régamey sought the appropriate technical materials to realize his expressive goals for each creative task, and he was not shy about combining and juxtaposing different tools from his compositional toolbox. After the war, in 1948, Régamey would explain that he had employed a “strict dodecaphonic technique” in composing the fifth Persian Song and the “Intermezzo Romantico” movement of the Quintet, but his was a selective and fluid dodecaphony.46 Citing Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto (1935) as an inspiration, Régamey employed twelve-tone rows to generate some of his harmonic material, but he did not avoid triads or other references to functional harmony. He embraced the concept of developing variation, and he experimented with various forms of symmetry in his counterpoint, but his technique shifted fluidly across these multi-movement works. In the Persian Songs, echoes of Berg’s post-romantic harmonic language and lyricism combine with Prokofiev’s grotesquerie and Ravel’s instrumental colors to underscore the texts, taken from the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, while the Quintet owes a stronger debt to French neoclassicism and to early Schoenberg.47 By cataloging and remixing modernist signifiers from the first half of the twentieth century, Régamey’s wartime compositions reminded the assembled composers

22     backwardness (Zaległość)

of the musical world in which they had been active participants just a few years before and allowed them to imagine a future in which they might rejoin that world. Witold Lutosławski later recalled that the Quintet had made a particular impression because the audience was unfamiliar with dodecaphony, and this piece gave listeners an opportunity to engage with contemporary modernist musical language.48 Lutosławski’s own compositional activity in these years traced a similar arc from the past to the future: his two-piano Paganini Variations (1941) reflected the influence of nineteenth-century virtuoso traditions (and his and Andrzej Panufnik’s own café performances), his Songs of the Underground Resistance (1942–1944) reflected the needs of the present moment, and the first movement of his modernist Symphony no. 1 (1941–47) was composed for the future, even though he had no assurance that he would ever hear it in performance. In other words, Polish composers and audiences were acting on faith; they were invested in a modernist future, even as the world crashed around them. The stakes for participating in this precarious wartime musical life were high, and many Polish artists and intellectuals suffered serious personal and material losses, especially after the initial invasions in 1939, the Warsaw uprising in 1944, and during the genocidal campaign waged against Polish Jews. The Holocaust claimed the lives of many Polish-Jewish musicians, composers, and scholars, who, before the war, had participated actively in Polish musical institutions and in Polish national culture. Timothy Snyder notes that at least 4.8 million Polish citizens died over the course of the war, with the majority of those deaths taking place in the Nazi-controlled zones.49 The trauma sustained by the survivors—by those who spent the war in Polish territory and also by those who were elsewhere, like Zygmunt Mycielski (who fought in France and then was sent to a German labor camp) and Zofia Lissa—was undeniable, and certainly their wartime experiences inflected their goals for the national future.50 But it is important to recognize that their wartime experiences did not erase their interwar experiences. These individuals were not starting over from zero. They brought their existing worldviews and aesthetic philosophies to the challenge of rebuilding Poland after the war. The demands of the postwar period transformed their earlier convictions, and new political and aesthetic discourses arose to meet new conditions. But interwar concerns about Polish backwardness—and competing modernizationist and modernist strategies for rolling back that backwardness—continued to fuel postwar debates about how best to move forward. R E BU I L D I N G A N D M O D E R N I Z AT IO N A F T E R WO R L D WA R I I

As historians Krystyna Kersten and Jan T. Gross remind us, the transition to communism after the war in Poland was not an instantaneous one. During the postwar

backwardness (Zaległość)    23

period, a yet-diffuse state power was faced with the daunting task of rebuilding the devastated nation and with redistributing people within newly drawn borders. During this period of transition, despite strong ambivalence toward the Soviets (and the Red Army), there was a sense within much of the Polish population that the communists might have the power to lead Poland out of its postwar devastation and toward a new future.51 Leaders such as Władysław Gomułka fought to articulate a uniquely Polish road to socialism—a road that would lead to the same ultimate goal as that of the Soviet Union, but founded on the specific traditions and experiences of the Polish nation. As time went on, the available “nationalist” interpretative directions for this road narrowed. In August 1948, Gomułka was removed from leadership (he would later be imprisoned), and in December of that year, the consolidation of the Polish Workers’ Party (PPR) and the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) made it clear that the USSR would exert stronger centralized control over Poland’s political and social development. The Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR) would serve as an agent of that control. J. Mackenzie Pierce has demonstrated that the push to rebuild cultural institutional infrastructure after the war—and the attendant desire to reconstitute and re-musicalize the Polish audience—grew directly out of cultural actors’ wartime experiences. In some cases, especially in Kraków, publication and performance institutions had already been functional (at various levels) before the war ended, and this allowed for a relatively seamless transition afterward. For example, Tadeusz Ochlewski had already laid groundwork for the 1945 establishment of the national music publishing firm Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne (PWM) during the war years, when he had begun to collect scores and manuscripts.52 After the war was over, the perpetuation of a Polish musical tradition took on a new urgency, as reckoning with material and personal losses rendered the precariousness of that tradition all too clear. Considerations of modernity and futurity moved into the background, and the temporal focus of reconstruction discourse shifted to the present moment and to restoring a connection to a prewar past. Critic Jerzy Waldorff articulated this very clearly in his report on the first postwar season of the Kraków Philharmonic Orchestra. This was the first full concert season after the war, in a city that, although it is now free, has been badly depleted by the [German] occupiers’ six-year economic depredation. It seems like an important thing, therefore, to put together an accurate report of the Philharmonic’s first musical season in free Kraków—and this is not only important for the contemporary reader. It may come about someday that a historian will be interested in this question: how quickly did Polish culture rebuild itself after this most terrible war? How long were the Germans able to paralyze Polish cultural life through unparalleled extermination of its practitioners and destruction of its material resources? Did this culture manage to rebuild from the ashes after a year, or after two, or perhaps after a great number of years? If [my] report fell into the hands

24     backwardness (Zaległość) of this interested historian, the answer could be found here—at least regarding the rebirth of one specific institution: the Kraków Philharmonic. They will learn that this institution was already, in its first postwar season, engaging with life no less intensely than it might have done before the war.53

Waldorff here broke the conventional bounds of the text to speak directly to us, reassuring the future reader that the war had only represented a pause in Polish cultural life, not its cessation. This text betrays considerable anxiety about the future, and about future readers’ judgment of past realities in Kraków, but there is little sense of what might take place in the interim between the present and the future moments. Within two or three years, it became easier to imagine that future. Discourses of rebuilding transformed into discourses of modernization, linking cultural progress to processes of economic, industrial, and political development. The image in figure 1 from a report about the 1947–48 concert season of the Silesian Philharmonic Orchestra in Katowice demonstrates this linkage very well. Here, the orchestra’s tour is depicted as a starburst, with the institution reaching outward from its industrial center in Katowice. This conflation of cultural and economic uplift lay at the foundation of the Marxist-modernizationist position, and there was certainly a hope that both forces would emanate from the urban centers out into the nation as a whole. As historian Mary Werden has argued, this strategy for generating progress was not a phenomenon located solely within the Soviet orbit. In the mid-twentieth century, discourses of development featured in the domestic policy of many nations, including the United States, where they became an important vehicle for articulating transnational power relations between the West and the Global South. The vision of modernity projected out of these various modernization discourses might have been different (capitalist growth vs. socialist revolution), but the desire to improve citizens’ lives and extend colonial power through the mechanisms of economic development was part of a broader postwar conversation.54 Similarly, a growing body of scholarship about middlebrow culture in the twentieth century suggests that the instrumentalization of cultural education in service of class uplift—and national uplift—was a phenomenon occurring in the West at the same time that it was happening in the East.55 As late as 1947 and 1948, the prevalence of modernization discourse in the Polish musical sphere was not necessarily an indication that its speakers were, themselves, doctrinaire Marxists, or that they were in favor of increasingly centralized cultural controls coming from the state and the party. Artists, scholars, and political leaders understood that cultural authority was still up for grabs within this new, postwar social-political order.56 Generalized language about modernization as a mechanism for moving Poland forward along a developmental timeline had significant appeal for an audience that was again beginning to think about the future. Almost everyone recognized the enormous practical advantage of tapping

figure 1. “Mapa wyjazdów,” in Filharmonia Śląska, Sprawozdanie z sezon 1947–48 (Katowice 1948). Creative commons license available through Polona, Digital Library of the National Library of Poland.

26     backwardness (Zaległość)

into widespread and urgent concerns about Poland’s cultural, economic, and political status, and it was understood that the real competition for legitimization would take place on the battleground of backwardness. NAV IG AT I N G S O C IA L I S T R E A L I SM

The boundary that had demarcated the difference between conservatives and progressives before the war was no longer a functional one, because everyone was now in the progress business. This shared goal had eclipsed the divergent forms of modernity projected outward by the two discourses. This was even true as aesthetic discussions turned to the topic of socialist realism in late 1947, after President Bolesław Bierut spoke on 16 November at the opening of the new radio station in Wrocław. Bierut called for new power relations in Polish culture: “The nation has the right to make demands of [its] artists, and one of these fundamental demands is that the deeper style of the [art]work, its goal, its purpose and its intensions, should meet the needs of the general audience.”57 Within the music community, it was not immediately clear what the implications of Bierut’s speech might be, because language about progress somewhat obscured questions about the goals of that progress—or, more contentiously, about the source of cultural backwardness. For example, when Zofia Lissa returned to Poland from the Soviet Union in 1947, she permuted the three fundamental principles of socialist realist aesthetics (ideological commitment, or ideinost’; national, folk spirit, or narodnost’; and a commitment to the Party, or partiinost’) to fit the Polish context.58 Above all, this meant that she drew on widely shared concerns about the backwardness of the Polish audience, and she framed socialist realism as a modernizationist musical discourse with the power to reverse that backwardness. Musicologist Pauline Fairclough has argued that, in the Soviet Union, socialist realist aesthetics were bound up with concerns about modernizing the mass audience, transforming them into cultured, good Soviet citizens. Although modes of consumption and distribution functioned differently than in the West, the signifiers of high culture (and of national culture) still bore an aspirational promise. Therefore, helping audiences to access those signifiers would support their development, and so too would encouraging composers to produce music appropriate to the tasks of education and outreach.59 Lissa’s interwar study of phenomenology and music perception had shaped her ideas about music’s semantic and representational value. Questions of musical meaning and communication had always been important to Lissa, and she turned to them with new urgency after her time in the Soviet Union, where she strengthened her belief in the politically, ideologically formative power of music to defeat national backwardness, leading Poles toward the communist revolutionary future. She argued in 1948 that Western European music had gone through a crisis in the

backwardness (Zaległość)    27

interwar period that had robbed it of its communicative function. Thus, in her view, Polish music should not follow the European model down this path, which would only deepen the national crisis.60 Lissa and her musicologist colleagues (especially Józef Chomiński and Stefania Łobaczewska) used the language of modernization to argue that Poland’s new social and political beginning required a new cultural foundation. Socialist art would be realist art, reflective of the real social and historical conditions facing artists and audiences alike. Artists, Lissa insisted, had a social responsibility to listen to their audiences and to learn from them as they worked together to realize a socialist future.61 The equation between modernization and cultural progress was not one that all Polish cultural actors were keen to accept. Stefan Kisielewski, for instance, had immediately after the war reaffirmed his commitment to interwar modernism; as the editor of the music journal Ruch Muzyczny (The Musical Movement), he did not hesitate in 1945 to announce his own program for stimulating the advancement of Polish culture. The journal’s opening mission statement might as well have been a reprint of Szymanowski’s 1929 interview in Świat from the beginning of this chapter. Pointing to Chopin and Szymanowski as examples, the editor argued that those two figures had created music that was equally European and Polish. “They spoke their Polishness out to the world, thereby adding the Polish voice—and [their] individual art—to the great choir of universal culture.”62 In his review of the 1945 Festival of Contemporary Music, which took place in Kraków in September of that year, Kisielewski lamented that the war had severed Poles’ connection to the “West European ‘forge’ of technique,” and he praised composers Artur Malawski, Roman Palester, and Witold Lutosławski for “looking to the future” and creating work that was “avant-garde (awangardowa) in the true sense of the word, blazing a new path through the yet-unknown thicket of truly new music.”63 Kisielewski was not concerned that these artists’ development be linked to modernization or social progress in the nation; rather, he envisioned an aesthetic progress that would reestablish Poland within a broader European cultural community. Kisielewski’s perspective only sharpened as Marxist-modernizationist perspectives gained influence in 1947 and 1948. Reacting against the Marxist camp’s strategic adoption of backwardness discourse, he argued that music existed on a politically neutral plane separate from the needs of society. For example, in his article “Is Music Unhumanistic?” for the Catholic cultural journal, Znak (Signal), Kisielewski defended the “aristocratic isolation” of musical art: “It does not diminish [music’s] significance that it is only accessible to the few, and that its accessibility is predicated on qualifications of nearly a physical nature. Indeed, the summit of a mountain is also only accessible to tourists with physical strength, and yet, in spite of its inaccessibility—its ‘eliteness’—it remains one of the symbols and signposts of truth and universal beauty. Thus, it seems to me, is the function of ‘hermetic’ and ideal music.”64 According to Kisielewski’s understanding of artistic

28     backwardness (Zaległość)

value, music could not be implicated within social or political backwardness and could not be expected to effect positive (or negative) change in these realms. Rather, Polish music faced a crisis of artistic backwardness, and that crisis could only be addressed by allowing Polish artists to interact with European culture. This was an argument that Kisielewski was willing to maintain even as the political environment became less hospitable to his views. Throughout 1948, he wrote a flurry of articles attacking socialist realism head-on. Finally, his provocation titled “Does Formalism Exist in Music?” attracted a debate-ending reply from Vice Minister Włodzimierz Sokorski, “Formalism and Realism in Music,” which answered Kisielewski’s rhetorical question with a definitive “yes.”65 Not every member of the interwar modernist generation held such an extreme position as Kisielewski’s. Within the context of postwar rebuilding, there were many artists who found it possible to imagine that artistic, aesthetic progress might be linked to national progress. They charted a middle path, synthesizing the modernizationist and modernist positions, using language that signaled their willingness to work with the increasingly powerful Marxist group while also retaining a commitment to artistic, aesthetic progress. One important model for this discourse came from Konstanty Régamey, even though he had left Poland in 1944 and was now living in Switzerland. As discussed above, Régamey’s Content and Form from 1933 had argued for artists’ special capacity to discern the “Content” of life, in which all the multiplicities of meaning and human experience were synthesized in an organic whole. Artists would then translate that Content into a specific “Form,” through which the audience might recognize and encounter Content itself. In 1948, Régamey published a pair of essays in Kwartalnik Muzyczny (Musical Quarterly) in which he extended his earlier aesthetic theory to incorporate the dimension of artistic change over time.66 The most insistent theme in these essays was their thesis that the Form through which artists communicated Content was constantly in flux, reflecting changes in social and cultural forms of human experience and expression. It was the artist’s responsibility to intuit the most appropriate Form and to challenge the audience with art that resonated with the Content of contemporary life. Régamey’s aesthetic framework was an interesting one in this historical moment, because it was neither formalist nor socialist realist. In its embrace of content and expressivity, Régamey’s invocation of synthesis here invited a kind of rapprochement with Lissa’s goals; the main difference lay in the role of the artist. Within the frame of Régamey’s argument, artists must remain perpetually dissatisfied with their ability to capture their own experience of content through art, and this dissatisfaction would push them to seek new modes of expression: When the artist completes his work, he has a sense that he has expressed all of the internal impulses that have been nagging at him. . . . Immediately, however, in the

backwardness (Zaległość)    29 very moment in which the work is finished, when it becomes somewhat detached from the artist and it begins to lead its own independent life, the artist becomes aware that his [creative] potential is yet again intact, untouched, demanding further discharge. In this manner, the impulse surfaces—not an impulse to continue with the work that is already finished . . . but to begin a new work.67

In Régamey’s view, it was therefore the artist—not the audience—who drove the cycle of progress: the process of creation, reevaluation, and innovation motivated the evolution of artistic style. It was the artist’s responsibility to seek the appropriate form for the communication of content. Contra Kisielewski, Régamey argued that this evolution did not take place independent of the audience, who, upon encountering Content through the artist’s formal innovations, would struggle to engage with that artwork, to understand it. Drawing on the work of Austrian art historian Aloïs Riegl, and especially on Riegl’s notion of Kunstwollen, Régamey projected that the audience’s affective experience of the artwork would cause them to become aware of their own creative potential, implicating them as “cocreators” (współtwórcy).68 This dialogic feedback circle worked only when artists possessed a powerful intuition into the needs of the audience. If they allowed their own creative desires to push them too far into experiment (into formalism), they would risk losing the audience; alternately, if they relied too heavily on tired conventions, the audience would not have an affective experience, and progress would not be achieved. Although Régamey was no longer in Poland, his close associates from before the war were making similar arguments, linking the artist to the audience, and aesthetic progress to social progress. In his 1948 article “Artists and the Masses,” Zygmunt Mycielski proposed that Polish music would never move forward if artists isolated themselves from the needs of the audience.69 On the strength of this argument, Lissa later cited it as evidence of Mycielski’s support for socialist realism. Later in the article, however, the composer resisted the increased hegemony of the Marxist-modernizationist position, arguing that there should also be space for “great” artists to make “great” art. À la Régamey, Mycielski proposed that art would serve the cultural needs of the audience by challenging them to grow as listeners. In Mycielski’s pushback, we begin to see the cracks appearing in the consensus that had facilitated national reconstruction after the war. So long as modernizationists and modernists were able to address generalized fears about Polish backwardness (figured generically as zaległość), then they could also speak in very broad terms about progress. But things got more difficult when those speakers began to name the perpetrators of backwardness; when that happened, the differences in their visions for Polish cultural modernity and for Polish music popped out in relief, and it was more difficult to bridge the gap between the two positions.

30     backwardness (Zaległość)

In 1948, Zofia Lissa’s article, “The Sociological Aspect in Polish Contemporary Music” (published alongside Régamey’s piece about artistic evolution), made it clear that the fault for Polish backwardness did not lie in the mass audience; their underdevelopment was a temporary and circumstantial condition. No, the real source of Polish cultural lag was Polish artists themselves, who clung to outdated, bourgeois notions of artistic progress.70 Lissa borrowed a page from the interwar conservatives in building her argument about aesthetic progress, rejecting Régamey’s (and Mycielski’s) insistence that artists’ modernist vision could act upon the audience. Lissa argued that artists’ own backwardness was the real cultural crisis in postwar Poland, because theirs was a purposeful backwardness, a willful resistance to the socialist future. Composers were writing for an elite audience that no longer existed, which meant that their music had no proper audience, no “receivers” (odbiorcy); she named Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Honegger, and Hindemith as prime examples.71 Lissa argued that the mass audience would not be able to accept or appreciate “formalist” contemporary art, because such artforms had no resonance with their lives or experiences. For Lissa’s Polish audience at the beginning of 1948, her critical rhetorical gestures might have recalled Rytel’s writing in the 1930s at least as strongly as the language of Soviet cultural ideologues, whose full impact had not yet been felt in the Polish music community. Like the interwar conservatives, Lissa conjured a progress that grew out of an earlier tradition, and she criticized modernist artists who privileged innovation. Her goals, however, were different. Rytel and his colleagues had desired the signifiers of an older art music tradition in order to recreate Poland as a simulacrum of nineteenth-century Germany, with its attendant investment in romantic nationalism. Lissa, on the other hand, rejected the idealist aesthetics that deified the canon and genius composers, and she was uninterested in the pursuit of an insular, exclusionary national tradition (a tradition that would certainly have rejected her, as a Polish-Jewish woman). For Lissa, a turn toward the new audience was a turn toward the future. Only an “epigone of innovation” (epigon nowatorstwa) would measure success against a world-historical timeline dependent on Western, bourgeois criteria for progress.72 This did not mean, she insisted, that she was asking composers to pander to the Polish mass audience; rather, she wanted them to listen to and learn from the audience, and to build upon the “heritage” (dziedzictwo) and “tradition” (tradycja) that had nourished their forebears.73 Perhaps more than any other member of the Marxist-modernizationist group, Zofia Lissa recognized that she was asking Polish artists to do something difficult. Especially for artists and intellectuals who had, like herself, struggled in the interwar years to learn about contemporary music amid the conservative and xenophobic tendencies of their conservative elders, it was a bitter pill to ask them to reject interwar modernism as the root of Polish backwardness. Yet she remained firm in her

backwardness (Zaległość)    31

conviction that the continuation of interwar progressives’ path would only further entrench their marginal position. Calling artists to take up the “social commission” (zamówienie społeczne), Lissa explained that, instead of money (which composers would receive from the State), the audience’s currency would return to the artist in the form of ideological and cultural consciousness. When artists succeeded in stimulating such consciousness, the audiences would, in turn, discover new needs and issue new social commissions.74 She here reversed Régamey’s dialogic notion of cultural progress: while, for Régamey, the creative impulse arose within the artist, Lissa’s social commission originated in the audience. This discrepancy pointed toward their different visions for Polish musical modernity, and it was no longer possible to ignore that difference. Some artists from the aesthetic modernist group held a hard line against Lissa’s rhetoric of the social commission. Stefan Kisielewski rejected the notion out of hand. If art had nothing to do with the needs of society, then questions of use value or communication with the mass audience could only impoverish it.75 Zygmunt Mycielski and other modernist interwar figures, though, continued to tread a middle ground, thereby retaining their influence and their voice in the music community. Their synthesis of modernization and modernism, socialist realism and formalism, had a curious effect; in retrospect, much of what they said and wrote about music in this period seems to line up with the doctrinaire language of socialist realism. However, no matter how much the surface of their discourse took on the signifiers of Stalinist rhetoric in the late 1940s and early 1950s, many of these modernists never rejected Szymanowski’s understanding of Polish cultural progress in relation to a European liberal intellectual tradition.76 As a result, even as socialist realism became official aesthetic discourse, it is still possible to identify moments when these cultural actors were defending their authority to direct the path of Polish musical life. For example, in 1948, Kwartalnik Muzyczny distributed a survey about compositional technique and aesthetics to a group of Polish composers.77 The survey’s nine questions were probably meant to serve as a kind of litmus test, separating its respondents into two groups (Marxist-modernizationists and modernists). The actual results demonstrated the richness and complexity of the middle ground between those positions. The survey included questions about dodecaphony and about folk music as a foundation for contemporary music, clearly intended to provoke partisan responses. The survey’s final question was even more heavily loaded, asking about the relationship between musical progress and the reconstruction of Polish society after the war: “What do you think about the new tasks that have arisen in connection with the [current] reorganization of [Poland’s] social structures? Do these tasks present new technical and formal possibilities [to composers]?”78 The first two responses came from Bolesław Woytowicz and Konstanty Régamey, printed together in the final 1948 issue, and the third came from

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Zygmunt Mycielski in early 1949.79 All three composers, to different degrees, demonstrated their concern for both the creative elite and the mass audience, and their desire to promote progress within both groups. Therefore, the question revealed that these modernist composers’ construction of Polish lag was complex, carving out a space between Kisielewski’s negation of the audience and the Marxists’ critique of artists. Backwardness was affecting both groups, they contended, and would have to be attacked from both directions. Régamey, who was writing from Switzerland, was the least invested in the political implications of his answers. Reflecting his own theory of artistic evolution, he argued that the employ of anachronistic forms and styles would only produce music plagued with an “internal falsity” (wewnętrzny fałsz), and that the audience would recognize that falsity for what it was. Instead, he argued that the new audience—the new, postwar Polish music culture—should be regarded as a blank template, ready and waiting for artists to educate them: “There, where there is no habituation, it is possible to begin at once with contemporary music.”80 Even with dodecaphony, the key was composers’ relationship to technique: if they used it to generate a synthesis of disparate elements and to communicate their own creative vision, then they would produce expressive and progressive music. By contrast, Woytowicz and Mycielski’s responses both walked a fine line: neither of them professed an interest in the dodecaphonic technique, but they also both sidestepped the notion of folk music as a foundation for contemporary musical language. The composers’ true rhetorical agility came through later in the survey. Mycielski simultaneously reflected his conversance with socialist realism and his own modernist aesthetic goals. He called on composers to recognize that they could not rely on old musical forms in these new times: “I believe that we are living in an epoch that will produce a new form—something equally great and enduring as the sonata form. We cannot know what [this form] will be. . . . The symphony doesn’t interest the masses, who are indeed joining [our] artistic life. Thus, we [composers] must find new forms and techniques for these new times. I believe that in no time we will find [them]! For the symphony is already old. [When we use it, it is as if we are] traveling by stagecoach to get to the airport.”81 In this imaginative rumination, Mycielski linked mobilization of the mass audience with progress, and accused artists of lingering in the past. However, he also invoked a Régameyan understanding of progress when he argued that the discovery of new forms was something that only artists could do. Perhaps referring to Zhdanov’s speech to the Soviet Composers’ Union in the previous year, Mycielski insisted that artistic progress would never arise out of “decrees and resolutions.”82 The survey response from pianist-composer Bolesław Woytowicz is the most surprising, because, of the three, the trajectory of his career did not suggest any kind of tension with socialist realism. Works such as the patently ideological Cantata in Praise of Work (Kantata na pochwałę pracy) of 1947, the descriptive Sym-

backwardness (Zaległość)    33

phony no. 2 (later known as the Symfonia Warszawska) of 1945, and several mass songs had established him as one of the state’s most celebrated composers.83 In his response to the survey’s final question, though, Woytowicz stood firm in his assertion of artists’ authority in initiating and directing cultural progress. He protested the use of “formalism” as a blanket descriptor for artistic complexity. The term had simply become a weapon in the hands of “a few irresponsible demagogues” (nieodpowiedzialni demagodzy), limiting composers’ freedom. The postwar world, he argued, was a complicated place, and Polish art needed to reflect this complexity. Artists might therefore require “formalistic” compositional techniques and forms because “there are those creative processes that must be realized in a highly complicated form, or in general they cannot be realized.”84 Woytowicz worried that, if they were restricted to the use of the Marxists’ simplified “new language,” Polish composers would not be able to convert their creative visions into musical form. As a result, they would not be able to engage the Polish audience, and they would only achieve a turn toward the status quo ante.85 In the end, Woytowicz insisted that, “really, the only person who can know for sure [if an artwork is formalistic] is the artist himself.”86 Only the composer could determine whether contemporary musical techniques were warranted by the demands of artistic content, or if they were being employed without a reason, reflecting an intellectual indulgence. Neither Woytowicz nor Mycielski were openly arguing that Polish composers should be able to use techniques and styles from Western Europe, but the implication was there. We might hear an echo of Szymanowski’s 1929 injunction that it was an artist’s “cultural responsibility” to know about all available techniques and ideas; only then would they be able to develop the new forms that would move Polish culture out of its backwardness. In fact, in this historical moment, Mycielski used Szymanowski’s example to build a very similar argument: “Szymanowski understood and saw that mass culture gauges itself against the highest achievements and pulls itself up [accordingly]. Art requires these highest standards and authorities.”87 If Poland wanted to shed its reputation as a culturally backward “Pipidówka” (a fictional backwater town), then the artist-intellectual class should retain its authority over art. D I SP L AC I N G M O D E R N I SM

In the summer of 1948, Tikhon Khrennikov visited Poland with a Soviet delegation to discuss formalism and realism with their Polish colleagues. This visit, in the wake of the Soviet Central Committee Resolution on music and Andrei Zhdanov’s February 1948 address to the Soviet Composers’ Union, added a new layer of urgency to discussions of socialist realism in Polish music.88 An article by Khrennikov appeared in Ruch Muzyczny, outlining the Soviet composers’ plan to create music for the mass audience and to refuse Western elitism. In Khrennikov’s formulation

34     backwardness (Zaległość)

(clearly based on Zhdanov’s language), realism was the only “progressive worldview,” reflecting a “true sensitivity to the world,” while formalism and modernism represented an impoverished, pathological “lack of faith in the power of progress and in the ideals of man.”89 Coming in a historical moment when the top-down authority of the Communist Party in Poland was growing stronger, Khrennikov’s words further bolstered the authority of Lissa, Sokorski, and others in the Marxistmodernizationist group and undercut the authority of the modernist position. The November 1948 congress of the Polish Composers’ Union featured an announcement that musicologists would be joining the union, and that it would be their responsibility to lead composers forward in matters of ideology and aesthetics. Appropriately, the congress culminated in a five-point mission statement for the union, meant to establish its goals for the future; it seems likely that these goals were written by the newly admitted musicologists. A concern for progress (and its implied twin, backwardness) pervades the mission statement. There was one possible concession to the synthesis-based aesthetics of the modernist group: “Musical works that are grounded in the national tradition of Polish music (and above all in the tradition set out by Fryderyk Chopin) will not forgo the newest achievements in compositional technique related to the great musical forms (symphonic, chamber, oratorio, opera, solo, etc.).”90 This concession lost some of its meaning, however, in conjunction with the assertion that Polish composers’ primary responsibility was to reach out to the “new listener” through the “creation of works, which through adopting the highest artistic level, may be understood and felt by . . . the worker and the Polish peasant.”91 These feints toward “high artistic level” and the “newest technical achievements” could not override the directive that musical works should be written on a level that could be understood by even the least-educated listener. The very notion of artists as an elite class, allowed to retain discretionary authority in determining the direction of Poland’s cultural evolution, was dismissed as a mark of backwardness in the fifth point: “Polish composers understand that elitism, both in creative production and in the organization of their union, is an anachronism in [the context of] our reality.”92 The union’s 1948 mission statement anticipated the direction that Polish musical discourse and activity would take between 1949 and Stalin’s death in 1953. In the next chapter, I will explore the implications of the party-state leaders’ attempt to divest elite culture of its authority, an effort that received its clearest statement at the 1949 Composers’ Union Congress in the small resort town of Łagów-Lubuski. The Marxist-modernizationist vision for the future assumed nearly hegemonic power in the subsequent years of Stalinist political control, but there were many modernists who continued to advocate for their own specialized interests. They retained the Szymanowskian-Régameyan conviction that the power to generate cultural and social progress—and to determine what constituted Polishness in music—belonged to the artist-intellectual class.

2

Lack (Brak) The Shifting Status of the Artist-Intellectual Class during the Thaw

T H E P O L I SH Z H D A N OV S H C H I NA

In the summer of 1949, the Polish Composers’ Union held a congress in Western Poland, in the resort town of Łagów-Lubuski. As discussed in chapter 1, the question of realism in music had already been a theme at previous union meetings, but it was at the Łagów congress that these aesthetic arguments became attached to a new, authoritative figure: Żdanow (Andrei Zhdanov). At this meeting, participants grappled with the implications of Zhdanov’s infamous 1948 address to the Soviet Composers’ Union.1 Excerpts of Zhdanov’s speech had appeared in the cultural journal Odrodzenie (Revival), but had not attracted much specific attention in the musical press.2 At the 1949 union congress, Zhdanov’s rhetoric about the “two currents” in Soviet musical life (one grounded in Russian tradition, realism, and the communication of ideological content to its audiences; the other rejecting that tradition in favor of novelty and empty experiments) served as a lens through which previously diffuse aesthetic arguments gained a new focus and function. Vice Minister Sokorski and Zofia Lissa used Zhdanov’s language to flip the existing power relations between artists and audiences, thereby fulfilling the challenge issued by President Bierut in 1947. Instead of leading the way to the future, artists and intellectuals were now meant to follow the cultural leadership of the mass audience, which had inherited the spirit of the epoch. In all practicality, officials working in the Ministry of Culture and Art and in the party’s Culture Department understood that artists and intellectuals could not actually look to the mass audience for leadership. This audience, which included the peasant and worker classes, still lacked consistent access to educational and 35

36     lack (brak)

cultural institutions. Therefore, even as official rhetoric heralded the organic ground-up flow of energy that would animate Poland’s cultural and ideological evolution, the party-state apparatus was also ready to implement strong top-down mechanisms to direct artists’ activities toward uplift and education. Composers resisted the loss of their autonomy, and they continued to assert their agency in leading Polish culture into the future. In this chapter, I trace the discursive tug-ofwar between the artist-intellectual class and party-state representatives from 1949 to 1957, dates that bookend the formulation, enforcement, and gradual dismantling of Stalinist cultural politics in Poland. Throughout this period, the two groups competed to articulate the needs of the broader Polish audience. Composers, however, possessed the special ability to generate culture, while, quite often, party-state representatives were only able to critique its manifestations; this discrepancy of power gradually allowed composers to reassert their cultural authority in the years leading up to the 1956 Polish October revolution. After the war, many members of the Paris-educated, post-Szymanowski generation of composers had worked with (and in) party-state cultural institutions in service of rebuilding and modernizing Polish culture. But their statements about audience outreach usually presumed that artists (with their technical expertise and creative sensibilities) would drive this process. The same was true at the Łagów congress. For example, Bolesław Woytowicz and Zygmunt Mycielski, who was the president of the union at the time, insisted at Łagów that artists should maintain their leadership function in society and that they should retain creative control over their approach to musical form. In his keynote address, Mycielski sandwiched his contrarian argument between doctrinaire repetitions of Zhdanov’s ideas; his tone was guarded but his message was clear: “No one here is using the slogan ‘art for art’s sake,’ or [erecting] some kind of impenetrable shrine accessible only to a chosen few, who pretend to hold a monopoly on expertise (znawstwo). Rather, the Polish composer-musician longs to sustain and develop a different monopoly. This is a monopoly predicated on professional specialization (fachowość) and knowledge, which allow him to take the lead in matters connected with music. [From this leadership role, the composer will be able] to conceptualize and realize . . . art, whose values serve the greater good of the entire nation.”3 Several things are notable here: first, Mycielski proclaimed that the battle against formalism had already been won in Poland—therefore implying that no further corrective action was necessary. Second, he emphasized the national context over the socialist one to such an extent that his speech more closely resembled Karol Szymanowski’s 1930 The Educational Role of Musical Culture than it did Zhdanov’s 1948 speech. He mapped realism and formalism onto art that fulfilled its social and national responsibility and art that rejected that responsibility. Art that embraced communication and expressivity versus art that reveled in “styleless, chaotic-eclectic mayhem,” enamored with its own technical cleverness. This

lack (brak)    37

was hardly a doctrinaire definition of socialist realism, as it lacked a clear political component. Mycielski also explicitly disavowed the prescriptive function of his words: “I don’t think we would be able to identify . . . works that demonstrated pure formalism or pure realism.”4 Polish composers were so varied, he argued, and they used so many different musical languages, that evaluation would require an informed and contextual perspective. This last point led to his urgent conclusion: composers were ready to assume a leadership function, based not only on their ideological commitments but also their professional qualifications. Altogether, this statement mounted a multivalent defense against the incursions of the Zhdanovshchina, even in the midst of a speech that otherwise normalized the drive toward socialist realism. Throughout the four-day congress, composers—and especially those from the interwar generation—continued to assert the valuable social function of an artistintellectual class in reaching out to the mass audience, calling back to the themes outlined in chapter 1. Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has argued, however, that the party was determined to dismantle intellectuals’ exclusive authority to disseminate knowledge and culture in East-Central Europe.5 Indeed, both Vice Minister Włodzimierz Sokorski and Zofia Lissa repeatedly enjoined composers to examine themselves (read: to engage in self-criticism) and to set aside any notion of their special qualifications. While Sokorski and Lissa did not agree about the way that socialist realism should be translated into specific musical terms, they were united on this question of the artist-intellectual class. Lissa warned Polish artists that their own instincts might lead them astray. Instead, they needed to seek out the needs of the audience: “The most important—and therefore the most difficult—task ahead is the discernment of [the listeners’ needs]. And there is no other solution than to ask the listeners about [their] needs directly.”6 In her concern for the audience, we find traces of Lissa’s arguments from the earlier 1940s about the sociological function of music. In plaiting these threads together with the inflexible dogma of Zhdanov’s pronouncements, however, Lissa positioned herself in a strictly oppositional relationship with composers.7 Until the congress at Łagów, many Polish musicians had expected to continue building elite culture alongside mass culture, working from the conviction that a robust elite class would also serve the uplift of the broader audience.8 At Łagów, that presumption was flipped on its head. All notions of cultural prestige required realignment, and approachability became the most important criterion for evaluating any given composition. Approachability, however, could be defined in different ways—an issue that became abundantly clear during the congress’s first listening session (przesłuchanie), where attendees heard and discussed three pieces of music: Kazimierz Sikorski’s Overture for small orchestra (1945), Zygmunt Mycielski’s Silesian Overture for symphony orchestra and two pianos (1948), and Zbigniew Turski’s

38     lack (brak)

Symphony no. 2, “Olympic” (1948). Presented in this order, the three compositions progressed from the simplest to the most complex in terms of their length, form, and musical language. The ensuing discussion developed the themes of Mycielski’s speech: while the aesthetic categories of “realism” and “formalism” were certainly in play, speakers’ language recalled the interwar debates between Piotr Rytel’s “conservative” camp and Szymanowski’s “progressives.” The crux of that earlier debate about modernity in music, discussed in chapter 1, lay at the intersection of two pressing concerns: the technical-aesthetic development of contemporary music and the desire to communicate with (and constitute) a national audience. On both sides, the stakes of Polish cultural progress were contingent on these two questions. For the conservatives, progress was a linear construct, emerging from—and extending, rather than challenging—a (Germanic) nineteenth-century tradition. The conservatives had privileged the signifiers of that tradition: heroic harmonic trajectories, organic motivic development, and Wagnerian narrative. Szymanowski, and then Konstanty Régamey after him, had protested that audiences no longer felt the contemporary resonance of these older harmonic and melodic conventions. Instead, progressives had encouraged Polish composers to listen widely to modernist European traditions, and to synthesize new sounds and new languages with existing national traditions to generate meaning and progress. At the 1949 Łagów listening session, composers were again debating the relationship between musical meaning and technique, especially in abstract instrumental music. They responded to their colleagues’ pieces as if they represented a spectrum of available possibilities, available futures for Polish music, and their reactions reveal serious disagreement about the role that artists would play in shaping those futures. Bolesław Woytowicz argued, for instance, that Sikorski’s Overture, which the composer had intended as educational “outreach music,” was actually inaccessible to audiences because it was boring.9 It was too simple to be meaningful. The comparison between Mycielski’s Silesian Overture and Turski’s symphony was more heated, in part because these two pieces represented different streams of neoclassicism. In his keynote address, Mycielski had critiqued interwar composers for their eclecticism and “stylelessness,” but he also praised developments in the areas of meter/rhythm and exploration of instrumental timbres. Mycielski’s Silesian Overture, with its propulsive A sections and expressive B section, uses both metric pulse and timbre to articulate structure. The A theme has a perpetuum mobile character, but in its first presentation Mycielski employs rests to interrupt its progress, breaking the material into contained blocks—first very short, but then growing longer and building momentum. The thematic material is simple, but Mycielski takes advantage of the discrete blocks to explore different textures and groups of instruments, setting up contrasts to propel the music forward. In the

figure 2. Zygmunt Mycielski, Silesian Overture (Uwertura śląska) (1948), page 36. Copyright © 1950 Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, Kraków, Poland. Excerpt used by kind permission of Zofia Mycielska-Golik.

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figure 3. Zbigniew Turski, Symphony no. 2, “Olympic” (1948), page 8. Copyright © 1967 Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, Kraków, Poland . Excerpt used by kind permission of the estate of Zbigniew Turski.

B section, the longer, lyrical theme shifts to triple meter, and Mycielski foregrounds timbre to create a sense of distinct characters waltzing across the texture; in this section, we may hear echoes of the rich instrumental colors from his prewar tribute to Szymanowski, Lamento di Tristano (1937), although there is a greater emphasis on winds in the Overture. Finally, when the A material returns, Mycielski allows it to rush forward unimpeded by rests, and at the climax (figure 2) the texture achieves maximum density and motion. As a whole, the piece exemplified Mycielski’s approach as outlined in his speech: avoiding the stumbling block of post-tonal musical language, he staked a claim on certain (French) neoclassical signifiers as appropriate stylistic tools in articulating structure and dramatic narrative for the audience. Zbigniew Turski’s symphony traveled a different interwar pathway—one that was destined to be a problem in the wake of the Zhdanovshchina—the grotesquerie of Prokofiev and Shostakovich. In addition to his stylistic referents, there were a few other points working against Turski here. He had adopted a complex,

lack (brak)    41

figure 4. Zbigniew Turski, Symphony no. 2, “Olympic” (1948), page 87. Copyright © 1967 Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, Kraków, Poland . Excerpt used by kind permission of the estate of Zbigniew Turski.

prestigious genre, the symphony, whose cultural capital marked it as a point of particular contention for critics who wanted to set the criteria for determining good Polish socialist-realist symphonies from bad formalist ones.10 Turski’s symphony had won a prize from the international Olympic committee, which was another complicating factor in a moment when Western approbation was hardly working in the artist’s favor. And, finally, the program of Turski’s symphony was meant to capture Poland’s wartime experiences and the Holocaust. Just one year earlier, both Turski and Bolesław Woytowicz had won praise for their war-focused symphonies, but now the dark tone did not meet Zhdanov’s requirement for optimism in socialist-realist music.11 Turski’s use of motivic transformation across the symphony should have been a positive element, but he created the wrong narrative. It was not one of triumph over hardship, but instead one of deterioration. In figure 3, we see the main theme of the first movement: a distorted, angular march, accompanied by fanfare in the brass. This theme appears in a different guise in the third movement (figure 4), grotesquely reshaped into a quick dance in triple meter, high in the clarinet range.

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From here, the movement swirls out of control, the dance growing in frantic intensity as it struggles against interruptions from the earlier military march mode. Throughout the symphony, the awkward intervals in these themes skew the harmonies this way and that, lending the musical language a certain alterity (although it is not fully atonal). The abrupt, major-chord flourish at the end cannot ameliorate the metric and harmonic turmoil that has preceded it. The assembled audience at Łagów liked Mycielski’s Silesian Overture almost unanimously; Bolesław Woytowicz deemed it the most accessible of the three compositions. To reach a true appreciation for Turski’s symphony, on the other hand, would require special knowledge and commentary. Several other respondents proposed that this characteristic of Turski’s symphony was precisely what made it so powerful and expressive, allowing it to stand as a “historical document of the occupation,” in the words of Witold Rudziński.12 Pianist-composer Jan Ekier implied that the piece was forward-facing; in five or ten years, audiences would understand this dissonant musical language. There was a sense—recalling Régameyan aesthetics— among many of the composers that accessibility was not only a matter of simplicity, but also one of interest and even of challenge. It was their responsibility to stretch their listeners, thereby stimulating their cultural development. Sokorski and Lissa were quick to remind the assembled group: it was not they who should issue a challenge to the audience, but the other way around. Sokorski swiftly judged Turski’s symphony to be formalistic and nightmarish. Lissa’s message was less about formalism and more about the mindset that composers should bring to their creative task. She praised Mycielski for turning away from his own interior authority and instead toward the “new man” (while noting the Overture’s problematic proximity to Stravinsky’s Petrushka), and she criticized Turski for getting caught up in his own intellectual chaos. “It must be said openly: this symphony cannot ‘mobilize’ our man.”13 To accomplish such mobilization, composers should stop listening to their own creative desires, instead working to fill their “social commission” (zamówienie społeczne). The Łagów conference was not dramatically different from the congresses that had preceded it, but, almost immediately, this meeting accrued the status of a watershed moment. Before 1949, the postwar debates about the best way to achieve Polish modernity had not yet solidified along rigid aesthetic lines. The Łagów listening sessions, however, demonstrated that this situation had changed. The now-dominant Marxist camp insisted that their new power relations, which refashioned artists as followers rather than leaders of progress, required a commitment to socialist realist aesthetics. Their insistence had an immediate effect: the union circulated an informational document after the congress announcing its intention to abjure all “elitism” and instead to promote music written for “the new listener.”14 Turski’s symphony was not publicly performed again until the first Warsaw Autumn Festival of Contemporary Music in 1956.15 Lutosławski’s Symphony

lack (brak)    43

no. 1 was also labeled “formalist” in late 1949 and it was not heard again until 1955.16 The music journal Ruch Muzyczny was already being pushed into a more rigorously Marxist position in late 1948, and then it was finally closed in late 1949.17 In its place was Muzyka, the ideological organ of the musicologists’ section of the Composers’ Union. Moving forward, many artist-intellectuals found themselves in a difficult position. Those members of the post-Szymanowski generation who had taken up the tenets of their forbear’s “progressive” aesthetics and definitions of Polishness in music were not ready to abandon them now. Musicologist Cindy Bylander has shown that these composers found ways to resist and critique inconsistent aesthetic ideologies to which they felt little affinity.18 Historian David Tompkins counters that the process of definition was highly dialogic, and that composers from across the aesthetic spectrum became personally invested in realizing socialist realism in musical form.19 In the remainder of this chapter, I demonstrate that both of these propositions can be true. That is to say, in the post-Łagów Stalinist era, many composers continued doing exactly what they had been doing in the 1940s and even in the 1930s. While some artists and intellectuals withdrew from public life, many others remained active in Polish cultural institutions and continued to produce various forms of “serious music” (muzyka poważna), music for light entertainment, pedagogical music, and ideological-political music (especially cantatas and mass songs).20 As Mycielski had done in his keynote address, composers negotiated with the center of power by leveraging claims about the value of their art and their specialized knowledge in service of the nation. During this period, it was difficult to ignore or oppose the top-down mechanisms of Stalinism outright, but it was still possible to activate the discourse of nationalism—a discourse whose powerful continuities linked modernist-minded artists and intellectuals back to a tradition with deeper roots than those of the recently solidified regime. Moving into the 1950s, their warnings about Poland’s cultural backwardness, which threatened to displace the nation from its European heritage, allowed them to bolster their authority and influence. These warnings most often decried Polish cultural “lack” (brak). The immediacy of lack discourse rendered it most effective in this moment of political instability, when the oppositional relationship between artists and the state was particularly polarized.21 As it became increasingly clear in the first half of the 1950s that Stalinist Soviet power was losing legitimacy and support in Poland (or, in fact, that it never had that legitimacy in the first place), impassioned accusations of “brak!” animated calls for change in both the cultural and the political spheres. If we follow the evolution of this language, identifying the speakers of lack, their definitions, and their proposed solutions, we may learn a great deal about the gradually shifting ideological commitments that heralded the revolutionary events of October 1956. At Łagów, Sokorski and Lissa used lack language to describe stubborn composers who

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did not accept the revolutionary leadership of the mass audience. Over the course of the early 1950s, though, members of the artist-intellectual class would gradually reappropriate that language for themselves, denouncing the effect that their isolation was having on the nation’s development. Using the discourse of lack in this way allowed them to reassert their authority in the midst of a widespread cultural and political Thaw. T H E SH I F T I N G L O C U S O F L AC K I N T H E E A R LY 1 9 5 0 S

The 1950 Composers’ Union Congress, which convened less than a year after the Łagów meeting, was the grimmest of the period. Sokorski and Lissa both expressed their disappointment in composers’ refusal to accept their new social role. Looking accusingly to the interwar-generation composers, Sokorski suggested that they had not been able to break themselves away from the dangers of modernism, and that there was “something inside them that forbids them to do what they have been called to do.”22 Further, artists’ refusal to develop a new musical language for the new era led to their tragic “alienation from [their] own nation,” displacing them from the progressive vision that they claimed to support. In a gloriously illogical flourish, so characteristic of the era, Sokorski concluded by directing his audience to the example of the Soviet Union (represented at this meeting by composer Tikhon Khrennikov and musicologist Boris Iarustovskii). Only in following the path blazed by their Soviet colleagues would Polish composers overcome their “lack (brak) of . . . struggle toward a new music that will serve the nation.” If they could not overcome this lack, artists would serve only as “enemies of progress,” languishing in their own apathy. Andrzej Panufnik’s Sinfonia Rustica (1948) became a particular target of ire, just as Turski’s “Olympic” symphony had been the year before. Sokorski announced that, although Poles “have valued him highly,” Panufnik had “done everything in his power to lose [his connection to the] village and to emotional expression.” In other words, in his formalistic composition, Panufnik had produced a falsehood: his music concealed its internal lack of heart.23 Representatives of state and party authority clung to their conviction that Polish composers were the ones who were driving Polish cultural backwardness. This narrative was the same as the one aired at Łagów. What was different, however, was the degree to which the assembled composers began to push back.24 Many voices spoke up in defense of the beleaguered Panufnik, from the union’s president to its youngest members; for instance, composer-conductor Jan Krenz argued that Panufnik’s music was both thoroughly modern and thoroughly grounded in the principles of melody. Both Sokorski and Lissa took special pains to refocus attention on the needs of the audience, but there was already a sense that their control was slipping. There were simply too many composers within the union who refused to internalize the power relations of the Zhdanovshchina.

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As historian John Connelly has argued, Polish communists were not in a position to repress all intellectual leaders whose ideas or interwar pedigrees did not meet party expectations.25 The party did not have enough legitimacy within the Polish populace, which tended to perceive Soviet leadership as a latter-day extension of Russian imperialism, to perpetuate itself without the assistance of an artistintellectual class. Anthropologist Katherine Verdery has outlined this very power relationship in her adaptation of Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital to the socialist context. The state could not generate its own symbols of cultural meaning, and therefore had to rely on an artist-intellectual class to do so. On the other hand, the state could not allow meaning production to happen freely. Leaders wielded control over scarce resources (suggesting language of lack!) in order to gain a degree of structural control over the valuation and distribution of intellectual “products.”26 The implications of this struggle for legitimacy certainly extended to the Composers’ Union. In the first half of the 1950s, only 12–16 percent of union members were party members—a number so low that the union did not even have its own internal party oversight group (Podstawowa organizacja partyjna, or POP).27 As a result, it was imperative that the political apparatus cooperate with non-party-affiliated (bezpartyjni) artists, and especially with the older, more established artists who had built their authority in the interwar period. At the 1950 union congress, Zofia Lissa disparaged the musical styles and languages of the 1920s and 1930s, but it was not so easy to unseat the entire generation who had entered their creative maturity using those very styles and languages.28 Zygmunt Mycielski is a case in point. He had been the union president since 1948; in this post, he continued to defend composers’ authority in shaping their own individual development, even as he also aligned himself broadly with the party’s program for educating the mass audience. In the months before the 1950 congress, however, Mycielski submitted a letter of resignation to the party’s Central Committee. In this letter, his frustrations with post-Łagów power relations are clear: “The party is putting an ever-greater emphasis on the ideological formulation of artistic tasks and goals, and, in musical practice, this is completely alien to . . . my artistic and musical training, education, and convictions.”29 In further diary entries from this period, Mycielski fretted that privileging ideology over craftsmanship (rzemiosło) would create serious gaps for composers, hampering the development of Polish contemporary culture.30 And, because he was unable to lead composers in filling these gaps, Mycielski was ready to remove himself from the post. While he may have been frustrated with his role in the presidency, Mycielski shifted his energy into more interior roles: he continued to advocate for himself and for his colleagues within the union and the ministry’s Arts Advisory Council, and he focused on his work as a composer and critic. In the year that followed, composers continued to reclaim the language of lack and to (re)construct a role for themselves as the indispensable remediators of that

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lack. The Festival of Polish Music, held between April and December of 1951, was one of the catalysts for this shift. Adrian Thomas has shown that the Ministry of Culture and Art intended the festival to serve as a staging ground for socialist realism in Polish music, and leaders anticipated that their funding for commissions and performances would initiate a sea-change in contemporary culture. These commissions were awarded liberally to composers of all ages and aesthetic orientation, including composers whose recent work had attracted ministry critique (Turski and Panufnik received some of the highest commissioning rates).31 Some of the most prominent artists felt the weight of official expectations—that they would generate cultural capital for Poland and for the party—but it was precisely their ability to meet those expectations that afforded them financial privileges, awards, and accolades. David Tompkins’s work articulates this tension; he argues that Panufnik and other composers learned during this period how to navigate the complex ideological and structural demands coming from political and cultural institutions. Because these institutions needed artists’ participation to function, artists were able to exert some independence in determining their own creative goals.32 Such independence should not be overstated, as there were still mechanisms in place to remind composers that the acceptable range for experiment was quite narrow. After Łagów, the union’s official listening sessions often provided a space for performative rearticulations of socialist realism, although this framing was not always made explicit. As a result, the language at these sessions was once again reminiscent of the interwar “conservative” group, especially when the pieces in question were symphonies. At the session held on 20 September 1951, discussants heard Mycielski’s piece for the festival, the Symphony no. 1, “Polish” (1951), a work that exhibited few of the earlier Silesian Overture’s modernist, neoclassical style markers.33 The ensuing debate focused mostly on the question of what an appropriate symphony sounded like, and whether Mycielski’s work qualified. Jan Ekier observed that the piece lacked the dramatic narrative typical of the genre; the work was more a suite than a symphony. Tadeusz Szeligowski rejoined that the problem was the balance between melody and harmony: a symphony required a stronger harmonic foundation. Others argued that the key to a symphony was the tension between its themes or the effective balance of the symphonic ensemble. Stefan Kisielewski attempted to critique Mycielski’s unambitious harmonic language, but his provocation was dismissed summarily. “Referring to Schoenberg is completely undesirable,” Piotr Perkowski scolded his colleague. In the end, it seemed that Mycielski had met the most important criteria: his language was simple, his melodies were beautiful, and he had achieved a sufficient depth of expressivity. Never in the transcript do the words realism or formalism appear, but it was very clear that Mycielski’s symphony was expected to operate within an accessible (and markedly Germanic, nineteenth-century) musical mode.

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Frustration with the limited range of possibilities flared at the 1951 Composers’ Union Congress.34 Counterintuitively, composers responded to criticisms about the insufficient display of socialist realism at the Festival of Polish Music by taking the language of lack and aiming it at themselves. They complained above all about deficiencies in their warsztat. Difficult to translate into English, the process of strengthening compositional warsztat (literally “workshop”) might be analogous to building up a toolbox filled with techniques and experiences. They would only be able to fix their stunted, underdeveloped warsztat, composers argued, if they had more freedom to experiment with compositional techniques. In so doing, composers imagined themselves as an audience—an audience with significant gaps in knowledge and experience—distinct from the general public, and this empowered them to advocate for filling those gaps. Musicologist Józef Chomiński spoke up to suggest that composers would not be able to develop a Polish national style without building a strong warsztat. Chomiński worried that, in their rush to reject formalism, Polish composers had failed to develop a sophisticated understanding of musical form. The rhetorical slippage between formalism and form meant that Polish composers had embraced content and rejected form, destabilizing the aesthetic unity that generated affective power in music.35 Later in the congress, young composer Andrzej Dobrowolski upped the ante, explicitly naming the reason that Polish composers did not have a strong technical foundation: they had been pushed too hard by the authorities. The Ministry of Culture and Art had demanded immediate ideological and aesthetic change, and composers had “taken [this demand] to heart and, as a result, [they produced] banal and eclectic compositions.”36 Eclecticism, often invoked in this historical moment as a signifier of bourgeois formalism, became in Dobrowolski’s formulation an indictment of socialist realism.37 Such arguments were not able to dismantle the top-down power dynamics that flowed between institutions and composers, but they did open up a lateral space for composers to exchange power among themselves. Within the union, composers began to short-circuit mechanisms that were intended to transmit ideology and used them, instead, to educate, critique, and encourage one another. The union’s Commissions Committee was a major venue for generating what Emily Abrams Ansari has described as an “epistemic community” among the composers.38 Although its function (the disbursal of funding) meant that it remained closely tied to the ministry, composers found ways to use the committee that were probably unintended by state and party institutions.39 This was true even after the ministry took over the committee in 1952; even in the face of greater cultural centralization, composers retained considerable influence because they had the specialized knowledge necessary to evaluate submissions.40 At that time, the process of disbursing funds was regularized: composers received 25 percent upon receipt of their commission, 25 percent after having demonstrated significant progress,

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and the final 50 percent after having completed the composition to the satisfaction of the committee members (and the union’s Governing Committee, which sometimes involved itself with the decision process).41 In 1951, the Composers’ Union began soliciting internal reviews for compositions that had been submitted for commissions. Not unlike the listening sessions, this peer review process could function as a mechanism of censorship or even personal attack, but it also allowed composers to speak to one another about compositional practice.42 The reviews betray their writers’ goals and commitments, both ideological and aesthetic, and reveal a great deal about composers’ priorities for themselves and for each other. For instance, over the course of 1951 and 1952, the language in positive reviews shifted, from approachability and simplicity to words like unique, contemporary, expressive, and personal. Most negative reviews raised questions of craft and style, pointing out faulty voicings, ineffective harmonic progressions, and strange instrumentation.43 Over time, reviewers became more concerned with Polish composers’ tendency to copy past styles and forms without a real understanding of those styles and forms (a criticism certainly aimed at socialist realism). The reviews thus allowed composers to support their peers in rebuilding their compositional toolboxes. Grażyna Bacewicz was one composer whose experience in navigating the commissions process, both as composer and peer reviewer, allowed her to develop a significant level of agency and support. In 1951, she received comments mostly related to her music’s approachability, but as time went on, reviewers indicated that her trajectory as a composer was at least as important to them as the projected response that she might receive from audiences. Without censure, then, Waw­ rzyniec Żuławski wrote in 1952 of her Symphony no. 3 that it was written at a very high technical level. As Mycielski had done in his Silesian Overture, Bacewicz synthesized “acceptable” signifiers of neoclassicism in this symphony (rhythmic drive, textural contrasts, timbral exploration) with signifiers of German symphonic tradition (motivic development across the form, heroic narrative culminating in a triumphant finale). Żuławski noted that Bacewicz had not incorporated folk styles in the symphony, overlooking the folk-inspired lyrical theme at the center of the scherzo movement, but he still praised the symphony for its expressive Polishness and “optimism.”44 Although he might have had cause to draw connections to outside influences (especially, as Adrian Thomas has suggested, to Albert Roussel or even to Shostakovich), Żuławski emphasized the role of the work within Bacewicz’s oeuvre, deeming it a successful step in her stylistic development.45 Despite Żuławski’s praise, Bacewicz’s Symphony no. 3 did attract criticism from some quarters. At an ideological “education session” held at the union in 1952, one speaker pointed to this symphony as evidence that Bacewicz was “experimenting feverishly.” Her use of chromatic harmonies and motivic transformations apparently indicated that she had strayed into “atonal deformations” in the scherzo and

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finale movements, creating a soundscape more appropriate as an accompaniment to a war film.46 While similar to the language aimed at Turski’s war-inspired symphony in 1949, this review did not consign Bacewicz’s symphony to the same fate; on the contrary, Bacewicz continued receiving prominent, state-funded union commissions, and she was therefore able to compose at a prolific rate. Her works, and especially her chamber pieces, pushed the limits of what perhaps should have been possible during a period later remembered for its glut of boring, monumental compositions. Consider, for instance, the darkly dramatic dissonances at the opening of her Piano Quintet, no. 1 (1952); unencumbered by the weight of the symphonic genre, she found more opportunities in chamber music to perform Szymanowskian interventions, using folk materials as a pivot into her modernist style (including feints toward post-tonal musical language). Her colleagues at the union and in other institutions recognized the value of her work and supported her. Of course, these union committees did not have the power to divert political consequences for those who openly opposed the party or its ideologies. The example of Stefan Kisielewski’s Fantasia (1952) for piano is instructive. Kisielewski had been writing about culture and politics since 1945, both for Ruch Muzyczny (until it closed in 1949) and for the Kraków-based Catholic paper Tygodnik Powszechny (General Weekly). His critiques of the regime led to his removal from his post at the State Higher School of Music in Kraków, and it became impossible for him to work within official musical life even on a freelance basis; he drew closer in those years to Catholic resistance networks.47 He continued to compose, but found it difficult to secure commissions or to publish his music. Despite (or perhaps because of) these conditions, Kisielewski reveled in ostentatious formalism in his Fantasia, rejecting simple narrative structure. Embracing the improvisatory character of the genre, the piece moves from one idea to the next with little warning; the harmonic language slides by minor-second relations between chords made up of fourths, fifths, and seconds. Maestoso and pesante passages recalling nineteenth-century virtuosic pianism alternate with driving perpetuum mobile and dreamy lento sections that may have sounded jazz-adjacent in this historical context. From the union Commissions Committee, the Fantasia received two reviews: one from Jan Ekier, and another from Witold Lutosławski. In his review, Ekier was torn. “It is as if,” he speculated, “the composer were operating under the influence of a creative impulse that led [him] in an emotional-formal direction, but he brought some kind of preconceived plan to the sonic material.”48 For Ekier, the strangeness of the piece suggested that form had overtaken content, muddling its impact. Lutosławski took a different reading. In his review, the tensions and imperfections of Kisielewski’s Fantasia appeared not as a weakness but a strength, for they revealed a composer who was ready to build his toolbox. Because the results were

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esoteric and, at times, “caustic” and “bruising,” Lutosławksi judged that the composition would not be a popular success.49 Still, he argued, the Fantasia was important. It was a document of the composer’s experimentation with the modernist language of Bartók, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, and Hindemith. After reading the reviews, the head of the committee (and ministry representative) Jerzy Jasieński decided not to pay Kisielewski for the completion of his composition. Lutosławski cried foul, implying that his colleague was being punished not on behalf of his challenging piano piece but because of his political views.50 Jasieński protested that he intended only to send the piece out for further review, but, after this meeting, the piece got “lost” in the process.51 Even positive encouragement from Lutosławski, one of the most important composers of the period, was not enough to convince the state cultural institutions to publish the piece or to support Kisielewski. There were structural limits to the agency produced through this composer-to-composer discourse. After Stalin’s death in March 1953, members of the artist-intellectual class grew bolder and more public in their bid for creative control. In June, Mycielski spoke to the ministry’s Arts Advisory Council on behalf of the Composers’ Union, and he was considerably less cautious as he identified various gaps experienced by Polish composers. They lacked sufficient institutional support for performance, they lacked educational resources, they lacked instruments. Most importantly, they lacked the freedom to learn from all the music that had preceded them. “I am speaking about this,” he explained, “in order that we might dispense with [our] horror in relation to works that have been accused of formalism, cosmopolitanism, postimpressionism, or any other varieties of ‘isms.’ ”52 Hedging slightly, he clarified that Polish composers should not necessarily promote modernism to the broader public, but they also should not fear this music. “Let us not act as if Godknows-what would happen if a composer were to use some technique from a period that has been pronounced dead and buried.”53 Composers should always keep their listeners in mind, he argued, when they experimented with various techniques or forms, but, crucially, they should have that freedom to experiment— even with compositional techniques that were not accessible to the mass audience. In essence, Mycielski was arguing that the Ministry of Culture and Art should recognize composers as an elite audience unto themselves. And if composers constituted an audience, this should mean (according to socialist realism’s own logic) that they should be able to determine their own path forward. This was an argument that would gain considerable traction in the years ahead. T H E A RT I S T- I N T E L L E C T UA L C L A S S A S A N E L I T E AU D I E N C E

In 1954 and 1955, the political and cultural Thaw picked up momentum. At the Second Party Congress in March 1954, participants began to speak more openly

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about errors in economic and organizational leadership. At the January 1955 plenary meeting of the Central Committee, Party Secretary Bolesław Bierut himself decried the party’s “noncompliance” with Lenin’s principles for leadership of the mass.54 Such a statement signaled that the Stalinist power structures were changing, and that discourse was also shifting toward an embrace of reform (and toward an embrace of Lenin’s legacy over Stalin’s), but no one yet knew what the extent of these reforms might be. In the period leading up to the 1956 Polish October revolution, politicians were trying to gauge how much control they would have to acquiesce, and artists and intellectuals were trying to reclaim the freedom and authority that they had lost in the earlier part of the decade. This dynamic also energized the Composers’ Union. In the face of composers’ ever-intensifying demands, both Lissa and Sokorski, who had ascended in 1952 to the post of Minister of Culture, found themselves making concessions in an attempt to retain their authority. In her keynote address for the 1954 union congress, Lissa acknowledged that Polish composers had suffered the effects of serious lack and that, perhaps, they required more stylistic freedoms. She seemed ready to acknowledge multiple Polish audiences, each with its own musical needs, and she admitted that certain composers (Andrzej Panufnik or Grażyna Bacewicz, for instance) might be more suited to producing music for a sophisticated concertgoing public. This rhetoric resonated with what Mycielski and others had been arguing for years. Even so, Lissa resisted affirming the existence of an elite Polish cultural class, with creative needs distinct from those of the mass audience. Allowing artists to envision themselves in this way could only replicate a Western brand of modernity incompatible with a socialist revolutionary future. Western composers were, she argued, headed into a bleak apocalypse: “Living in constant fear of the H-bomb . . . [Western composers] truly cannot write any kind of symphony but ‘atomic,’ they cannot search out any other kind of music than ‘electronic’ . . . [and] ‘concrète’ music. They give up all other sonic materials in favor of this humming and clamoring, because [these sounds] produce the only adequate scream for their harrowed souls.”55 For Lissa, these avant-garde evocations of despair could only reflect solipsistic isolation: these artists produced “atomic” music because they, themselves, were living in an atomized society. In Poland, the referent of progress could not be an atomized Western European model, in which artists felt empowered to create aspirational art for some imagined future nation. On the contrary, Polish music should be driven by the needs of an already-existing audience, supporting their lived experience of the nation as it unfolded in real time. Many of the composers and scholars present at the 1954 congress were not satisfied with Lissa’s position, and they vented their frustrations directly upon her, accusing her of holding them back. Zbigniew Turski, mentioned earlier in the

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chapter, was the most caustic; interwar-generation composer Piotr Perkowski also made no attempt to hide his contempt for Lissa. It is important to note that composers did not vent in the same way upon Sokorski, who was in a more powerful position. With regard to responses to Zofia Lissa, we must recall that she was both Jewish and a woman. The impact of her intersectional identity upon her role as scapegoat during the Thaw comes through with a visceral chill, for instance, when Perkowski described Lissa as a fairy-tale queen with a block of ice where her heart should be.56 Composers’ lack language gained a new urgency as they affirmed their right to assume leadership over Polish cultural development. Their demands took two basic forms, which only strengthened one year later at the 1955 union congress: first, composers wanted to have greater control over the institutional structures that distributed and promoted their music. At both the 1954 and the 1955 union meetings, Tadeusz Baird argued that Polish composers needed to hear their music in performance; they needed to participate in broader international exchange; and, crucially, they needed support from a specialist press.57 The first and second Festivals of Polish Music (the first in 1951, the second in 1954) had achieved national exposure for contemporary music, but Baird felt that Polish composers also needed international exposure. Without that exposure, they faced a kind of isolation gap; composers and their music were trapped within Poland’s borders.58 The second argument was related to the first: especially at the 1955 union congress, composers amplified their own ignorance of musical developments taking place outside of Poland, and now they demanded access to this knowledge. Where in the earlier 1950s there had been vague complaints about their ignorance of certain forms or techniques, participants at the 1955 congress were ready to name the composers and compositions with which they were unfamiliar. In contradistinction to Lissa’s vision of a Polish cultural tradition emerging from the audience’s present lived experiences, many composers imagined a national future that would draw its momentum from the broader trajectories of Western art music. Spoken thus, the names of the “lacking” composers became symbols of a past heritage and of a future legacy that many Polish artists hoped to reclaim as their own. Mycielski noted in his diary that the minister and vice minister of culture, Włodzimierz Sokorski and Jan Wilczek, repeatedly called him into their office prior to the congress, monitoring what he planned to say in his keynote address. As a result of their interference, Mycielski remarked ironically that “the congress was like an idyll.”59 In the context of this enforced optimism, it is all the more interesting that Mycielski concluded his speech with a call to arms: “I must emphasize here that we are unfortunately living in a world that is absolutely closed and—to all intents and purposes—absolutely isolated from the artistic world that surrounds us. . . . It is difficult to expect our young people to become expert critics and prac-

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titioners when they are separated from everything that is happening in the Soviet Union, in the other People’s Democracies, and in the West.”60 Mycielski identified two Soviet composers (Prokofiev and Shostakovich), with whose music Polish audiences and composers were insufficiently acquainted, but his group of Eastern and Western European composers was much larger: “We don’t even know the work of [Leoš] Janáček or [Béla] Bartók, or [Arthur] Honegger, [Igor] Stravinsky, [Benjamin] Britten, [Olivier] Messiaen, or . . . Frank Martin.”61 In this list of composers—several of whom were no longer living, and the rest of whom were certainly not the youngest or newest composers working in 1955—Mycielski underscored the length and seriousness of Polish composers’ isolation. He was also, to a certain extent, posturing for effect; certainly, especially among Myciel­ ski’s own interwar generation, composers had carried their knowledge of earlier twentieth-century music with them into the postwar period. Access to scores was difficult, though, and performances were even rarer. Without the ability to share their knowledge with audiences and, more crucially, with younger generations of composers, members of the interwar generation were ready to announce that Polish music culture had been displaced in time, frozen first by the war and then by Stalinist-era controls.62 The names listed by Mycielski are also notable for their “moderate” approach to modernism, suggesting that he was also reasserting pre-Łagów, Régameyan discourses of musical progress. The artists in Mycielski’s backlog might all be reasonably held up—in his estimation, at least—as participants in a similar modernist project, balancing commitments both to elite art traditions and to the needs of the contemporary audience. Mycielski’s goals here resonated (in ways he could not have known) with contemporary rhetoric about middlebrow modernism in the West. Christopher Chowrimootoo has demonstrated, for instance, that critics in 1940s Britain were also looking to Jean Sibelius and other early twentieth-century artists as models of “a middlebrow synthesis of originality and progress, high and low, dissolving the extremism that modernism had engendered.”63 Similarly, Mycielski’s lack language was not aimed at opening a space for some kind of extreme “pure formalism” as it had been framed in 1949 by the Marxist ideologues, but rather at a middle path, which might allow Polish modernists once again to reach for the synthesis of content and form that was the Régameyan ideal. Amid all this heightened discourse about cultural lack, the premiere of Lutosławski’s Concerto for Orchestra in 1954 marked an important moment—a moment in which critics, composers, and political leaders seemed to recognize a new path forward. After the suppression of his Symphony no. 1, Lutosławski had mostly retreated to the production of smaller-scale compositions that better suited the demands of socialist-realist aesthetics: folk-song arrangements, chamber pieces, and mass songs.64 The premiere of the Concerto for Orchestra, then, announced the composer’s return to large-scale abstract orchestral forms, and

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critics responded with enthusiasm. In this piece, Lutosławski highlighted the same musical parameters that Mycielski had promoted in his Łagów speech as the acceptable markers of neoclassical modernist style: he used rhythm and meter, texture, and timbre to motivate the structure of the composition. Nowhere is this clearer than in the final movement, the Passacaglia, toccata e corale, in which an ostinato begins in the double basses and then ascends slowly through the entire ensemble. He used these style markers to animate neotraditional forms, whose structures followed intuitive dramatic arcs, and, further, he incorporated Polish folk music into the fabric of his musical language.65 Taken altogether, then, these characteristics might suggest that Lutosławski’s Concerto for Orchestra represented a new development for socialist realism in instrumental music, but members of the artist-intellectual class did not hear it that way. The energy of the piece, its complexity—these were familiar features of Bacewicz’s chamber music of the early 1950s, but her symphonic work had been much more restrained. Lutosławski’s embrace of dissonant harmonies on such a grand scale indicated that the Concerto for Orchestra was something different, a turn in a new direction. Even Zofia Lissa heralded Lutosławski’s Concerto as a marker of a new cultural era in her 1955 review for the journal Przegląd Kulturalny (Cultural Review). Lissa used her review as an opportunity to distance herself publicly from Stalinist ideological dogma and from the unpopular top-down institutional dynamics that had enforced that dogma. She employed the language of “self-criticism”—the rhetoric used within party circles to acknowledge practical or ideological failures in executing the spirit of communist ideals—but she mostly dodged the “self ” element, using many passive grammatical constructions. “Luckily,” she proclaimed, “we have already put behind us those years, in which one strike of the pen or an official word could attach the label of ‘formalism’ to new musical works.”66 It was “our music critics” who had failed to understand the subtleties of realism in music; they had grouped “essential innovation” and empty bourgeois experiment together into a single category. Lissa’s praise for Lutosławski lined up in significant ways with Mycielski’s modernist vision of musical progress, indicating that she, too, was open to reestablishing the pre-Łagów rapprochement between the Marxist-modernizationist and modernist positions. She argued that Lutosławski, in his Concerto, occupied a productive middle ground between the poles of socialist realism and formalism. Lissa focused on Lutosławski’s harmonic musical language, noting that Lutosławski had found a way to blend tradition with innovation, establishing pitch centricity without relying on depleted harmonic relationships. In this way, he had provided a foundation and a functional organization in the work without resorting to the (formalist) system of dodecaphony. Lissa declared that Lutosławski had successfully produced a musical work that was new but not completely foreign or inacces-

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sible: “It is fresh in its resources—inventive, but not experimental at all. It is innovative, but it is tied through many threads to tradition.”67 This logical argument—that Lutosławski’s innovations were new, but not too new—was key to Lissa’s discussion of the Concerto’s expressivity, which arose out of the interaction of rhythm, texture, and sonority. Lissa posited that Lutosławski’s expressive mode represented not so much a departure from Polish tradition as an expansion or development of it: “Lutosławski is a representative of the generation that is reacting against musical expressionism . . . [while also] casting aside the autonomism of constructivism, according to which music is an ‘organization of sounds in time.’ Is this position really foreign to the tradition of Polish music? Tradition—as we well know—grows and develops in every environment; it is not constant. The contribution of every outstanding creative individual broadens, changes, renews it. Lutosławski, whose music is thoroughly Polish, modernizes our traditions in this respect as well.”68 In the course of her analysis, Lissa hit a number of times upon this point: Lutosławski’s Concerto might lie outside his audience’s expectations or their previous experience, but it was not foreign to their sensibilities. It was challenging, but not alienating. Lissa lifted up Lutosławski as a corrective example of what creative genius under socialism could or should look like.69 Most other Polish music critics, on the other hand, were considerably less indebted to the project of socialist realism, and were thus uninterested in its continuation under new terms. By 1955, the discourse about Polish cultural backwardness was so strong within the union and in the cultural press that Lissa’s rhetoric of moderate, careful progress could not satisfy the new appetite for innovation. This restlessness was apparent in many other critics’ responses to Lutosławski’s Concerto, as they tended to see the composition as evidence of Lutosławski’s potential, rather than as evidence of his maturity. For example, while musicologist-critic Stefan Jarociński wrote a glowing review for Przegląd Kulturalny in 1954, he read the work as a harbinger of Lutosławski’s future ability.70 “We have waited for this masterwork for many years,” he explained, claiming a certain degree of foreknowledge: “Many of us have long been convinced that [such a work] would come from Lutosławski’s hand.”71 For Jarociński, however, this composition represented the beginning of a catching-up process, and not the end. The experiments in the Concerto were not at the same level as the musical developments that were taking place outside of Poland; rather, Lutosławski’s experiments, which reflected the influence of earlier twentieth-century modernist composers, were only progressive in the backward context of Polish postwar music culture. “It would undoubtedly be a depreciation of such a masterwork as the Concerto,” he argued, “to see it merely as the sum of . . . musical achievements of the decade. Every great work does not only close a certain period, but also opens a new one, demonstrates new perspectives and manifests new possibilities.”72 In Jarociński’s estimation, the most exciting thing

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about the Concerto was Lutosławski’s willingness to take up new techniques and to adapt them to his own goals—he had taken up the challenge to build up his creative toolbox. Meanwhile, party and state authorities resisted acknowledging an elite artistintellectual audience as long as possible. The director of the party’s Culture Department, educator and fierce ideologue Stefan Żółkiewski, distributed a report to top party officials in early 1956 about the “ideological situation in culture after the Third Party Congress.”73 There is a begrudging recognition here that artists were important to the building of socialism, but the report proves that Żółkiewski and his associates were pushing hard against the creative unions because they were demanding a return to bourgeois-democratic civic freedoms. In relation to music, Żółkiewski’s report exhibits a confused mixture of pride and concern. For instance, while he praised Lutosławski’s Concerto for Orchestra for demonstrating a Polish commitment to artistic excellence and progress, in the next breath he wrung his hands over composers’ turn toward Western forms of musical expression: “[Among Polish composers, there has been] an almost complete turn away from compositions of the type that are intended for cultural outreach (upowszechnienie)—popular works, mass songs, cantatas, etc. And in several [cases], there has been a clear shift toward producing works of an elitist persuasion.”74 In this assessment, Żółkiewski was most likely responding to Zofia Lissa’s input; in roughly the same time period, Lissa submitted a report to the Culture Department about the ideological situation in the Composers’ Union.75 Acknowledging the increasingly embattled relationship between composers and party authorities, Lissa explained that composers perceived the party to be an enemy of creative freedom and of cultural progress. They did not understand that, at least from Lissa’s perspective, the Marxist vision of progress did allow for different kinds of music: “Certainly, difficult, innovative music must exist as a space for composers’ creative experiment, and the broader, less musically literate audience simply will not grasp this music right away. Still, [this difficult music] must exist alongside a stream of popular music, music for education and outreach, accessible to the new workers’ class and to the new intelligentsia.”76 The composers’ hostility was so great that they had severed the relationship between the two streams of art. The most talented composers in the union felt only contempt for the party’s ideological guidance, and they had no interest in ameliorating the backwardness of the broader Polish audience—a task that they relegated to “second-rate” composers. Even considering their laudable achievements, Lissa criticized elite composers for focusing inward on their own lack, their own desires: “The composers feel that they can return to the way things were before the war: whatever they write, and however they write, it is good.” Such an inward turn could only represent a cultural regression, a yearning for the very cultural atomization that she had criticized in her 1954 address to the Composers’ Union.

lack (brak)    57 T H E A RT I S T- I N T E L L E C T UA L C L A S S A N D T H E 1 9 5 6 P O L I SH O C T O B E R R EVO LU T IO N

Despite resistance within the party’s Culture Department, the artist-intellectual class continued to gain political traction in early 1956 because their discourse was beginning to sync up with the concerns of revisionist intellectual groups within the party and state structures. The defection of Józef Światło, former deputy within the Secret Police (Urząd Bezpieczeństwa), in 1953, and the Radio Free Europe broadcasts of his revelations about the regime’s crimes, activated many party members who were already concerned about widespread abuses of power and Stalinist deformations of socialist principles.77 Following the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Party in February 1956, the relatively broad Polish distribution of Khrushchev’s shocking “Secret Speech” opened up even more space for criticism and discussion of reform.78 Young leaders drew on this momentum to speak out against the anti-intellectualism of the party. Members of the Union of Polish Youth, an organization originally founded to serve as an ideological incubator, had already rebranded their press organ Po Prostu (Plainly Speaking) as a “weekly paper for students and young intellectuals” in 1955. In their April 1956 editorial, titled “What Is to Be Done?” after Lenin’s 1901 essay, the editors argued that the party in Poland had tried to isolate intellectuals from the working class and, in their mission to promote the latter, had weakened both groups: “The truth about the (moral and political) role of the working class does not require the negation of different truth: the forwardleading (intellectual) role of the intelligentsia in the construction of socialism. This is especially true now, in the atomic era.”79 In comparison to Lissa’s 1954 invocation of atomic power as a negative metaphor for Western artists’ disenfranchisement, here atomic energy appears as a signifier of a progressive national future that would require the support of an active intelligentsia. It was the powerful discursive chemistry of Polishness, progress, and ideological reform that allowed the student-intellectual movement to grow, and alongside it, a fully-fledged group of revisionist thinkers within the party. Especially after the workers’ revolts in Poznań in June 1956, a major division became evident within the party. One group, the Natolin faction, continued to align itself with the Stalinist ideology of mass revolutionary consciousness, while the other, the Puławy faction, embraced the ideals of decentralization and de-Stalinization.80 It was this latter group that took the upper hand in the second half of 1956, in no small part due to their promise to reimagine what a uniquely Polish road to socialism might look like. In contrast with the anti-intellectual bent of the Natolin group, many adherents of the Puławy group were interested in reviving Lenin’s NEP-era, decentralized relationship to the intelligentsia.81 Puławian Jerzy Morawski, secretary for the party’s Central Committee, advocated an unprecedented relaxation of

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censorship in the press because, as he would later recall, “I already understood that, in order to move away from [a state of] police terror, it was necessary to seek out a mutual understanding with society.”82 Under such conditions, revisionists were able to criticize the party openly, drawing on the discourse of lack to advocate for the leadership role of the intellectual class. For example, Leszek Kołakowski, one of the party’s most vocal revisionist thinkers, argued in his 1956 essay, “Intellectuals and the Communist Movement,” that revolutionary ideology must arise from the intelligentsia, whose role in society was indispensable: “The participation of the pedagogic intelligentsia in the system of government is, other things being equal, in inverse proportion to the degree of repression; for the less one is capable of ruling by intellectual means, the more one must resort to the instruments of force.”83 In Kołakowski’s formulation, the consequences of repressing intellectuals would be very dire indeed; not only the freedom of the populace hung in the balance, but also the creative and scientific potential represented by that stratum of the populace. To allow Stalin’s “cult of the individual” to take precedence over the healthy cooperation of the intelligentsia and the working classes would be to consign the communist nation to a state of perpetual backwardness. The existence of the intellectual-cultural group of revisionist thinkers within the party meant that, in this pivotal moment, intellectual activity was not marked by default as a critique of the PZPR. Rather, it was perceived a means of strengthening the nation’s commitment to a progressive socialist future. And even if the majority of active Polish composers from this period might be better classified as liberals in a classic sense, yearning for communion within a robust intellectual community grounded in European tradition, their use of lack-based nationalist rhetoric resonated with the language of their revisionist colleagues. United under the banner of the “Polish tradition of the intellectual ethos,” the liberals and revisionists shared a conviction that intellectuals were, in the words of historian Andrzej Friszke, “not only white-collar workers, but also engaged citizens, defenders of humanistic and national values, who should influence their environment and shape the opinion [of the people].”84 It was in the context of these shared commitments that the intellectual-cultural coalition held out hope for the change of leadership that seemed imminent. After the sudden death of party leader Bolesław Bierut in Moscow earlier in 1956, there was a vacuum of power, and the Poznań protests exacerbated tensions, attracting negative scrutiny from the Soviets. Finally, Władysław Gomułka was reinstated to the party in August 1956 and then reelected to leadership at the Eighth Party Plenum in October. Gomułka had been removed from party leadership in 1949 because his vision for Poland’s socialist future was too heavily inflected by nationalism. In 1956 this vision was no longer a liability. His triumphant speech to the throngs of Poles who gathered in the streets of Warsaw proclaimed a resurrection of the “Polish road to socialism,” which had

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endured a temporary detour under Stalinist Soviet centralization.85 Naturally, these events did not go unnoticed by Khrushchev, who flew into Warsaw to threaten the impending invasion of Poland by Soviet forces. Gomułka was able to avoid such intervention (unlike his Hungarian counterparts) by highlighting Poland’s continued loyalty to the true mission of socialism and to the Soviet Union.86 With his Polish audience, however, Gomułka pointed to the future, toward progress and modernization, and, to bolster that message, he drew on the reform message that the Puławy group and the revisionists had already been building. Composers were ready to take advantage of the decentralization that accompanied this political shift—and the relaxation of censorship that came with it. The Composers’ Union issued a statement to the party’s Central Committee in late October 1956, congratulating them on their recent “change in personnel.” They tempered their enthusiasm, though, with a call for change: “Polish musicians are convinced that they will now have opportunities for unfettered creative development, as well as for candid and comprehensive discussions among artists. We hope that this period of political pressure—a period in which administrative control hampered the full freedom of artistic expression—will be closed forever.”87 It was already clear in October 1956 that composers had regained some of this creative agency; after all, the occasion of the first Warsaw Autumn Festival of Contemporary Music coincided exactly with the Polish October Revolution.88 The festival had first been proposed in 1954, and, throughout the long period of its germination and planning, organizers had employed the discourse of lack to highlight the state of cultural backwardness that had descended upon the Polish contemporary music community. As Lisa Jakelski has demonstrated, Composers’ Union leaders were able to advocate with state and party officials for their new festival on the grounds that it would serve as a site of international cultural exchange, simultaneously boosting the international reputation of Polish music and exposing Polish composers and audiences to music from which they had long been isolated.89 They secured official support by leaning into the language of structural and institutional lack that Tadeusz Baird and others had wielded in 1954 and 1955: Polish music was making great strides, they argued, but composers lacked opportunities to export their music abroad. Conductors, performers, and audiences outside Poland (in the East and the West) lacked exposure and knowledge about Polish music. A contemporary music festival, featuring invited performers and guests from around the globe, would provide the perfect institutional outlet for the promotion of Polish music. While state and party authorities may have been focused on exporting Polish culture, union organizers were also excited about the potential for import. The festival had real potential to address composers’ lack of exposure to specific contemporary musical phenomena. The festival’s program demonstrated a commitment to remediating this problem, as nearly a third of the works presented

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(twenty-four out of eighty) were Polish premieres of foreign compositions.90 Repertoire choices also reflected a desire on the part of the organizers to present a kind of retrospective anthology, filling the holes in the audience’s knowledge. The program was rather eclectic for a festival of “contemporary music,” and it focused heavily on the same group of moderate modernist artists that Zygmunt Mycielski had highlighted in his 1955 speech to the Composers’ Union. Igor Stravinsky was the composer who appeared the most frequently, as the program featured five of his compositions written before the war (and one written after). Works by Arthur Honegger and Béla Bartók also occupied prominent places.91 The festival program was simultaneously filling gaps, building a canon, and envisioning a way forward that was built upon tradition; it was a musicalized manifestation of the arguments that Mycielski and other modernist composers had been making since the 1930s. After the festival, the wave of positive critical reception in the Polish press suggested that the organizers had met their goals. Certainly, there were critiques of the festival’s program, with a number of writers suggesting that the organizers should have included more recent, postwar musical developments, but many of these shortcomings were forgiven in the same breath in which they were mentioned. Critic Lucjan Kydryński acknowledged in the popular political-cultural journal Przekrój (Intersection) that, yes, the festival program had seemed incomplete, omitting some of the most important postwar compositional developments, such as dodecaphony and musique concrète. However, he conceded immediately, such a program made perfect sense in the Polish context, because there was so much lack that the organizing committee had to fill the most foundational gaps, such as that of Stravinsky’s oeuvre. They had to prioritize.92 Warsaw Autumn was just the beginning; in early 1957, claims about Polish lack swelled to their loudest point. Political-cultural institutions were in a state of flux, and artists and intellectuals were working to determine what the party’s new cultural politics might look like. The moment was ripe for artists to advocate for themselves, to lay claim to greater authority and freedom in determining the direction for that cultural development. A perfect example appears in the impassioned speech with which newly elected union president Witold Lutosławski opened the 1957 Composers’ Union Congress. This speech is best known for Lutosławski’s triumphant conclusion: “We are breathing today in an atmosphere of true creative freedom. And this is the first and indispensable condition for the progress of art.”93 To build up to that conclusion, though, Lutosławski’s speech drew on tropes of backwardness. The composer opened his remarks not in an optimistic mode, but with a narrative of past trauma: When I look today, from the perspective of eight and a half years, upon the infamous congress held in Łagów in 1949, when a frontal attack was launched against Polish music—I am chilled simply by the recollection of that horrible experience. Truly, it is

lack (brak)    61 difficult [to imagine] a more absurd thesis than this: that it was necessary to eradicate the achievements of the last several decades and to return to the language of the nineteenth century. And yet, a genuine attempt was made to make us believe this thesis. And that’s not all—many times, endeavors were made to promote works that were epigonistic and sterile, while original and creative works were kept from performance. . . . The period about which I am speaking did not endure long—in fact it concluded a few years ago—but it lasted long enough to inflict enormous harm upon our music. The psyche of the creative artist is an extremely delicate and precise instrument. This is why the attack on this instrument and the attempt to control it plunged quite a number of us into heavy depression. Being completely cut off from that which was happening in art in the West also played a not-insignificant role in this gloomy experiment to which we were being subjected.94

Here we may observe the boldness with which Lutosławski took ownership of the historical trajectory stretching between the 1949 and 1957 congresses. At Łagów, Lissa and Sokorski had blamed composers for their own lack: their lack of ideological enlightenment, their lack of commitment to the mass audience. And in invoking that language, they sought to shift composers’ attention toward the audience, whose needs should fuel the nation’s progress into modernity. In his 1957 speech, Lutosławski rewrote this rhetoric, shifting blame squarely onto the political and cultural leaders who had disrupted the social function of the artist-intellectual class. Łagów became a symbol, then, of lack itself. In facing the future, Lutosławski did not celebrate a new period of freedom, but instead paused to address the serious challenges that were facing Polish composers in 1957. Although post-revolutionary cultural and political life offered new opportunities, Lutosławski argued that Polish composers were disoriented after their long period of deprivation: Are we shaking off this state of depression? Do we have enough enthusiasm for new creative pursuits? Certainly, the answer is yes. However, in spite of this, our situation is by no means an easy one. Each of us faces the problem of finding his own way through the confusion arising from the art of our epoch. This problem rises in particularly sharp relief for those of us, who, after a break of several years, have reestablished contact with the music of Western Europe. Not all of us have a clear opinion about what is happening in that music and about the direction in which it is heading.95

The new openings that had become available with the political changeover in 1956 had released Polish artists from their cultural vacuum and had allowed them to recognize the true extent of their backwardness. In regaining their comparative scale, they realized what (and how much) they lacked. Lutosławski used this invocation of lack to call up its imminent replacement by the opposite condition, an efflorescence of Polish cultural modernity, casting

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October 1956 as a kind of “Zero Hour.” Now that Polish composers had access to new ideas, they would soon gain a “clear understanding” of the cultural developments that had taken place in the world during the period of their isolation, which would allow them to take on a new leadership role in that world. In other words, just as Mycielski and others had been arguing for years, the artist-intellectual class needed to attend to its own needs, to its own lack. They needed to rebuild themselves and to reverse the damage done at Łagów; only then would they be able to reverse the nation’s backwardness. As we will see in the next chapter, this twopronged argument would prove effective in advocating for the creation of new institutions to serve the compositional community, but it would also link artists’ needs inexorably to the needs of the nation as a whole. Artists’ dreams for elite cultural production would remain bound together with their responsibility to uplift the mass audience.

3

The Dissemination of Culture (Upowszechnienie kultury) Rebuilding Elite Institutions and Educating Elite Audiences

D E C E N T R A L I Z I N G C U LT U R A L P O L I T IC S A F T E R O C T O B E R 19 5 6

In the wake of the Polish October Revolution in 1956, Witold Lutosławski’s triumphalist proclamation that Polish composers were now “breathing in an atmosphere of true creative freedom” heralded the start of a new era. Or at least the expectation of one. The lack discourse employed in the first half of the 1950s seemed to have found its mark: now, the cultural intelligentsia would be able to fill the gaps in knowledge and experience that constituted their backwardness. The inaugural Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music signaled that the gap-filling process had begun. This festival, however, could not meet all of the growing demands of the music community. Composers, critics, and scholars wanted to facilitate the exchange of information about contemporary music culture as it was occurring on both sides of the Iron Curtain. In this chapter, I will examine two institutions that sought to do just that: the Polish Radio Experimental Studio, and the music journal Ruch Muzyczny (The Musical Movement). Both of these institutions were established (or reestablished, in the case of Ruch Muzyczny) in 1957, and both were intended to meet the creative and educational needs of a specialized, “elite” cultural audience. As the decade drew to a close, the political environment in Poland shifted once again. Comparing these institutions will illustrate the delicate negotiations by which artists tried (sometimes unsuccessfully) to justify the proliferation and support of an expert audience based on claims that such an audience would lead the Polish nation into the future.

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Before moving to an analysis of these case studies, an overview of the cultural politics that animated the immediate post–October 1956 period will clarify the stakes for artists. Within party and state cultural oversight organizations, the aftermath of the 1956 revolution brought more confusion than triumph. As we saw in chapter 2, the head of the party’s Culture Department, Stefan Żółkiewski, complained in early 1956 that Polish artists were feeding their own elite cultural interests at the expense of the mass audience. Instead of focusing inward, they should pursue cultural upowszechnienie, a buzzword ubiquitous throughout the postwar period with many possible shades of meaning. Translated literally into English as “dissemination” or “promulgation,” upowszechnienie was often linked with kultura (culture) to signify the spread of culture in its broader sense, and was therefore bound up with initiatives for uplift and outreach. Within party and state circles, this discourse of dissemination signified a mission to educate and indoctrinate the peasant and worker classes. Because the word’s denotation did not bear those specific social and political implications, however, speakers were able to employ it flexibly in advocating for the spread of different levels of culture to various subsets of the Polish national audience. When Władysław Gomułka assumed party leadership in October 1956, his rhetoric of the “Polish road to socialism” demanded an eradication of the Stalinist political past and opened a space for building a Polish socialist future. The word decentralization linked these endeavors, suggesting that the path to the future lay in dismantling old governing structures, shuffling them, and then eventually reassembling them in (somewhat) new forms. This process resulted in a number of significant personnel shifts: Żółkiewski, for instance, found a new home at the Polish Academy of Sciences and within the Ministry of Education. Włodzimierz Sokorski, who had been the minister of culture throughout most of the Stalinist period, became the head of Polish Radio. Changes went beyond personnel, extending to institutional structures themselves. During the initial post-revolutionary period, from the end of 1956 through 1957, there were endless conversations about the goals of the party’s Culture Department and about the Ministry of Culture and Art. Ideologues declared themselves to be appropriately chagrined by the failures of their previous, heavily centralized topdown approach to cultural outreach and education, and they were open to any number of scenarios for decentralization. The archival record reveals that party leaders were considering downsizing or even dissolving the state’s Ministry of Culture and Art, handing the organizational reins over to the creative unions and other institutions.1 Ultimately, the ministry retained its role and it was the party’s Culture Department that underwent the biggest transformation—perhaps better described as a full-scale dismantling and reconfiguration. The Culture Department was replaced by a new, smaller Culture Commission, which would fill an advisory (rather than policy making) function.2

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Throughout these convoluted debates about infrastructure, one thing was clear: leaders within the party and the state were feeling pressure from lack-based claims voiced by the artist-intellectual class. And, while these leaders were divided in their attitude to these claims, they certainly understood that artists believed themselves to be backward and they blamed the party-state apparatus for their deficient condition. The most effective solution for appeasing artists’ arguments was to make an ostentatious show of eliminating the party’s direct authority over the realm of creative activity. Cultural leaders within the party therefore agreed to construct a new, bipartite structure for cultural politics; there would be a functional division between the practical, institutional foundations of cultural life and artists’ personal creative choices. The Ministry of Culture and Art would manage the former (with advice and oversight from the party’s Culture Commission), but they would relinquish direct authority over the latter.3 At the first meeting of the newly established Culture Commission, held in October 1957, members affirmed their hands-off policy: they would trust artists to make their own aesthetic choices in a state of creative freedom (swoboda twórcza).4 Digging deeper into the transcripts of the meeting, though, it becomes clear that this magnanimous declaration obscured a more complicated management strategy. While members of the commission were willing to make a goodwill gesture toward artists, they were also looking for indirect modes of control that might limit or manage the effects of artists’ headlong rush toward Western notions of cultural progress. The solution lay in the discourse surrounding cultural outreach and distribution (upowszechnienie); the members of the commission agreed that they would allow artists to create art in whatever manner they wished, but they would not be able to share that art with audiences without the oversight of the party-state apparatus. In other words, the party would quarantine the threat within the artistic communities themselves. Lucjan Motyka, a highly placed functionary within the Ministry of Culture and Art, described this approach as a kind of discipline through positive reinforcement: “It is essential that [we] take up a position founded on ‘yes,’ rather than on ‘no.’ It seems to me that there has been a [general] craving for such a shift in expression.” He cautioned his colleagues against the impulse to resurrect pre-1956 oversight policies, because these “will smack of ‘no,’ which will carry with it the sweetness that always comes with forbidden fruit.”5 Motyka’s language distilled the essence of the party’s newly decentralized relationship to artists. While wielding the discourse of creative freedom, and backing away from explicit modes of censorship, the commission would invest in more indirect modes of control such as criticism, funding, and distribution. Only one member of the commission raised concerns about this approach, and that was the new minister of culture and art, Karol Kuryluk. In the year since Kuryluk had been appointed to the position, he had already made it clear that he

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took a different view of culture (and the party’s relation to it) than had his predecessor, Włodzimierz Sokorski. Here, at the first meeting of the Culture Commission, Kuryluk expressed frustration with his colleagues’ rhetorical acrobatics. The line between art and the mechanisms of its distribution, he argued, could not be so neatly drawn: “If [an artist] paints for himself or mounts an exhibition, is this a question of outreach (upowszechnienie), or of art?”6 Kuryluk insisted that the commission could not in good faith claim that their control over mechanisms of distribution would not affect artists’ creative activities. If the party intended to concern itself with the institutional, infrastructural foundations upon which Polish culture functioned, then leaders would always control the material and political conditions within which artists produced their art. This would simply lead to a repetition of the errors of the previous period, forcing artists to choose between two unacceptable options: they could produce certain kinds of art that party and state institutions would deem acceptable for distribution to audiences, or they could make art for themselves. And, for Kuryluk, this latter option was not really an option at all, for art did not exist in a vacuum; it demanded “the possibility of a confrontation with the reader, the viewer, the observer—in a word, with the audience.”7 Art, he believed, could not be separated from the conditions of its own production and distribution. The commission’s proposed separation of art from audiences also overlooked one of Polish artists’ and intellectuals’ main grievances from the past few years: they wanted to be recognized as an audience in their own right. The Cultural Commission limited their view to the distribution of mass culture—and especially of ideological art. There was no space here for imagining an elite stratum of culture, or for theorizing the kind of broader social, national uplift function that such an elite stratum might be able to perform. M A Ł A STA B I L I Z AC JA : F O R M A L I Z I N G T H E R E L AT IO N SH I P B E T W E E N E L I T E A N D M A S S C U LT U R E

Karol Kuryluk’s statement at the first Culture Commission meeting would prove to be prescient, as the false foundation of the post-1956 reforms soon began to manifest itself. In an act of political retrenchment, often called the mała stabilizacja (little stabilization), Gomułka’s government began to walk back its commitments to decentralization. Vocal members of the revisionist Puławy faction within the party—and especially members who had advocated for the leadership function of intellectual culture—found themselves shifted out of powerful positions, and Gomułka drew closer to his more conservative nationalist (and xenophobic) colleagues who had supported him earlier in the postwar period.8 The student paper Po prostu (Plainly Speaking), discussed in chapter 2, was shuttered in October 1957 for having “spread doubt about the reality of building socialism and, in relation to

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many other matters, [having] promulgated bourgeois concepts.”9 In April 1958, Kuryluk himself was removed from his post as the minister of culture and art, due at least in part to his liberal provision of stipends for Polish artists to travel to the West; the much more dogmatic Tadeusz Galiński replaced him.10 In the midst of all of these changes, the discourse surrounding cultural outreach and education was also shifting. While leaders within the party and state cultural apparatus did not rescind their commitment to creative freedom, they were ready to make some new demands of the artist-intellectual class. Ignoring or isolating them was no longer sufficient; it was clear that the ruling structure wanted to instrumentalize cultural production at all levels of society. Debate about how cultural activity, in both its mass and elite manifestations, would generate national progress occupied party leaders throughout this “stabilization” period. In December 1958, the Culture Commission (together with several other party and state departments) hosted a national conference for “activists in the field of cultural education.” The goal of the conference was to establish a set of official strategies for achieving wide-scale Polish progress; in a word, the theme was cultural uplift. At the conference, there was certainly a faction who reverted to the dogma of the Stalinist period, arguing that artists should only be allowed to generate art for the broader national audience.11 Those voices were loud, but there were other voices who were louder, individuals who insisted that a strong artistic-intellectual sphere would strengthen the nation as a whole through a kind of cultural trickle-down effect. Jerzy Morawski, who had been closely connected to the party’s revisionist Puławy faction, delivered the conference’s keynote address.12 Morawski opened his remarks in a pose of concession. He was willing to acknowledge that artists should have the freedom to support two separate streams of Polish culture: art for a mass, popular audience, and art “whose primary addressees . . . will be the [members] of intellectual, scientific, and artistic circles.” Freedoms enjoyed by artists were not meant to encourage their experimentation with aesthetic trends that were antithetical to the tenets of socialism. On the contrary, artists must be ready to demonstrate their dedication “to the best socially active tradition of Polish culture,” while simultaneously working to usher the nation into the twentieth century, jumping “from backward (zacofanych) territory—nearly medieval—to a contemporaneity that employs the newest techniques.”13 For Morawski, then, progress and social responsibility were mutually reinforcing. If artists were to have the freedom to educate and uplift themselves, blazing a path to the future, then turnabout was fair play. In the best of all possible worlds, they would be able to tap into the most exciting contemporary developments in art while remaining dedicated to the needs of the broader national audience, and this balancing act would not require the administrative interference of the party-state apparatus. However, as I will show in the following two case studies, it was difficult

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for elite cultural institutions to navigate this dual commitment, and, in fact, the party and state oversight agencies frequently required these institutions to prove their usefulness in meeting the needs of the mass audience. The institutions’ continued survival depended on their leaders’ ability to make necessary adjustments and to convince their accusers that their work was crucial to ushering Poland into a state of modernity. If they failed to pivot, authorities had the power to reestablish balance through course correction. T H E P O L I SH R A D IO E X P E R I M E N TA L ST U D IO : F I N D I N G A BA L A N C E

In the months following the 1956 revolution and the first Warsaw Autumn festival, the terms muzyka elektronowa (literally “electron music,” as electronic music was initially designated in Polish) and muzyka konkretna (musique concrète) came into frequent usage as markers of musical futurity—and of Polish cultural lack. There was no electronic music on the 1956 Warsaw Autumn program, and domestic critics noted the absence, pointing out that Polish artists and audiences alike had very little understanding of these new technological and aesthetic developments.14 The association between electronic music and (Western) contemporary music predated the events of 1956, though, as the aesthetic-ideological discourse of the Stalinist period had already established that connection. In early 1953, the journal Przegląd Kulturalny (Cultural Review) ran a piece about musique concrète. On the surface, the (anonymous) author meant to project a negative impression of the musical practice as a “pathological” example of the “ideological bankruptcy of bourgeois aesthetics.” At the same time, the article must also have piqued the curiosity of its readers, tossing out references to the music of John Cage, Pierre Boulez, Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Schaeffer, and Pierre Henry.15 Regardless of the article’s intended effect, it certainly linked these composers’ experiments to contemporaneity as it was being defined in the West. The next year, at the 1954 Composers’ Union Congress, Zofia Lissa invoked electronic music as a measure of the disparity between the futures desired by bourgeois and communist nations. Polish composers did not, she proclaimed proudly, feel any need to compose “atomic symphonies, musique concrète or electronic music, or quartets for the end of the world.”16 As discussed in chapter 2, composers were already prepared at that congress to challenge Lissa’s authority in determining what they did or did not compose; Zbigniew Turski, whose Olympic symphony had attracted Lissa’s particular ire at the Łagów conference, was particularly critical. He argued that, in elevating her own personal taste and aesthetic values to the level of universal principle, Lissa had “played a harmful role in the creative life of the composer,” isolating them from cultural developments taking place outside of Poland.17 It was no longer time for

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listening to Lissa; Polish composers yearned for the signifiers of futurity, such as electronic music and the experiments of the “concrète composers” (konkretyści). Even Zygmunt Mycielski, whose own compositional style was thoroughly gro­unded in interwar neoclassicism, mused in his diaries in 1955 that musique concrète might be the path forward into the contemporary musical world. Ultimately, the point was moot because “this is not [available] for us here, as we have been closed off for so many years.”18 Under these circumstances, it is unsurprising that electronic music became a frequent topic of discussion after October 1956. At the 1957 Composers’ Union Congress, composer-conductor Stanisław Skrowaczewski proposed that it was the Union’s responsibility to support its members in their quest for more information: “We know that, in the past seven years, electronic music (and a whole group of people associated with it) has arisen in the world.” Technical and aesthetic experiments in this vein had not previously been possible, but now the union had the opportunity to “foster contact between our composers—or at least those who want it—and electronic music and musique concrète.” To do this, he argued, the union needed to support the establishment of “some kind of studio-laboratory.”19 They needed an institutional base from which to spread cultural knowledge—and to encourage uplift—among composers themselves. Perhaps unbeknownst to Skrowaczewski, one month earlier, in February 1957, the governing committee of Polish Radio had already begun to discuss the establishment of an “Experimental Studio.”20 At that meeting, one of the directors warned organizers not to commit too soon to any particular set of goals.21 However, while the institutional leadership may have been exercising caution before making firm commitments, the flurry of articles that appeared in the Radio’s official press organ, Antena, suggests that the Studio was a hot topic of discussion for artists, Radio employees, and administrators alike. Amid this diversity of voices and perspectives, a general consensus arose: the Studio should fill a bipartite role. It should serve as a space for elite cultural experimentation, allowing Polish composers to create and distribute electronic music (and knowledge about that music), and it should also serve as a laboratory for the creation of music and sound effects for all types of musical and spoken-word radio programming. Antena’s recurring series, “[People] Are Talking about the Studio,” featured many contributors whose primary concern was the Studio’s practical contributions to the institutional functioning of Polish Radio. The Studio’s future director, musicologist Józef Patkowski, spent a great deal of time in 1957 visiting radio studios around Europe, including Paris and Cologne. While on assignment, he gained perspective on these studios’ priorities and achievements, and he formulated a point of comparison against which to measure Polish Radio. His contribution to the Antena series did not even include the word music. Instead, Patkowski framed the Polish Radio Experimental Studio in terms of its potential contributions to the

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technological and acoustic advancement of the Radio institution as a whole.22 Drawing on the language of mass cultural outreach, Patkowski argued that the Studio should function primarily as a workshop for artists and technicians to learn about contemporary developments in sound design. Radio leader Józef Pański agreed: this would be the first step toward “raising the level of radio programming in every respect, with an aim to reaching the listener in the best way possible.”23 In the Antena series there were also contributors who highlighted the potential for creating and distributing elite forms of culture at the Studio, but this did not mean that they ignored its more practical ramifications. Witold Lutosławski, for example, hoped in his entry that the Studio would improve Polish standards of radio technology, in which realm he felt they were “very backward.”24 Moving beyond the practical, Lutosławski had a different vision for the Studio’s future. He hoped that Polish composers would be able to use the Studio to generate Polish electronic and tape compositions. With the use of these new technologies, Lutosławski argued that composers outside of Poland were creating a new kind of music that moved beyond the physical limitations of performers and traditional instruments. While Lutosławski was not himself convinced about the lasting value of this music (and especially of musique concrète, which he critiqued as a mechanistic artform), he believed that composers—young and old—needed to experiment “as soon as possible, in order to make up for [their] delay.” By invoking the temporalized language of chronological backwardness, in addition to the focus on gaps (braki) in Polish culture, Lutosławski and many other contributors focused on the Studio’s potential for disseminating elite culture to a group of composers who desperately needed to move forward. Beyond offering opportunities for creative experiment, the Studio could also serve as a repository for recordings and scores, as a physical space for convening lectures about new music, and as a site for international exchange. Also, because of its relationship to Polish Radio, there was always the potential that the Studio would generate and broadcast educational programming about new music, thus reaching a whole new audience. Leadership within Polish Radio seemed to support this bipartite narrative wholeheartedly, even unto its embrace of the discourses of Polish cultural lack. Włodzimierz Sokorski, who had become the head of Polish Radio after October 1956, made a resounding bid for the Studio in his cover story for Antena, “Not to Stand Still: That Is Our Mission.” Sokorski did not shrink from the institution’s elite cultural potential, arguing that Polish Radio should be engaged in actively creating “new musical forms, and even new kinds of music, different from anything that has existed before.”25 To justify an investment in contemporary technological and musical developments, Sokorski himself invoked the specter of lack: We are lacking in inventiveness in all areas of sound: acoustics, echoes, hums, voices and all the various shrieks that characterize life. We are lacking musique concrète

the dissemination of culture    71 and electronic music, new types of radio instruments and new recordings. We are lacking experimental studios, workshops for creative work, and even good tapes. There is no regular cooperation between engineers and program directors, there is no struggle to establish a new model for radio techniques, or to devote collective effort to discovering new technical and formal modes. . . . And until technical specialists begin to fight for programming and program directors for technology, we will never lift ourselves from our moribund position. It will be as if we had clung to the business model of the cottage industry in the face of the interplanetary immensity of progress and creative radio work.26

At least in the eyes of Sokorski, whose influence within the party was not small, these new radio technologies (and their related new forms of music) had the power to undo both forms of backwardness: the Studio would fill a serious gap in the Polish cultural environment, and, in so doing, would also speed the nation into the exciting technological future. Finally, after months of discussion, the Radio’s governing committee announced the establishment of the Polish Radio Experimental Studio (Studio Eksperymentalne Polskiego Radia) on 9 November 1957. This memorandum included a fivepoint mission statement, which had been the subject of some discussion at the October meeting of the governing committee. When the organizational committee made their final report and recommendations at that meeting, some voices raised concerns about the “overly unilateral direction of the Studio’s proposed mission, at the expense of greater connections with the [Radio’s] program.”27 At the end of the ensuing discussion, it was determined that the Studio would function in consultation with the Radio’s programming directors. And, indeed, it seems that this agreement influenced the shape of the Studio’s mission statement as it was announced in November: The leaders of the “Experimental Studio” will establish the technical conditions for experimentation (for use by those working at or collaborating with Polish Radio) in the following areas: 1. The introduction of new, ready-to-use sound elements for radio plays and for programs that combine music and spoken word, 2. The construction of new equipment for sound effects, and the use and the possible construction of electronic instruments, 3. Acoustics, 4. Musique concrète, 5. Independent scientific research in this field.28

This mission statement suggests that Radio leadership and Studio leadership were trying to find a balance between the two levels of cultural education, with a decided bias toward the practical function that the Studio would play in supporting radio programming.

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figure 5. Włodzimierz Kotoński, Etude for a Single Cymbal Stroke (Etiuda na jedno uderzenie w talerz) (1959), opening pages. Copyright © 1963 Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, Kraków, Poland. All Rights Reserved.

Within its first two years of operation, however, the Studio had already demonstrated that its commitment to elite initiatives was at least as strong as its efforts to support the broader mass cultural outreach mission of Polish Radio. The Studio began to take on a distinctive institutional character, as its leadership and its associated composers and engineers threw themselves into creating new music. In 1959, composer Włodzimierz Kotoński, collaborating with Studio Engineer Eugeniusz Rudnik, realized the Studio’s first original tape music composition, Etude for a Single Cymbal Stroke (Etiuda na jedno uderzenie w talerz).29 In this piece, Kotoński recorded one cymbal strike and then transposed this tone to eleven additional pitch levels. He manipulated the timbre and duration of each pitch with various filters and tempo alterations, and he constructed a serial structure for these discrete sounds and their dynamic levels.30 The resulting composition, just over two and a half minutes in length, attracted the eager attention of critics and other composers. The Studio collaborated with the publishing firm Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne (PWM) to publish a score (figure 5), which was similar to the study-and-realization score of Stockhausen’s Studie II published by Universal Edition in 1956.31 Studio head Józef Patkowski was especially proud of

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this publication, because “only about a dozen such scores have been published worldwide.”32 He worked with PWM to publish a series of four scores, which serve both as a graphic record of the sonic manifestations themselves and also as an educational and promotional tool, including lengthy explanations and analyses. In his review, young critic Tadeusz Kaczyński acknowledged that Kotoński’s manipulation of recorded sounds was not necessarily novel in a broader European context (citing precedent in the work of Pierre Henry). Kaczyński argued, however, that Kotoński’s embrace of serialism as a structure to organize those sounds— also a very new technique for Polish composers—set him apart. His carefully designed structure, which exploited the parameters of time and sonic space, “testifies to Kotoński’s connection to musical tradition.”33 The descriptive language here resonates with the “sonoristic” timbral, textural, and temporal characteristics that would become closely associated with the emergent Polish avant-garde, and, indeed, the PWM score from 1963 reinforces this connection with its use of graphic shapes to communicate the structural and timbral arc of the piece. In Kaczyński’s view, Kotoński’s experiment proved that the Studio was successful in both filling cultural lack and in generating forward momentum.34 The Studio did not serve only as a site for creating music. It also began to function as a clearinghouse and a repository for cultural knowledge, including scores and recordings (sometimes gifted by foreign guests). Leaders sought to disseminate this knowledge outward, cultivating an audience for contemporary music. One of the Studio’s most important first endeavors toward this end was the organization in June 1959 of a seminar for composers, scholars, and other cultural figures who might be interested in tape and electronic music, or in the Studio’s resources more generally. In his proposal to Sokorski, Józef Patkowski suggested that the seminar should serve both as a demonstration of the Studio’s accomplishments and as an outreach opportunity, educating attendees about “the situation in experimental radio music.”35 The seminar functioned something like a crash course in contemporary music and technology. The rigorous schedule included lectures about acoustics, radio, and recording technology, along with film screenings and listening sessions. Patkowski also invited the Italian composer Franco Evangelisti to speak about European developments in electronic and tape music and to explain his own compositional techniques. Above all, the goal was to encourage Polish artists to take advantage of all of the Studio’s resources and to imagine a radical new future for Polish music. The guest list included several distinguished figures, including Witold Lutosławski and Bolesław Szabelski, alongside a group of young composers. It was so important to Patkowski to support these promising artists that he requested funding to support the travel expenses for fifteen of them who lived outside of Warsaw, including the yet relatively unknown Henryk Górecki and Krzysztof Penderecki.36

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Musicologist Leon Markiewicz noted the preponderance of young people in his report on the seminar for the journal Ruch Muzyczny. In his assessment, the seminar’s attempt to foster enthusiasm among composers was a natural outgrowth of the Studio’s elite cultural goals.37 Markiewicz’s minimization of the Studio’s practical functions reflected a general shift in the Studio’s identity. At least within the music community, the Studio was perceived as an institution that existed primarily to serve composers and to disseminate knowledge about contemporary music. Thus, it seemed that the balance between the two levels of cultural outreach had been upset, if not in practice, then in the Studio’s public perception. Polish Radio institutional leadership did not fail to take note of the Studio’s imbalance. Over the course of the next decade, the governing committee brought Patkowski in several times and chastised him for allowing the Studio to drift too far from its social and institutional responsibilities.38 This did not mean that Radio leaders wanted to disband the Studio or to discontinue its elite activity. Rather, they wanted to restore the balance and to ensure that the Studio maintained its commitment to mass culture. At each of these crisis points, Patkowski had to justify his leadership decisions to reassure his parent institution that these developments were all to the greater benefit of Polish culture as a whole. For example, in the summer of 1960, the Polish Radio governing committee initiated an audit to assess the effectiveness of the Studio’s activity in relation to its resources.39 Patkowski explained to the auditor that the Studio had undertaken new, important projects, including the 1959 seminar and the educational program, Horyzonty Muzyki (Musical Horizons), which was produced within the Studio and broadcast over the high-concept Polish Radio 3.40 Patkowski was making a bid for these new initiatives to become a permanent part of the Studio’s official mission, thereby legitimizing its increasingly heavy focus on elite culture. He also described collaborative projects that bridged the gap between elite and mass forms of outreach, such as the soundtracks that Studio composers and engineers had produced for a number of films and animated shorts. These examples were important because they demonstrated the expressive and practical value of musical experiments such as Kotoński’s in employing electronic sound to communicate with Polish audiences. One of the first films produced through such a collaboration, A Stroll through Old Town (Spacerek staromiejski, 1958) used music to illustrate the experience of life in postwar Warsaw. In the film, director Andrzej Munk follows a little girl as she walks through the newly-rebuilt Old Town, which had been almost completely destroyed by the Germans near the end of the war. Without any dialogue, the young heroine explores the urban spaces, navigating the confluence of reconstruction and ruin, with only composer and sound-designer Andrzej Markowski’s interplay of “real” sound effects and “imagined” electronic sounds to cue the audience into her thoughts and emotions. For example, while playing on the old city wall, the girl notices a mural depicting can-

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nons and other symbols of warfare (figure 6a); a motorcycle behind her provides the initial artillery fire, but the electronic sounds soon take over, booming across the bricked ramparts. Later, surprised by three jets soaring above her head, she begins to run through an area of ruins, chased by a swirling mass of electronic sound and processed piano strikes (figure 6b). The morphing of everyday sound into electronic sound and vice versa models the blending of reality and imagination for the young protagonist and the bleeding-together of old and new—of remembered trauma and post-1956 optimism—that characterized contemporary life for the Polish audience. The film was an ideal example of what Patkowski needed to demonstrate to his Polish Radio auditors: that the Studio’s identity as an elite cultural space was not in tension with its ability to produce meaningful art for the Polish audience. Rather, these two goals were symbiotic; in fact, Kotoński’s avant-garde Etude had been inspired in part by his work on the animated film, Albo rybka (1958), for which he had composed the score.41 Patkowski justified the Studio’s current developmental path not by minimizing its elite-oriented activities, but by emphasizing the ways in which such activities served a specific and positive function in strengthening Polish culture on all levels. Advances and experiments in avant-garde electronic music might only reach a small audience, but the resultant technical and sonic advances would be important also for genres and initiatives intended for wider consumption. Therefore, Patkowski managed to forge the connection that party leaders at the 1958 cultural education conference were unable to clarify. He was able to demonstrate that the support of elite culture would have a practical effect upon Polish society at all levels. This was not some kind of mystical trickle-down, but a much more concrete effect: the Studio would train composers and engineers who would then write more effective music for radio, film, television, and other mass-cultural media. The result was that, while the Studio repeatedly faced challenges from their institutional hosts, Patkowski and the Studio engineers were able to turn those challenges into opportunities for reasserting their commitment to generating cultural progress in Poland. In fact, these potential crisis points often became moments when the Studio leadership was able to instrumentalize its claims about the creation and distribution of elite culture in order to request additional funding, equipment, and promotional support. T H E RU C H M U Z YC Z N Y C R I SI S O F 1 9 5 8

Not all institutional leaders were as adept as Patkowski in demonstrating that their elite cultural initiatives contributed to the party’s larger cultural goals. Moreover, not all institutions were granted equal measures of free agency by the party and the state. Already in late 1957, greater restrictions were being placed upon the written word. Congresses of the Literary Union, in contrast to the corresponding

figures 6a and 6b. Scenes from A Stroll through Old Town (Spacerek Staromiejski) (1958; dir. Andrzej Munk).

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Composers’ Union meetings, were dominated by warnings against “revisionism”— a mode of critique to which Gomułka was increasingly hostile. The ability of written texts to convey specific meaning made this area of culture potentially more dangerous both within Poland and abroad, especially when such texts incurred negative attention from other Eastern Bloc nations or the Soviet Union. With the tightening of censorship, it also became more difficult for representatives of print institutions to advocate for themselves when they tangled with authorities. Errors of imbalance between elite and mass cultural outreach were perceived as direct attacks upon party ideology. The closure of the student paper Po prostu in 1957 was just the beginning; all of the major press organs attracted intense scrutiny and, sometimes, they underwent reorganization or even closure.42 The new journal Europa, which featured an essay about European music culture by Zygmunt Mycielski, was closed in 1957 before it had even distributed its first issue.43 The musical press was no exception. The music journal Ruch Muzyczny faced a major crisis in 1958 and only narrowly escaped closure by undergoing a complete transformation of its leadership and format in 1959. The journal, which had begun publication immediately after the war in 1945, had a history of state interference: it had been shuttered in 1949, presumably due to its continued engagement with Western, formalist musical developments in the face of encroaching socialist realist hegemony.44 In the early 1950s, then, the only major print outlet dedicated to music had been Muzyka, a scholarly journal that published long-form (often ideologically charged) articles by musicologists and music critics. Certainly, as the Thaw built momentum after 1953, Muzyka thawed along with everything else. The scholarship in its pages began to exhibit greater methodological diversity, and there was space once again for discussing contemporary techniques and styles that had previously been labeled “formalist.” Even so, composers and critics were aware that Muzyka did not fill all of the music community’s needs. At the 1955 Composers’ Union Congress, many voices raised concerns about this area of lack and suggested that the union form its own press organ. Kazimierz Wiłkomirski, the director of the Gdańsk Opera and Philharmonic Orchestra, insisted that there was a need in Poland for a press outlet that would provide a broader picture of musical life in Poland. Wiłkomirski stressed the importance of constructive music criticism for composers, who needed to “see [themselves] as if in a mirror, noting both their failures and achievements.”45 The party’s Culture Department was also aware of this deficiency. A report from 8 December 1955 proposed the creation of a new journal that would “address the most important problems in this field, organizing discussion, and presenting an overview of [music as it appears in] the press and a chronicle of musical life in the country and internationally, etc.”46 Within both the party and the Composers’ Union, then, there was a sense that a general music journal was needed—one that would cater both to composers and to a broader audience of music lovers.

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At the next union congress, held in early 1957, the reopening of Ruch Muzyczny was already underway. This new iteration of Ruch Muzyczny would not be, as had been proposed earlier, an official organ for the Composers’ Union; rather, it would be published in Kraków by PWM. The journal’s resurrection was met with rigorous debate. Even though it had not yet distributed its first issue, a number of older and more conservative composers were already concerned that the journal would focus only on musical developments from Western Europe, and that their own compositions would appear in an unfavorable light. The flashpoint for their ire was the journal’s proposed editorial board, and especially its inclusion of Bogusław Schäffer, the enfant terrible composer-critic who frequently roasted his older colleagues in his writing. Former union president Witold Rudziński indicated that Schäffer’s presence on the board had incited a kind of boycott among potential contributors, who did not wish to write for a journal that had affiliated itself with this particular vision of Polish progress. If Polish composers were to address the complexities of contemporary music, and to find a way to position themselves within this terrain, he felt that they would require a more inclusive journal.47 The first issue of the new Ruch Muzyczny appeared on 1 May 1957, and it opened with a brief statement of intent, establishing the journal’s scope and character. This manifesto immediately framed the journal’s primary mission as one of addressing Polish lack: “[We] must fill the gap (luka) that has existed for a long time in our musical culture.”48 Notwithstanding the anticipatory criticism aired at the union congress several months earlier, the editors readily acknowledged that their primary audience was the cultural elite, or individuals who possessed the expertise necessary to understand specialized musical discourse. The editors were unabashed in their desire to inform their specialist audience about what was happening in contemporary music outside Poland, as this was an area that still represented a serious point of lack for that audience: “[The journal’s] thematic expansion beyond the scope of specifically Polish matters, and [our] aspirations to address the issues that enliven the international music [community], do not indicate our desire to efface the Polish character of this journal. On the contrary. We desire only that a reference to ‘foreign’ musical phenomena would not denote, as it has to this point, phenomena that are unfamiliar [to us].”49 Interesting here is the insistence that disseminating such elite cultural information did not, in itself, impugn the journal’s commitment to Polishness. On the contrary, filling this lack would return Polish musical life to a state of health (uzdrowienie), mobilizing composers and musicians. This goal had also motivated the nineteenth-century and 1940s iterations of Ruch Muzyczny—a fact that resonates in its title, translated (somewhat awkwardly) as The Musical Movement in English. Regarding mass cultural outreach, the editors envisioned a more indirect role for the journal. Instead of attempting to educate the broader public, the editors intended to cultivate Polish musical educators.

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The first three items in this inaugural issue of Ruch Muzyczny illustrated the plan set forth in its manifesto. First, the journal included a transcript of Lutosławski’s famous speech to the 1957 Composers’ Union Congress, which articulated a number of the same concerns raised by the editors. Second, there was a piece from senior editor Bronisław Rutkowski, who offered a blanket assessment of music education in Poland, identifying challenges for the future. And, finally, there appeared an article from Bogusław Schäffer, entitled “New Paths in Contemporary Music.”50 This piece presented a telescoped narrative of the evolution of twentieth-century music, filling in the gaps in his uninitiated readers’ knowledge. Over the course of this article, Schäffer laid out a spectrum of contemporary musical activity: on one end, he placed Stravinsky’s postwar compositional efforts, which reflected the composer’s continued engagement with tradition, and on the other, he placed electronic musical experiments coming out of Paris and Cologne. For Schäffer, the latter phenomenon, as manifested in the work of Pierre Schaeffer and Herbert Eimert, was an exciting development that was still taking shape in real time, while the Stravinskian turn had already passed its point of relevance. To ignore the young postwar avant-garde group at the expense of older modernist composers would be to cement Polish cultural backwardness: “For the time being, we [Poles]—the delayed Europeans—are just [starting to become] interested in the progress of this ‘promising kid.’ Let us become better acquainted with him before his face is encircled with a long gray beard!”51 Schäffer’s impatience pokes through here. While recognizing the significance of the modernist masters, he wanted the Polish audience to engage with avant-garde music. This was the work of education or uplift that needed to happen, especially among composers, if Poland wanted to rejoin the contemporary moment before it became the (gray-bearded) historical past. There were plenty of articles in the early issues of Ruch Muzyczny that did rise to Schäffer’s challenge to introduce readers to contemporary musical composers and institutions in the West. Pianist Janusz Zathey (a colleague of Schäffer’s, who had also studied composition in Kraków in the early 1950s) submitted an eyewitness report about the summer courses in Darmstadt, which he deemed the “Mecca of New Music.”52 The article opened with a translated quotation from Gertrud Schoenberg, Arnold Schoenberg’s wife, addressed to the Darmstadt program director, Wolfgang Steinecke: “The Church [does] for God what this Music Institute [does] for new music: the ‘dissemination (upowszechnienie) of faith.’ ”53 This is a theme to which Zathey devoted considerable space, this notion of the Darmstadt courses as a site for the promotion of transformative knowledge. Bemoaning Poland’s late arrival to the Darmstadt environment, he suggested that Polish composers and music publishers could do more to insert themselves into the performance and publicity opportunities there. But, more importantly, at the end of his report, he brainstormed about how the Polish music community might better promote its own elite cultural growth and international exchange.

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Ruch Muzyczny, alongside the Polish Radio Experimental Studio and the Warsaw Autumn festival, was an institution poised to step into this role. The journal printed interviews and original articles by foreign composers and scholars, and it regularly included “chronicles” of international and domestic musical events, thereby inserting the Polish audience into the contemporary chronological moment as it unfolded in real time. Ruch Muzyczny printed analytical reviews of recent Polish compositions, often printing lengthy passages from the musical score in advance of the scores’ public availability. Articles explaining jazz improvisation, dodecaphony and serialism, and electronic music allowed the journal to serve at once as a listening guide and a composition textbook. The design of the pages, although printed on low-quality paper in black-and-white (with bold color blocking on the front covers), also exposed readers to culture with which they might not have been familiar. For example, the tenth issue of 1957 opened with a translation from Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus and an accompanying reproduction of Pablo Picasso’s Man with a Guitar (1913) (figure 7). The journal also featured paintings or sculptures by many contemporary Polish artists, placing Polish art in dialogue with international culture. The issue with Mann and Picasso opened with a woodcut, The Trio, by Kraków-based artist (and frequent designer for PWM) Adam Młodzianowski (figure 8). Ruch Muzyczny did not limit itself to disseminating knowledge about contemporary music making. Nevertheless, the heft of the journal was definitely aimed at a specialist audience, and that audience was undeniably hungry for information about the development of international music culture after the war. This elite, contemporary focus did not go unnoticed. In July 1958, East German musicologist Eberhard Rebling published a scathing critique of the Polish journal in Musik und Gesellschaft (Music and Society).54 In the course of his open letter addressed to “our Polish friends,” Rebling accused the editors of Ruch Muzyczny of making politically motivated publishing choices, even as they insisted that their journal was not political. He pointed to their focus on Western European musical phenomena and their corresponding critique of socialist realism. Over the course of his article, Rebling called out specific authors, including Bogusław Schäffer and Bohdan Pilarski, and even specific articles, such as Janusz Zathey’s Darmstadt report. According to Rebling, Ruch Muzyczny’s authors were purposefully misreading the political and aesthetic intentions of Lenin and of Khrushchev in order to “characterize bourgeois modernism as a ‘progressive direction’ ” in art.55 On this last point, Soviet critic Victor Gorodinsky also took Ruch Muzyczny to task in an article for Sovetskaya muzïka, accusing the journal’s authors—and in particular, Bohdan Pilarski—of willfully misunderstanding the aesthetic goals of socialist realism and of shamelessly courting the approval of the West.56 After reading these accusations, the editors of Ruch Muzyczny came together to write a response to Rebling.57 They felt betrayed by Rebling’s article, perceiving it as

figure 7. Ruch Muzyczny 1, no. 10 (1957): 4.

figure 8. Ruch Muzyczny 1, no. 10 (1957): 1.

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a slanderous attack.58 The editors provided evidence that their journal did, in fact, include articles about music in the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc nations, but they remained impenitent about their inclusion of Western composers and music. Above all, the editors argued that it was Rebling (and, by implication, East Germany) who was moving in the wrong direction. His outdated interpretations of socialist cultural politics did not even reflect the Soviet Union’s own recent statements on the subject.59 By contrast, the editors insisted that it was Ruch Muzyczny’s dedication to finding and promoting the best new artworks and most important aesthetic debates (regardless of their country of origin) that would best serve Poland’s cultural progress. In making this case, the editorial board took a tack not so different from that of Józef Patkowski in his defense of the Polish Radio Experimental Studio. They claimed that artists needed free access to contemporary knowledge to grow in their own creative powers. Ruch Muzyczny was intended as a “free tribune,” presenting the “most diverse, frequently contradictory views, in order to stimulate, by means of creative, constructive discussion, the collective search for ways to improve methods of teaching, popularizing, and creating music.”60 According to this logic, the growth of a strong artist-intellectual class could not help but serve a practical purpose in Polish society because it was precisely this class that had the ability to facilitate progress on all levels. In September 1958, Zygmunt Mycielski wrote an open letter to Rebling, which appeared as part of his regular “Musical Notebook” column in Przegląd Kulturalny. He began with the same general trajectory as the editors’ earlier response, but he provided an additional reason why Polish artists needed free access to culture: “We are, in Poland, endowed with a deeply ingrained trait, which has, over the long years, been difficult to root out. [This trait] demands independence of [creative] endeavors and, related to this, nonconformity of thought.”61 The key implication of Mycielski’s argument was that Polish artists should be allowed to interact with Western artistic developments simply because they were Polish. He did not offer justifications of Ruch Muzyczny’s activities based on those activities’ practical value for reaching the broader audience. Rather, he proposed that free access to elite (Western) culture was necessary and valuable because it was a facet of Polish national identity—a facet that had, as Mycielski pointed out, been badly damaged by the recent Nazi devastations.62 Although Mycielski recounted in his diary that he went through many revisions and consultations with the editor of Przegląd Kulturalny before publishing this column, the response was unsurprisingly mixed. He noted that Tadeusz Ochlewski, the director of PWM, sent him a telegram with only one word: “Bravissimo!” The party’s Central Committee, on the other hand, scrutinized the article very closely, and then it came under fire from Russians and Germans alike at the 1958 Warsaw Autumn festival.63 During the festival, there was an official meeting between a

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group of prominent Soviet and Polish musical leaders to discuss Rebling’s critique of Ruch Muzyczny.64 The report from this meeting reveals that discussions took up a familiar theme: balance. Significantly, the Soviet guests censured Rebling’s and Gorodinsky’s articles, affirming that “aesthetic discussions should be allowed to exist in a completely pure atmosphere, devoid of any [administrative] insinuations.”65 In this statement, they implied that there was room for the Polish journal to explore a variety of aesthetic positions without fear of reprisals related to its institutional goals. However, the Soviet guests followed this goodwill message with a pointed backhanded compliment: the critical articles from Rebling and Gorodinsky were problematic because they had not considered the evolution of Ruch Muzyczny over time, and its increased engagement with mass cultural phenomena. Both sides agreed that there should be more frequent exchange between Soviet and Polish musical criticism, and that Ruch Muzyczny and Sovetskaya muzïka would both reflect that reciprocal relationship in their pages. In other words, the Soviets praised their Polish colleagues for moving away from the journal’s original, elite focus and for reaffirming an interest in Soviet culture. In his capacity as the director of PWM (and the publisher of Ruch Muzyczny), Tadeusz Ochlewski concluded his official report about this Polish-Soviet encounter with an optimistic proclamation that it represented one of the greatest accomplishments of the 1958 Warsaw Autumn festival. But the underlying message from the Soviet visitors had been clearly heard by others within the Polish music community. In a letter addressed to the editorial board of Ruch Muzyczny, the leadership of the Polish Composers’ Union requested a meeting after the Warsaw Autumn festival to discuss the criticisms of the journal that were pouring in from “various People’s Democracies” about the lack of oversight, especially of younger authors who “often do not realize the significance of their carelessly and blithely expressed views.”66 This situation was “extremely worrisome” to the union, whose leaders urged caution (and greater control) in the future. Thus, despite Ochlewski’s protestations, the political machinery of official “oversight” clicked into gear; near the end of 1958, representatives from the Ministry of Culture and Art began to meet with union leaders to address the “Ruch Muzyczny matter.”67 As early as December of 1958, there were rumblings about the closure of the journal. Mycielski himself announced at a meeting of the ministry’s Arts Advisory Council that Ruch Muzyczny was facing closure for financial reasons.68 The same month, however, composer-critic Stefan Kisielewski sent a letter to the union leadership, disputing the financial argument; he had heard from the ministry that they wanted to close Ruch because “musicians’ circles have objections to the publication of the journal.”69 In early 1959, less than a year after Rebling published his article, the Ministry of Culture and Art offered the editorship of Ruch Muzyczny an ultimatum. According to Mycielski’s diary, the ministry sent a letter, calling the

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editors to “come to their senses.”70 This letter apparently included a number of demands, chief among them the charge that the journal should become more general in its scope and tone. Mycielski noted, in an entry from 1 May, that the ministry had offered them five months to accomplish this transformation, but that, really, everyone understood that the decision had already been made. The journal was to be moved from Kraków to Warsaw, and there would be changes in the editorial board. The ministry wanted Mycielski to serve as the chief editor for the new Ruch Muzyczny, but he had serious reservations. He felt that his colleagues who had already agreed to join the new editorial team were “acting in good faith, although, in reality, they are performing the will of the ministry and of its pen pusher, the current Minister of Culture and Art, Galiński.”71 Over the course of the year, Mycielski continued to participate in discussions with the ministry about the nature of the new journal and about his potential leadership role, finally agreeing in July (“against my will”) to take the position. While Mycielski never referenced Rebling’s article in his account of Ruch Muzyczny’s reorganization, it is clear that the journal was being refashioned, in large part, to address its elite focus. The new minister of culture, Tadeusz Galiński was convinced that Ruch Muzyczny must be transformed from a specialist music journal into a mass-culture magazine with broad appeal.72 Mycielski felt that achieving such a degree of mass appeal was unlikely, but he agreed to try to strike a balance, both within the journal itself and among his deeply divided editorial staff.73 Minister Galiński made it all too clear that the new Ruch should function primarily as a mechanism for “the popularization of musical culture,” which Mycielski feared would only occur at the expense of elite culture and of everything “that I hold to be the highest achievement of . . . art.”74 Despite these internal struggles, the journal did seek an equilibrium when it began distribution again in February 1960. In its new format, expanded in size and with a new aesthetic presence (more pictures, glossier paper), Ruch Muzyczny still included articles about contemporary music—and even articles by the same young musicologists and composers whose work had attracted criticism before the reorganization. But alongside these contributions the journal now ran articles related to a wider spectrum of cultural activity in Poland. The new Ruch included articles about performances and competitions, about education, historical composers and their work, concerts and books, and many topics that might appeal to a more general audience. The journal’s priorities and goals had thus been rebalanced so that its impact extended simultaneously upward and outward. The first issue in February 1960 opened with a manifesto that said as much: We want to retain the achievements of the Kraków Ruch Muzyczny, a tradition that was both dedicated and pioneering, fighting for the highest quality of artistic work even with difficult conditions under the auspices of Polskie Wydawnictwo

86     the dissemination of culture Muzyczne. . . . We want the Warsaw publication of Ruch Muzyczny to become a journal for all musicians and lovers of music—not only for composers, theorists and performers, but also for concertgoers and for those whose hearts are attuned to the issues facing our music. Therefore we will begin to embrace the broadest possible perspective of the problems facing musical life in Poland. . . . We do not want to be a journal that represents some kind of singular coterie or musical opinion, but rather, we want our biweekly [journal] to reflect [everything] that is actually happening in Polish musical life.75

The mission statement expressed respect for the previous iteration of Ruch, but the underlying critique of the earlier journal’s imbalance was not so subtle. This was especially true as the manifesto moved on to outline the editors’ plans for future development: the Warsaw Ruch would be a journal for all music lovers, and it would not be a journal that represented “some kind of singular coterie.” Reading between the lines here, it is possible of course to identify in this list of positive attributes a catalog of the previous journal’s sins. The manifesto bore traces of ministry intervention, serving as a reminder to other musical institutions of what could happen if they neglected to balance their commitments to both elite and mass culture. If this balance was maintained, then the party-state apparatus could allow and even actively support the dissemination of information about new and difficult music, because such initiatives could be wrapped more generally into Poland’s trajectory away from backwardness and into the future. M OV I N G F R OM L AC K T O L AG

This official support would only remain in place if the institutions in question were also able to demonstrate their real and practical commitment to raising the level of culture in Polish society. If they were not able to demonstrate such a commitment, then the authorities reserved the right to course correct, as they did with Ruch Muzyczny. These were, after all, public institutions that depended upon official funding and administrative support to engage in any outreach project, elite or otherwise. Even as scholars, composers, and musicians found myriad ways in the post-revolutionary moment to strengthen their specialist audience and to build international prestige, party and state leaders were able to ensure that Poland’s new cultural identity would not move in a direction that was antithetical (explicitly or implicitly) to their own cultural and political goals. One of the major implications of the “little stabilization” period for Polish culture was that the discourse of lack was no longer sufficient in making patronage claims on the state. Lack language had been extremely effective in periods of political flux, allowing its speakers to use comparisons to advocate for specific changes. During the Thaw, and especially in the period immediately following the 1956 revolution, Poles had been able to invoke the language of lack in relation to other

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nations, both East and West. They pointed to specific gaps: Poland was missing certain cultural phenomena, certain institutional foundations, certain forms of knowledge. The discursive terrain of the “stabilization” years, by contrast, was subtler. Even as he walked back his reforms, Gomułka’s pronouncement of the “Polish road to socialism” still resonated as a kind of progressive victory. The party-state apparatus had made a commitment to creative freedom, and even as leaders began to pressure cultural institutions to use that freedom in particular ways (and not in other ways), they were careful to maintain a public front of support for Poland’s cultural progress. Especially on an international stage, party and state cultural leaders were very happy to continue exporting progressive Polish art. In this context, claims of lack became less effective because the gaps had become less visible, and a discourse predicated on negative comparisons with the West was no longer desirable. We have already seen that elite cultural institutions had to adapt their negotiation strategies during this period; neither the Experimental Studio nor Ruch Muzyczny could depend on lack discourse in justifying their continued existence. Rather, they had to demonstrate their commitment to the ongoing chronological evolution of the nation. In the next three chapters, I will explore the ways that this new mode—a discourse of lag—employed language about chronological time to link aesthetics of futurity and progress back to national traditions. This arc between the future and the past would generate tremendous momentum for both artists and audiences as they rushed toward the end of the decade.

4

Lag (Opóźnienie) Genius Construction and Looking Back to Move Forward

SE A R C H I N G F O R G E N I U S

During the retrenchments of the “little stabilization” period, which began in 1957, the discourse of Polish cultural backwardness shifted away from lack-based language. Discourses of cultural backwardness grounded in lack had invited quantitative approaches to ameliorating that backwardness; therefore, this language had been effective in advocating for resources, institutional support, and even more abstract things, such as access to travel or educational opportunities. As demonstrated in the institutional case studies of chapter 3, however, the political and cultural environment changed during the “little stabilization” period in such a way that it was no longer possible to justify the support or production of high culture simply because doing so would fill a gap. Leaders in the Polish Radio Experimental Studio and the journal Ruch Muzyczny had to demonstrate that their institutions were capable of broad practical function, and that any substantive investment in nourishing artists and intellectuals would also stimulate Polish cultural progress at all levels. This shift suggested that the notion of progress itself was being used in a new way—that its definition was suddenly qualitative rather than quantitative, and that its trajectory was being measured against internal, rather than external, benchmarks. This latter parameter of progress was especially important as Gomułka’s government entered its maturity; the much-vaunted “Polish road to socialism” proposed a unique path to the future, and this path could not be evaluated in relation to other nations’ paths (and especially not Western, capitalist ones). This did not mean that composers and critics stopped using language about cultural backwardness in relation to the production and distribution of so-called 88

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“serious music” (muzyka poważna). On the contrary, the specter of Polish cultural backwardness—now framed in terms of lag rather than lack—continued to propel spirited aesthetic debate and creative experimentation in the later 1950s. Unlike lack discourse, lag-inflected language attracted little scrutiny from state and party leadership because it did not imply a need for direct political action and it did not immediately imply negative comparisons with the West. Instead, it turned inward and called upon national narratives—narratives that stretched deeply into the past, tapping into affiliations and identities that did not respect the temporal boundaries of the contemporary communist Polish state. Under the political conditions of the Thaw, discussions about national lag had the power to unite various political and cultural actors in a shared commitment to reversing that lagged position. While this did not mean that music institutions functioned without direct political oversight, it did mean that questions of musical aesthetics often escaped that oversight. Increasingly, the creative unions and other artistic institutions were able to exert their special authority over stylistic or technical concerns so long as their creative labors could be shown to be promoting progress in the nation (and so long as they did not explicitly challenge state and party power). Over the course of the next three chapters, I will trace the aesthetic and institutional implications of this shift to the language of lag, which ultimately provided a foundation for the articulation of a Polish musical avant-garde movement in the later 1950s and early 1960s. In the current chapter, my goal is more specific: I argue that lag discourse reframed the role of the composer within Polish culture, reinvigorating tropes grounded in early nineteenth-century romantic nationalism about the creative and political responsibilities of artistic genius. In the wake of the 1956 Polish October revolution, composers often attracted praise for using new, unfamiliar techniques—and especially techniques that had been critiqued or suppressed as formalist in the early 1950s. When lack language began to be superseded by a discourse grounded in lag, characterized as a kind of chronological displacement or delay (opóźnienie), progress in music could not be measured by novelty alone. Alongside innovation, cultural leaders were increasingly concerned about compositional craft, about originality, and about musical meaning. The composer’s role in generating cultural progress moved into the foreground, and, as a result, questions about genius—judgments about who could be a genius, and how, and why—arose with increasing urgency. This renewed focus on the composer-as-artist did not appear suddenly in 1957; stirrings could be felt already a few years earlier as the political and cultural Thaw gained momentum. One fraught site for renegotiating the role or significance of artists was the Commissions Committee. Discussed in chapter 2, this committee initiated and managed commissions under the combined supervision of the Composers’ Union and the Ministry of Culture and Art. When composers completed commissioned works, they submitted them for review, and the committee sent

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them on to peer reviewers; based on that feedback, the committee would decide whether to finalize the commission and to disburse the remaining funds. Between 1954 and 1956, union and ministry leaders played tug-of-war with the committee; the ministry tried on several occasions to use institutional funding to exert its authority over composers, but at every turn union leadership found ways to reassert the political independence of creative activity. For instance, at the beginning of 1955, the ministry sought to take final commissioning decisions away from the union at the same time that they also sought to redirect the committee’s commissioning efforts toward pedagogical compositions. Union leaders were able to use the second goal to mitigate the effects of the first. If the most important mission was an influx of excellent new pedagogical material, they argued, then the union would be able to handle the commissions more efficiently and effectively than the ministry’s committee.1 The committee’s shift in 1955 toward commissioning more pedagogical music and smaller-scale chamber pieces also reflected ongoing union debates about the committee’s role in Polish musical life. At the 1955 Composers’ Union Congress, several speakers raised concerns about the cooling effect that the committee exerted on Polish musical development. In his remarks, Kazimierz Wiłkomirski struck right at the heart of the matter, arguing that cultural progress depended on “creative genius” (geniusz twórczy). What guidance could the Commissions Committee (with its rigid processes, review apparatus, and seemingly arbitrary power to accept or reject a composition) possibly offer a genius? Wiłkomirski presented an example: What kind of advice could he offer as a peer reviewer to Grażyna Bacewicz, if he were to review her next concerto? If his taste or aesthetic affinities did not line up with hers, how would his input be useful to her? Wiłkomirski acknowledged that the committee had been vitally important to Polish composers in previous years, and that several important (although “not necessarily genius”) works would not exist without its commissions. In general, however, he argued that the fear of negative responses from the committee was limiting artists’ willingness to take risks. Composers—and especially those of the highest caliber—needed to look beyond the Commissions Committee for guidance and support. They should listen instead to themselves, allowing “our passion and our powerful love for art to dictate whether a work should take a certain form.”2 The degree to which composers themselves felt satisfied with their work, informed by enthusiastic or critical feedback from listeners and performers, should guide the creative process. Zygmunt Mycielski, who was the chair of the Commissions Committee at that time, defended the committee’s decision-making processes by reinforcing Wiłkomirski’s own language: composers such as Bacewicz were “atypical” and did not represent the majority of the commissions that received the committee’s consideration.3 In practice, it was clear that the committee and its reviewers recognized an implicit division within its applicant pool based on stature and talent—in a word,

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according to genius. In the early 1950s, all composers, regardless of stature, had received lengthy reviews and commentary in response to their submissions; by 1955, reviewers offered no feedback to composers such as Bacewicz and Lutosławski, saving their extensive comments for younger or lesser-known applicants. Indicative of a greater decentralization of arts funding as the Thaw wore on, prominent composers’ names also began to appear less frequently on the commission lists in 1956 and 1957.4 Another change in 1956 further emphasized the status division within the Composers’ Union. Eschewing anonymity, Commissions Committee reviews suddenly bore the names of their authors. In the meeting where this change was approved, members agreed that attaching the names of these prominent composers would lend greater authority to the advice contained in the reviews themselves.5 In making this change, the reviews took on a new function. Where in the earlier 1950s they had facilitated discussions about compositional craft among composers who largely perceived themselves as equals, by 1956 the reviews became a mechanism through which prominent composers could educate the union’s less-prominent and younger members while reinforcing their own elite status. Reviewers took their mission seriously, providing substantial feedback even for unsuccessful commissions. In cases where public performance could not be justified, reviewers occasionally proposed private listening sessions (przesłuchanie) to provide a learning opportunity for the composer.6 Reviewers also used their comments to champion up-and-coming artists whom they believed might someday ascend to the group of elite Polish composers. Ironically, they often offered very critical assessments of these promising composers, of whom more could and should be expected. In a negative review of young Wojciech Kilar’s Sinfonia concertante (1956), composer Kazimierz Serocki explained the rationale behind his critique: “I believe [Kilar] to be one of the most talented composers of the youngest generation. . . . From him I demand more. And in that [expectation], I was disappointed.”7 After assessing various specific problems, Serocki explained his harsh critique: “If I have written at length about this, it is because . . . I very much value Kilar’s talent, and I wanted to plead with him to have more ambition. Maybe he will take offense with me, and maybe he will consider this and avoid [these criticisms] in his next works. I am writing in every sense out of affection and not out of malice.”8 Reviews like Serocki’s were not concerned with measuring the newness of the works they surveyed, or with identifying new techniques therein. In lieu of focusing on innovation, then, reviewers placed a premium on a certain undefinable quality, a spark of creative energy, and they recognized that there was no way to inculcate that spark if it did not already exist. This was a lack that was fundamentally unfillable. Mycielski, toward the end of his review of Włodzimierz Późniak’s Suita Orawska, turned away from the composition at hand and addressed his fellow committee members:

92     lag (Opóźnienie) I must emphasize here something that arises in many works—the issue of musical imagination. . . . With the passing years, it is ever more difficult for me to find satisfaction in relation to this matter. I believe . . . that we should turn particular attention to this rarest characteristic in an artist, although it is not clear, whether a professor or critic is in a position to offer here a clear judgment, especially if it relates to young [artists]. Our climate is not sympathetic, anyway, to the development of such a fundamental characteristic, as is imagination in art.9

Mycielski proposed here, just before the 1956 revolution, that the question of invention or imagination was more than just a problem: it was an epidemic, begotten by the stagnant Polish cultural climate.10 This belief that the Commissions Committee did not have the power to instill genius, but only to encourage it when they found it, underscored the limits of a lack-based development strategy. Mycielski was decrying not a deficiency of cultural infrastructure, but a deficiency in Polish art itself. Artists of genius would find a way to survey the aesthetic and technical developments that stretched across the timeline of Poland’s displacement without simply replicating the innovations of other artists, thereby reifying the conditions of lag. Instead, they would blaze their own path forward, telescoping and synthesizing those innovations within their own personal (and national) aesthetic vision. In the remainder of this chapter, I interrogate the trope of creative genius in the immediate post-revolution years in Poland, as artists and intellectuals looked first to the past for inspiration from earlier genius figures and then to the present for current candidates. The nearly unanimous election of Witold Lutosławski to that role, regardless of his own disinterest in assuming such a responsibility, reveals a great deal about discourses of artistic progress and national tradition that would nourish the emerging avant-garde movement just a few years later. L AG D I S C OU R SE , A RT I S T IC EVO LU T IO N , A N D T H E P O L I SH BA R D ( W I E S ZC Z )

I have argued that the language of backwardness, figured either as lack or as lag, can be applied self-reflexively to generate consensus and to promote a collective drive toward progress. Lag discourse, in particular, may be employed by the self-proclaimed Other to express a sense of existing outside of time, or existing on a unique timeline. In proclaiming their inhabitance of a moment that existed previous to the chronological present, many Poles—and especially artists and intellectuals— wielded the language of lag after World War II to break away from a homogenous world-historical timeline and to imagine an idiosyncratic path forward. Lag discourses allowed Polish speakers to conjure shared national displacement experiences stretching from the late-eighteenth-century partitions through the World Wars and their nation’s incorporation within the Soviet Bloc. By stepping outside

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the arbitrary restrictions of chronological time, artists were able to pick up the threads of national projects long deferred and to speak to present audiences through the language of past traumas. In Poland, there were existing narratives, dating back to the early nineteenth century, that accorded this kind of power to artists. Musicologist Halina Goldberg discusses the figure of the Polish Romantic wieszcz, a word that she argues has no good equivalent in English; beyond a bardic function, “he is also a seer and a prophet, one who guides his people to other spiritual and temporal realms.”11 The need for a national wieszcz intensified after the failure of the 1830–31 uprising against Russian occupation, and exiled Poles sought meaning in their loss through the messianic visions of poets such as Adam Mickiewicz. These visions were not exclusively political. Mickiewicz and other Polish romantic philosopher-artists married revolutionary politics to millenarian theology in their messianic vision of the defeated Polish nation, whose suffering would offer purification and, ultimately, redemption—not only for Poland, but for humanity.12 Through the efforts of these artists, the memory of the 1831 defeat became a touchstone for the preservation of Polish national identity throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The powerful function of this memory, together with the very real political and historical effects of the partitions, disrupted the nineteenth-century secularization of time that, according to historian Reinhart Koselleck, represented a key stage in the development of modernity in (Western) Europe.13 In the absence of a categorical demarcation between “tradition” and “modernity,” artists and intellectuals continued to draw the past into the present in service of a future vision for an independent Polish nation.14 Polish romantic messianism found its clearest expression in literature, but Goldberg demonstrates that music held pride of place in the poets’ imaginations. Music had the power to communicate to an audience without the mediation of words, and therefore had a unique ability to evoke memories and to engage meaning on multiple levels. In the early nineteenth century, these attitudes led to the elevation of Fryderyk Chopin as a bard, especially within the émigré Polish community in Paris. That status would follow him long past his death, with Karol Szymanowski writing in 1920 that Chopin had possessed a unique capacity for communicating specific historical national trauma in a timeless form: “Chopin really was a Pole who composed Polish Music which at the same time is universal art of the highest standard. . . . The great compositions ring out with the tragic, albeit heroic, pathos of a nation which, although on the verge of exhaustion, still defended passionately its fundamental right to existence.”15 There had not, Szymanowski lamented, been another great composer to take on this bardic mantle in the intervening century, and he proclaimed the necessity of finding a new genius to lead Polish culture forward. This would not be achieved by taking literal inspiration from Chopin’s music, which belonged to the past, but rather by channeling

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Chopin’s creative spirit: a national bard would synthesize Polish cultural experiences with “universal” values and contemporary European musical developments. Only this synthesis would allow Polish art (and audiences) to blaze a path forward, and to “sweep aside ‘yesterday’s dams,’ stubbornly erected to keep us isolated from influences which were alien to us.”16 After Szymanowski’s death, composer and critic Konstanty Régamey extended these ideas further. In his 1948 Kwartalnik Muzyczny article, “Toward an Analysis of Evolution in Art” (discussed in chapter 1), Régamey wrote about the dialogic relationship that existed between the artist, the artwork, and the audience.17 He retained his interwar conviction that a stratum of metaphysical artistic “Content” existed outside of time, but in this essay, he focused on artists’ creative instincts in identifying the appropriate forms and techniques through which to communicate this Content. The process for generating artistic progress was, in Régamey’s estimation, relative and not at all reliant on a fixed chronological timeline. In order to best communicate Content to the audience, artists might need to reach into the distant past for inspiration, or they might need to engage with more recent technical developments—or they might need to find a synthesis of past and present that held the promise of a new future. Indeed, the notion of synthesis permeated Régamey’s theory of cultural progress: synthesis of tradition and innovation, of composers’ creative vision with audience’s needs, of Content and Form. The significance of synthesis here, and of the dialogic relationship between artist and audience, extended the phenomenological groundwork that Régamey had laid in his interwar writings, in which he argued that listeners’ perception of artistic Content arose not from their perception of individual components of an artwork, but from their experience of the nodes (węzły) and tensions between those components.18 Listeners’ experience of narrative time therefore unfolded within the space of each artistic encounter, finding synthesis—true Unity—in the energy that animated the interstices. Cultural progress, according to this schema, could not be measured through external comparisons. Newness was a qualitative, not a quantitative or chronological, consideration, and could only be determined according to the communicative power of the individual artist’s work, and the ability of that power to spur the artist on to further creation. Régamey immigrated to Switzerland after World War II, but his previous status as the leader of the progressive camp of composers in the wake of Szymanowski’s death meant that his influence was still being felt in the postwar period.19 Régamey’s framing of artists’ dual responsibilities to art and to audiences, and his general disregard for progress in a chronological sense, suggests a vision for the creative potential available within the space of lag discourse. It might seem counterintuitive to imagine that purposefully adopting a subject position of lag would be a strong or a fruitful move, but postwar Polish artists’ embrace of lagged positioning

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allowed them the freedom to define progress on their own terms. They were able to reinterpret narratives of contemporary musical development to suit their own creative needs and the needs of their audiences, charting a unique path into the future. Language about catching up with the contemporary moment, or about reestablishing Polish influence within Europe, might have gained momentum through references to chronological time, but the sense of time’s passage—its speed, its dynamism, its potential—was fully internal, fueled by collisions between ideas and experiences. It was in this liminal in-between space that the creative energy of lag discourse lay, just as the Régameyan “nodes” of an artwork propelled its movement and the exchange of meaning between the (genius) artist and the audience. L O O K I N G T O T H E PA S T: T H E P O S T WA R R E C E P T IO N O F KA R O L S Z YM A N OWSK I

In the 1920s, Karol Szymanowski had proclaimed the need for a new Polish bardic genius. At the time, Szymanowski himself was the most likely candidate for this position, but, as discussed in chapter 1, Szymanowski’s reception during his lifetime was extremely polarized. After the war, many of his interwar interlocutors worked to remake Szymanowski into a different image, but the problem remained: Szymanowski’s musical aesthetics did not line up with any of the available postwar definitions of musical modernity. Therefore, despite his obvious significance to the history of contemporary Polish music, Szymanowski’s music could not serve as a direct foundation for a new tradition. Instead, narratives about his life became a battleground for debating Polish cultural backwardness. Between the late 1940s and the late 1950s, his critical reception would undergo a major shift, framing him first as an ineluctable anachronism and then as a proto-avant-garde genius composer. This shift reflected a new understanding of musical progress. Party-state leaders and members of the latter-day conservative-cum-Marxist group in the late 1940s and early 1950s used Szymanowski as a scapegoat upon which to heap the sins of formalism. Picking up the same criticisms used by Rytel in the 1920s and ’30s, they argued that the composer’s European travels and his interest in various threads of musical modernism had hampered his development of an authentic Polish musical voice. Instead, he had only managed to reproduce innovations that he collected from other sources.20 Szymanowski’s rootlessness, according to the Polish Marxist interpretation, had led him to conceive of the artist as an individual separate from sociopolitical and national tradition. One of the composer’s most famous statements along these lines was his 1922 article with the ostentatious English-language title, “My Splendid Isolation.”21 At the 1948 Composers’ Union Congress, then vice minister Włodzimierz Sokorski gestured toward this very article in painting Szymanowski as a manifestation of the cultural

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deterioration of capitalism. In his stylistic eclecticism, the composer had “repeatedly endeavored to cloister himself within an illusory sense of his own isolation and the isolation of his own sound world. Of course, this was a delusion, because, in spite of its formalistic methods of composition, his music . . . was, plainly speaking, a creative reflection of the chaos of a perishing world.”22 Sokorski’s offhand dismissal could not adequately account, however, for the role that Szymanowski had played in mentoring the very composers to whom the vice minister was speaking.23 For this audience, Szymanowski loomed large; he was their teacher and predecessor whose influence could not be negated. On the contrary, critics and composers from competing political and aesthetic positions debated his legacy, shaping the narrative of Szymanowski’s musical development according to their own purposes. Their disagreements could be felt in the words that they used to describe Szymanowski’s music: one observer’s “eclecticism” was another’s “synthesis.” Particularly fraught was the music that Szymanowski had composed in the 1910s, with his frank embrace of various “isms”: symbolism, impressionism, exoticism, and eroticism. The works he composed after returning to Poland in 1919 were in some ways less contentious, because of their overt references to Polish national tradition, but critics used this later period to diagnose Szymanowski’s relative backwardness or forwardness. For those in the Marxist camp, Szymanowski had been moving in the right direction, but his residual modernism figured as a sign of his personal backwardness. For modernist-inclined composers and critics, on the other hand, it was precisely Szymanowski’s contemporary musical language (and especially his Bartókian derivation of nontraditional harmonies from folk modes) that had signified his progressive aesthetics. From both perspectives, the temporal lag of the Polish nation had hampered Szymanowski’s development, and he had died before he had been able to reverse that lag. The way that they told this story, and the specific compositions that they highlighted within that story, allowed critics from both sides to instrumentalize the lost potential and momentum of Szymanowski’s career to advocate for their respective visions of the Polish musical future. In 1950, Marxist musicologist Stefania Łobaczewska published the first major biography of Szymanowski. Notable for its massive size (spanning more than 650 pages, including extensive score and photographic reproductions) in a period of economic austerity and rebuilding, Łobaczewska’s book constructed a much more complicated image of the composer than Sokorski had done in 1948.24 She recognized the disparity between her own ideological position and the composer’s aesthetic ideals, but she drew on psychological and historical-contextual analysis to rehabilitate Szymanowski as a composer who had begun in his later career to overcome his cosmopolitanism through an embrace of his Polish national foundations. Łobaczewska began from the premise that Szymanowski’s identity was characterized by division (rozdwojenie) at all levels. In his music, he maintained ties to

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nineteenth-century romantic aesthetics while simultaneously reaching in his critical writings toward twentieth-century modernism. In his psyche, Szymanowski was torn between an emotional internal sensibility and a more logical relationship to the external world. Łobaczewska’s Szymanowski was tragically aware that he existed in a contemporary moment that privileged the modernist/logical side of his personality, but he was unable to suppress his yearning for all things romantic/ emotional. She argued that his torment was a product of Polish cultural backwardness. The composer had been shaped by the material, political, and cultural conditions of his homeland, where the partitions had caused the romantic period to stretch well into the twentieth century.25 Łobaczewska noted with regret that “Szymanowski had . . . too much to make up for in the area of compositional technique alone; at the moment when he stepped into the arena of history, the gap dividing this technique from the West was too great for him to enter directly into the most avant-garde pursuits.”26 Her regret was eclipsed by her disapproval of Western European avant-gardism. Łobaczewska’s analysis of Szymanowski’s music from the 1910s demonstrates her belief that the composer was never more hampered by lag than when he was trying most ardently to close a perceived gap between himself and the West. In her view, Szymanowski was unable to resolve the duality (dwoistość) that shaped his life and his music by reaching for external inspirations; when he chased after progress, the result was always stylistic eclecticism, anachronism. As an example, she offered up the Symphony no. 3, op. 27, “Song of the Night,” composed between 1914 and 1916. Łobaczewska identified the symphony as an artistic credo for the composer’s outward-facing middle period, as “one of the climactic moments in the deepening of Szymanowski’s creative invention.”27 Cataloging influences from Debussy and Scriabin (harmony), Strauss (virtuosic instrumental writing), and Mahler (orchestration), she noted that these turn-of-the-century developments had been mostly absent in Polish music. She praised Szymanowski’s use of contrasts, especially in textures and timbres, to illuminate Rumi’s text, and she argued that moments of tension (not unlike the Régameyan “nodes”) conveyed the expressive content of the work.28 She tempered her praise, however, with the critique that Szymanowski had filtered these affective contrasts through his own subjective creative drive, and they were dependent on the kinds of specialized knowledge that adhered to elite culture. Szymanowski’s experiments with chromatic saturation, maximal textural density, and expressionistic melodic writing for chorus and soloist built toward a transcendent climax in the third movement, but, in Łobaczewska’s estimation, they also generated a sense of unease (niepokój) that distanced the music from his (Polish) audience.29 By contrast, Łobaczewska looked to Szymanowski’s final period of composition, after 1920, for examples of true musical progress. Holding up the Stabat Mater, op. 53 (1926) as the paradigmatic example, she argued that Szymanowski

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had turned inward to Poland, and backward, to the distant past, for inspiration. Instead of using nonfunctional chromatic sonorities and whole-tone collections, the composer had used modal mixtures grounded in “archaic” liturgical singing practices and (nonspecific) folk influences to accomplish much the same effect.30 The comparison between these two pieces, the Symphony no. 3 and the Stabat Mater, is interesting because the dramatic arc in both is quite similar: Szymanowski opens with thin textures, minimal materials cast low in registral pitch space, and then gradually he increases the density, volume, and harmonic complexity to generate giant sound masses. Perhaps one of the most notable differences lies in the nature of the moment of apotheosis or transcendence itself: while the Symphony no. 3 relies on maximalism to build to a point of overwhelming sensory and spiritual ecstasy, the final movement of the Stabat Mater opens with a moment of utter transparency, the soprano soloist singing the chant-inspired melody that Szymanowski believed to be his most beautiful composition.31 This is a different kind of apotheosis, inviting reflection and temporal dislocation. For Łobaczewska, there was no question which piece represented the correct path for Polish music: while the Symphony no. 3 had projected “the subjective vision of an individual [artist] with broad intellectual horizons and refined emotional experiences,” the Stabat Mater expressed “simpler emotions, those accessible to people with less education and less emotional sensitivity.” In reaching beyond himself and listening to the resonances of “people from a different epoch, from another . . . world than that in which he lived, from another social class,” Szymanowski had succeeded in overcoming his eclecticism and finding, in its place, a synthesis grounded in Polishness.32 We may extrapolate Łobaczewska’s concepts of genius and creative progress from such judgments. She did not measure genius in proximity to innovation. Łobaczewska’s Szymanowski was a progressive artist only when he embraced the logic of Poland’s lag, adopting an idiosyncratic position as a twentieth-century romantic composer. On the opposite side of the political spectrum, Stefan Kisielewski also linked Szymanowski’s aesthetic backwardness to Poland’s national backwardness.33 In his role as an anti-Marxist gadfly, Kisielewski was not interested in presenting Szymanowski as some kind of proto-socialist realist composer, putting the needs of the audience ahead of his own creative vision. Instead, his 1947 essay presented Szymanowski as both an example and a warning. For Kisielewski, Szymanowski’s eclecticism arose directly out of Poland’s long displacement from Europe, and the only solution would be for postwar composers to rejoin the European contemporary musical tradition that was already in progress. Kisielewski argued that, with no major predecessor since Chopin, Szymanowski had been forced to create a Polish musical tradition from nothing, like Robinson Crusoe on his island. This had led him to telescope the entirety of nineteenth-century musical development within his own musical language.

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Employing the English-language word “handicap” to describe the composer’s chronic state of anachronism, Kisielewski extended his diagnosis to Polish culture more broadly: “The fact is . . . that, although [Poland] belongs directly to the family of nations that make up Western culture, we are rarely the original builders of that culture. [If we do contribute to that culture, it is] only through individuals of exceptional genius, [those who are] disproportionately great in comparison with our society, such as Copernicus and Chopin. The transformations in European culture have been generated, to this point, outside [our borders]. Our reproduction of these transformations is a derivative phenomenon; we are always the late consumers of Western culture and not its cocreators.”34 It was through this lens of derivative consumption that Kisielewski analyzed Szymanowski, arguing that he had “hailed from a different artistic epoch than that in which he was destined to live.”35 In lieu of genius, then, Kisielewski characterized Szymanowski’s mission as one of assimilating and transmitting the markers of European musical modernity to his students. This, ultimately, was his gift to Polish culture. He could not “catch up” with the contemporary moment in his own work, but he could bequeath to his students a sense that a Polish national ideal should be a European one. What is striking about these two biographical accounts of Szymanowski is their similarity, despite their authors’ different ideological positions. Both Łobaczewska and Kisielewski focused their attention on the internal contradictions that characterized the composer’s life and work, and they both held him up as a metaphor for the Polish nation, caught between two centuries. For neither author was Szymanowski an uncomplicated genius figure, in the sense that he had made universal contributions (conceived within a homogenous world-timeline). Rather, his contributions were internal; only within Poland could the progressive potential of this music be appreciated. Less than a decade later, during the Thaw, the discourse about Szymanowski shifted. Instead of holding him up as an example of Poland’s perpetual displacement, composers and scholars began to look to him as an example of a predecessor-genius—a figure who modeled a strategy of stylistic synthesis as a means of moving forward. This shift in tone and language is particularly clear in Kisielewski’s own writing. In a 1958 chapter about Szymanowski, Kisielewski reproduced extensive passages from his earlier essay, but he framed them with an entirely different argument.36 Through this new biographical sketch, Kisielewski established Szymanowski as a composer driven throughout his life by a sense of both his Polishness and his Europeanness, and by a desire to “make up for [Poland’s] backwardness” by lifting national musical concerns to the level of the universal. More remarkably, in contrast with the earlier essay’s defeatism, Kisielewski declared that “in defiance of everyone and everything, [Szymanowski] was successful.”37 Kisielewski supported his thesis by shifting his focus to the final period of Szymanowski’s career, the same years that Łobaczewska had highlighted in her book.

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Kisielewski argued that the older composer had, during this period, “achieved [the goal] for which he had been aiming his entire life: a national style that was simultaneously universal.”38 Whereas in the earlier essay, he had allowed the ballet Harnasie (completed in 1931), with its audible traces of Stravinsky’s influence, to signal the high point in Szymanowski’s career, here Kisielewski elevated the Stabat Mater to that position. Łobaczewska had argued that the Stabat Mater demonstrated Szymanowski’s turn inward, but Kisielewski suggested here that the pivot toward the past had facilitated an outward turn and an engagement with contemporary musical techniques, resulting in a “crystalline, transparent, fascinating sound world.”39 In this later essay, therefore, Kisielewski constructed a Szymanowski who had successfully fulfilled the mission to reconnect Poland to Europe: “He became an ambassador of Polishness in the world and, simultaneously, the restorer and spiritual leader of our music. He laid a foundation for new music in Poland, and he left behind a generation of composers, who, although often far from emulating his style or technique, move forward, animated by his lofty and uncompromising artistic ideas.”40 This Szymanowski was an active, positive role model, rather than a passive, negative one. He had not been accepted as a genius figure during his life, but now the postwar generation could fully appreciate and realize his efforts to renew Polish music tradition. Zygmunt Mycielski, who had been one of Szymanowski’s closest students, added a messianic edge to the rhetoric of the predecessor-genius in a 1957 essay, asserting that the older composer had absorbed all of the challenges of Polish cultural backwardness upon himself, “as if through a lens,” in order to spare later generations from enduring the same trials.41 He had shown his students how to move forward within the creative logic of lag, synthesizing the contradictions and disjunctions that made up their history. Mycielski did not agree, however, with Kisielewski about the impact that Szymanowski’s example should have upon postwar Polish music. Rather than interpreting progress as a process of rejoining a European timeline or of demonstrating mastery over certain markers of musical modernism, Mycielski focused on Szymanowski’s resolute commitment to his own creative vision: “All of his music testifies to this internal effort to reach a deeper understanding of the self, of its own invention, of its own expression.”42 In this testament of praise, we may also hear a rebuke to composers in the heady early Thaw years, not to give themselves over too thoroughly to the logic of lack. Rushing toward the West, filling gaps and absorbing new techniques, would not generate true progress. The tangled threads of Szymanowski’s postwar reception reveal a great deal about their individual authors’ political and aesthetic commitments, but, taken together, they also point to something bigger. In the late 1950s shift toward a positive evaluation of Szymanowski’s contribution and the refiguring of his stylistic eclecticism as synthesis, we may also see a new appreciation for the creative possibilities available within the lagged subject position—especially for a genius artist. Without the pressure to conform to a homogenous timeline and to catch up with

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innovative techniques and styles developed elsewhere, an artist might instead attune to local and personal creative demands, might turn simultaneously forward and back, to produce artistic synthesis. And in this synthesis lay the path toward an un-backward future. The first Warsaw Autumn festival in 1956 featured Szymanowski’s music in both the opening and closing concerts, and the two works on the program were the Stabat Mater and the Symphony no. 3. Tadeusz Marek, in his program notes, declared both works to be masterpieces on an international scale. The symphony represented Szymanowski’s engagement with a broad swath of early twentiethcentury musical modernisms, achieving a level of ecstatic tension unparalleled even in the work of Scriabin, and the Stabat Mater was founded upon folk music, Polish religious tradition, and personal vision. Taken together, they “reflected the complexity and conflicts of contemporary artistic life”—conflicts that now faced a new generation of Polish artists.43 The critical response to Szymanowski’s compositions at the 1956 festival was rather muted, suggesting that, perhaps, audiences were eager to hear from the new generation. In their reviews, critics affirmed his position as a great master (mistrz), and more than one review asserted the presence of a national, native (rodzimy) element in this music, placing Szymanowski in Chopin’s lineage. Most critics, however, devoted only a few words to Szymanowski. Leszek Ludorowski, in his review of the festival’s first concert, noted that his readers were probably already familiar with the Stabat Mater, and that they did not need him to analyze it further; instead, he focused on Messiaen’s Les offrandes oubliées and Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 10, which had bookended Szymanowski on the concert.44 In his reflection on the festival as a whole, young critic Ludwik Erhardt was rather more impatient. Questioning why Szymanowski had been included at all in this festival of contemporary music, he complained: “Never, even during his own life, was [Szymanowski] ‘contemporary’ in the context of European music; . . . today, it is probably even more true that he should not be counted [among contemporary Polish composers].”45 Other critics were kinder in their analysis, but many of them seemed to agree in principle (if not tone) with Erhardt. Szymanowski, argued Jerzy Młodziejowski, “was the beginning.”46 It was time, now, to see how a new group of Polish composers would run with his example, demonstrating their own syntheses of contemporary musical technique with personal intuition and national tradition to generate cultural progress. Time would tell if there was a new Polish genius artist among them, ready to assume the Chopin-Szymanowski mantle. D O D E C A P HO N Y A S A SIG N I F I E R O F M O D E R N I T Y

The reception of the first Warsaw Autumn revealed a readiness to look beyond Karol Szymanowski, but that readiness signaled something else as well: an

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awareness that Szymanowski’s early twentieth-century modernist milieu did not represent the “most modern” pathway in European postwar music culture. Audiences frustrated with Szymanowski expressed similar sentiments, therefore, about Stravinsky’s and Honegger’s works on the program—to say nothing of Brahms and Tchaikovsky. As demonstrated in chapter 2, composers in the early Thaw years had often decried their own lack of familiarity with modernist composers from the earlier part of the century as a means of advocating for greater access and creative freedom. By 1957, that strategy had been set aside. Nowhere is that clearer than in the case of Stravinsky, who, leading up to the 1956 revolution, had signified all things modern. His early engagement with folk nationalism and his later turn to neoclassicism had fascinated Szymanowski and his students alike, and his status as the most-represented composer on the first Warsaw Autumn program suggested that organizers still believed his music to be an important gap in the audience’s experience. In June 1957, the journal Ruch Muzyczny published a special issue, celebrating Stravinsky’s seventy-fifth birthday. Stefan Kisielewski opened the issue with an article that was hardly celebratory in tone; he acknowledged Stravinsky’s genius, but suggested that the composer’s true contributions already belonged to the past.47 Kisielewski thus invited his readers to critique Stravinsky as a composer and as a modern master—a rhetorical gesture cemented further by the addendum of a survey, “About the Work of Stravinsky,” which posed questions to Polish composers and critics. Ruch Muzyczny published seven responses to the survey: (in order of appearance) Tadeusz Baird, Henryk Schiller, Tadeusz Machl, Witold Lutosławski, Wojciech Kilar, Adam Walaciński, and Michał Spisak.48 These respondents represented a wide range of ages, experiences, and musical styles, but their answers reflected several shared rhetorical gestures: first, they denied Stravinsky’s influence, and they asserted their own familiarity with the composer’s oeuvre, and second, they distanced themselves from Stravinsky’s path of musical evolution. Baird summed up the responses best in an addendum to his survey: “P.S. All of my answers, written above, do not at all signify that I do not understand or that I do not appreciate the great role that Stravinsky has played in musical life in the 20th century. I admit, however, that I feel more admiration for his work than true passion.”49 One of the survey’s questions offered unexpected insights into the respondents’ understanding about the path forward for Polish contemporary music: “Were you shocked by Stravinsky’s turn to the dodecaphonic technique? Do you feel this turn is a natural development, or is it—as some people are saying—one of the composer’s ‘flings’?”50 This leading question touched a nerve, because, for many years, the dodecaphonic technique had played a synecdochical function in Polish musical discourse, representing all of the Western, formalist techniques from which Polish composers had been isolated during the Stalinist period. At the infamous

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Composers’ Union Congress at Łagów, musicologists Zofia Lissa and Józef Chomiński had both lambasted dodecaphony as a symbol of Western decadence. Chomiński was particularly adamant that music based upon the “twelve-semitone system” (system dwunastopółtonowy) lacked meaningful structure, and that balance could “only be restored when a composer jettisons dodecaphony.”51 For Lissa and Chomiński, then, a turn away from dodecaphony and atonality was the only way to recoup the ability of music to communicate musical content. With the political and cultural Thaw, there came a renewed interest in dodecaphonic techniques and in the Second Viennese School, both of which represented serious areas of lack for Polish music culture.52 If the brevity of Szymanowski’s reception after the 1956 Warsaw Autumn signaled a readiness for something new, the outpouring of words dedicated to Arnold Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto, op. 42 (1942) pointed to dodecaphony as a signifier of modernity—even if critics were unsure if they approved of that signifier. Jan Boehm admitted, for instance, in the Olsztyń-based newspaper Warmia i Mazury that he had concerns about the technique’s implications: “in the opinion of some critics, dodecaphonic music . . . has a great future. It requires, however, the listener to develop a new relationship to music—not so much emotional as intellectual. Will the listener want to give up emotional experience in favor of intellectual delectation? Only time can answer this question.”53 Boehm’s observation is interesting because it replicated, to a certain extent, the same critique that Lissa and Chomiński had raised in Łagów, framing dodecaphony as a technique that threatened to separate form from content. Absent the ideological baggage of socialist realism, this critique resonated with Régameyan aesthetics. How could composers possibly achieve a synthesis of form and content when they were using a form that repelled their intuitive understanding of content? Zygmunt Mycielski complained in his own diaries—even as he admitted that he was trying to learn how to use the technique—that he found dodecaphony to be an “absurd, confined system, moving from speculation to the ear instead of the reverse. . . . Dodecaphony represents an attempt to find discipline, but it provides a sonic result that is terrible for the ear, for it is not at all based in the fundamental laws of acoustics.”54 The arbitrary division of the scale into tones and intervals defied, in Mycielski’s view, the phenomenological concerns that should motivate the creation of art. Faced with such a challenge, it would be difficult to live up to Szymanowski’s example as Mycielski understood it: to allow one’s own creative spiritual vision to drive the compositional process. This privileging of intuition over logic was, in his mind, a marker of a specifically Polish modernism.55 Régamey had argued in the 1940s that it was possible to use the dodecaphonic technique without dogmatism, applying its principles flexibly to serve the composer’s creative vision. He cited Alban Berg (especially the Violin Concerto of 1935) as an interwar precedent and himself and Frank Martin as postwar composers who were continuing

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this trajectory.56 And in 1957, answering the Ruch Muzyczny question about Stravinsky and dodecaphony, a number of the respondents indicated a similar conviction as they defended Stravinsky’s creative choices. The youngest composer of the bunch, Wojciech Kilar asserted flippantly that Stravinsky “does what he wants with sound, how he wants.”57 Tadeusz Machl, who had been a composition student at the Kraków conservatory before joining the faculty there in the early 1950s, clarified this sentiment further. Great composers should, he argued, be able to use any technique, because they would always employ those techniques in service to their greater goals (rather than the other way around): “Talented individuals of Stravinsky’s caliber use whatever techniques they need in a given moment. This isn’t caprice, it isn’t a whim; this is the conscious application and selection of expressive techniques for appropriate content. This kind of composer does not lose his individual identity, whether he uses dodecaphony in one instance, functional harmony in another instance, harmonic mixture, bitonality, or even pre-Bach polyphony.”58 In words that resonated with Mycielski’s plea to the Composers’ Union Commissions Committee back in 1955, Machl here clarified that technique was not the issue. Genius was. And if an artist was a “talented individual of Stravinsky’s caliber,” any creative pathway could, conceivably, act as a conduit for their genius. The question remained: if dodecaphony was a highly desired signifier of modernity, then which Polish composers would take it up? Which composers would show themselves capable of submitting the intellectual rigors of contemporary musical technique to their own creative intuition, thereby generating progress and ameliorating Polish lag? The urgency of this question suffused musical discourse in the period following the 1956 revolution. Younger composers within the union complained that they had insufficient access to information about dodecaphony, and few models from whom to learn.59 Even outside the union, people within a broader cultural sphere seemed to apprehend the significance of the technique; Mycielski recalled in his diary that the literary figure Julian Przyboś had approached him on a city bus and demanded to know, who, among the Poles, was writing dodecaphonic music? Mycielski responded with some surprise that there were no Polish dodecaphonists. There had been Józef Koffler, before the war, but he had been murdered by the Germans, and there had been Roman Palester, but he had emigrated. Przyboś sighed, brooding, “But this is the music of the future.”60 Without hitting the benchmark of dodecaphony, then, there was a sense that Polish music would not be able occupy that future. In a 1958 article about contemporary music techniques for Ruch Muzyczny, young composer Bogusław Schäffer grumbled about his colleagues’ frenzied interest in dodecaphony. He pointed out that this technique did not, on its own, signal contemporaneity in the postwar West, where a new generation of composers was now experimenting with more radical forms of serialism. Still, Schäffer felt compelled in his article to trace a tradition of Polish dodecaphony, naming Koffler,

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Palester, and, surprisingly, Witold Lutosławski. Schäffer’s choice of Lutosławski here is significant because, at the time of writing, Lutosławski had not yet premiered a dodecaphonic composition.61 He was also the only composer in the list who was still living and working in Poland, and therefore he was a potential candidate for tapping into this fund of cultural capital. This was a potential that had been noted as early as 1954, in Stefan Jarociński’s review of the Concerto for Orchestra. Jarociński had praised the Concerto for its progressive momentum, but had then expressed his hope that the next composition might employ the dodecaphonic technique. “In [Lutosławski’s] case, this technique would not portend any danger,” he assured his readers. “It would not become a [restrictive] system for him; rather, it would share the fate of all the other techniques that the composer has thus far taken up in order to achieve his main goal.”62 For Lutosławski to access the cultural capital of dodecaphony, then, the general consensus seemed to hold that he could not simply replicate others’ past innovations, filling cultural lack. Rather, he would have to take up dodecaphony and make it his own, using it to express content to the Polish audience. In other words, he would have to be a genius. E L E C T I N G A N EW NAT IO NA L G E N I U S : W I T O L D LU T O S Ł AWSK I A N D F U N E R A L M U S I C ( 1 9 5 8 )

In 1958, Lutosławski perhaps unintentionally stepped into the role of “Polish dodecaphonist” when he produced Funeral Music (Muzyka żałobna), his first major composition since the Concerto for Orchestra.63 Just as the Concerto for Orchestra had been understood as the symbolic end of the socialist realist period and the opening of the musical Thaw, the Polish music community was poised to welcome Funeral Music as the sign of Polish modernity. Ahead of the premiere, Bohdan Pilarski conducted an interview with Lutosławski for Ruch Muzyczny.64 Pilarski seemed determined to guide his interviewee toward a self-characterization as a national genius, which is hardly surprising; in July of 1957, the critic had already hailed the composer as a bard figure (wieszcz) after Chopin and Szymanowski.65 Christopher Chowrimootoo has written, in his study of Benjamin Britten and middlebrow modernism in Britain, about the “duplicity” of a critical establishment that was determined to frame Britten as a modernist, ignoring any (quasiromantic) characteristics that did not accord with their preferred definition of musical modernism.66 In the Polish critical reception of Lutosławski, we may observe a similar duplicity, a kind of collective agreement that Lutosławski should follow a certain path, and that his genius should take a certain form. I do not make this argument to detract from Lutosławski’s obvious creative powers, but rather to point out that determinations about the quality and impact of his identity as a genius were often taken out of his hands. His work was being interpreted within

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the logic of lag discourse as a means for projecting Polish music into the future while retaining a connection to national tradition. In the interview, Pilarski was particularly interested in unpacking Lutosławski’s influences. After Lutosławski explained that Bartók’s influence was only very general (despite the piece’s dedication to the memory of the Hungarian composer), the young critic turned to the question of dodecaphony. Pilarski opened this line of inquiry in a straightforward manner: “Bogusław Schäffer, in one of his articles, listed you as one of the Polish dodecaphonists. Is this correct?” Lutosławski replied abruptly: “I don’t know where that came from. I have never used that technique.” Refusing to be deterred so easily, Pilarski tried to elicit a more specific response: “That [answer] suggests that you are critical of [dodecaphony]. Please, could you elaborate on this topic?” Lutosławski’s answer recalled a host of existing Polish tropes about dodecaphony, but also contained a hint of frustration: “I am not so much negative about the technique, as [I am about] its exclusive and universal treatment. Certainly, it is a very interesting and necessary invention, but [it is] too unilateral and exclusive, and the entirety of compositional technique should not be limited to [dodecaphony].”67 Lutosławski sidestepped the question of influence, asserting his ability to use the technique without pledging fealty. Later in the interview, Lutosławski asserted that one of the central problems driving this composition—the problem that had occupied his attention for the past four years—was the development of a new musical language. The composer explained that he had been searching for his own means of working with twelve tones that would stand “outside of the tonal system and outside of dodecaphony.” At this reference to dodecaphony (albeit a negative one), Pilarski tried once again to deduce whether Lutosławski’s Funeral Music might have “any kind of general connection to this [dodecaphonic] technique.” Annoyed, Lutosławski once again dismissed any functional relationship to dodecaphony. When prompted, then, to supply an alternate explanation of his new language, the composer continued: “Well, [it is] certainly not [founded] in the twelve-tone series, which fixes the order of tones in advance [of composition]. In contrast to dodecaphony, I believe it is impossible for any sequence of tones, or of harmonies (współbrzmień), to be indifferent, without a specific aural effect—in other words, [there is no series] that does not operate in a specific way upon our senses.”68 Not unlike Mycielski’s earlier complaints, Lutosławski demonstrated here a concern for the audience’s aural experience; his primary reason for rejecting the dodecaphonic system lay in its intellectual abstraction, divorced (in his view) from questions of perception and creative expression. Lutosławski framed his statement negatively, as a refusal, but he left room for the possibility that a composer might construct a series that was not indifferent to these core questions. This potential loomed even larger as Lutosławski explained that he had recently discovered “a certain psycho-physiological phenomenon”:

lag (Opóźnienie)    107 The eye adjusts to the distance or intensity of light as a result of the principle of accommodation. An analogous thing happens with hearing: the phenomenon of the accommodation of the ear. For example, if I listen for a while to a sequence of major seconds, after a certain period [my] ear adjusts and becomes accustomed to this interval. If, at a certain moment, the listener is taken by surprise by a different sonority, he will react to [that change] very powerfully. It is the exploitation of that characteristic that is the subject of my search. A [dodecaphonic] series containing all intervals works in rather the opposite fashion. [With such a series], the change of impulses is so fast, that the phenomenon of accommodation cannot take place.69

Lutosławski’s concept of the “accommodation of the ear” recalled Régamey’s ideas about “nodes” in a piece of music—the highly charged moments in which content and form collided and made themselves known to the listener. This phenomenological approach would continue to be enormously important to Lutosławski throughout the remainder of his compositional career. He worked to understand the physiological principles guiding musical perception, and thereby to facilitate listeners’ meaningful understanding of musical-dramatic structure as it unfolded in time.70 In Funeral Music, Lutosławski was concerned with the connections between tones and with controlling the listener’s experience of dramatic tension through a gradual, finely calibrated exposure to those connections. The practical application of these ideas is evident in the work’s formal construction and pitch organization. He begins with a twelve-note series, but the very nature of this series reflects his fundamental commitment to “accommodate” his listeners’ ears gradually: he employs a limited-interval row, made up only of alternating (Bartókian) tritones and minor seconds. The listener is more likely to experience this row as a series of two repeating intervals, rather than as a series of twelve distinct pitches. As shown in figure 9, Lutosławski opens the first movement, “Prologue,” with a statement of this row joined end-to-end with its inversion transposed at the tritone, creating a twenty-four-note row. Here at the very outset, Lutosławski introduces a deterrent to an aural perception of a dodecaphonic structure: atop his twenty-four-note row, he overlays a rhythmic pattern of seventeen durations (totaling twenty-three beats).71 Lutosławski lends greater structural significance to the duration pattern than to the pitch series, introducing a new canonic voice with every new statement of the former. Listeners are more likely to orient themselves to the duration pattern (and especially to its characteristic “short-shortlong” gesture) than to the pitch series. This process of adding canonic voices leads toward greater harmonic complexity as the canonic voices interact with one another. However, due to the controlled manner in which Lutosławski introduces these materials, “accommodating the ear” fully to the two primary intervals, the aural effect of this contrapuntal exposition is less one of harmonic accretion than of the buildup of an increasingly dense mass of shifting tritones and minor seconds.

figure 9. Witold Lutosławski, Funeral Music (Muzyka żałobna) (1958), opening. Copyright © 1958 Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, Kraków, Poland. Copyright renewed 1982 by PWM Edition. All Rights transferred to Chester Music Limited. This arrangement Copyright © 2020 Chester Music Limited. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard LLC.

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Then, after the texture has reached a maximal density and, presumably, after the listeners’ ears have become sufficiently accommodated to these intervals and the products of their interactions, Lutosławski abruptly stops adding canonic voices at the end of the fourth iteration of the twenty-four-note row (this occurs in the middle of the sixth iteration of the duration pattern) and turns to a new kind of activity. At this point, shown in figure 10, he speeds up the rate of change in the movement, instigating a brief augmentation canon on two specific pitches, F and B. Beginning with the lowest voices in the longest durations in measure 29 and then gradually adding strata of higher voices in shorter durations, Lutosławski hammers the tritone into the listeners’ ears for four measures before moving into a stretto passage in measure 33, juxtaposing the original two versions of the row (beginning on F and B). Because of the slow, careful way in which Lutosławski introduces his basic musical materials over the first thirty measures, listeners should be able to track the progress of these materials, even as they undergo more complex formal processes. In other words, the composer has constructed a work that gradually teaches its audience how to listen to it.72 The formal, dramatic arc of Lutosławski’s movement is aurally perceptible, even as it generates more tension and forward momentum. He repeats the pattern of augmentation canons and stretto passage once more, reversing the distribution of material across the ensemble. And then, to

figure 10. Witold Lutosławski, Funeral Music (Muzyka żałobna) (1958), pages 8–9. Copyright © 1958 Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, Kraków, Poland. Copyright renewed 1982 by PWM Edition. All Rights transferred to Chester Music Limited. This arrangement Copyright © 2020 Chester Music Limited. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard LLC.

figure 10. (continued)

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close the movement, the composer reduces the musical texture, loosely mirroring his texture-building technique at the opening of the movement, guiding his listeners toward an instinctive understanding of its closure when it ends just as it began. In Funeral Music, Lutosławski constructed an elegant formal structure whose dramatic arc is fully comprehensible without dodecaphonic analysis. Despite this fact, it is nevertheless indisputable that Lutosławski was interested in the potential of a precompositionally determined pitch row to generate larger musical forms.73 The composer’s insistence, in his interview with Pilarski, that he had never used the dodecaphonic technique makes sense, though, in the context of his own deeply conflicted feelings about dodecaphony. Privately, in his Notebook of Ideas, Lutosławski recorded several concerns regarding dodecaphony and serialism. For example, in early 1959, shortly after the performance of Funeral Music at the 1958 Warsaw Autumn, he noted: “It is clear today that twelve-tone serialism did not generate a form. This is an analytical method—it is a method for dismembering, not for synthesizing. It ensures the uniformity of material. This is [its] only reason for existence.” Later, in the same entry, he continued: “[The dodecaphonists’] work is undoubtedly very useful: after the destruction of the tonal system in a moment of certain chaos, ‘they’ organized material, named elements, etc. [But then] . . . they went too far; their conclusions cannot be defended.”74 Lutosławski situated the dodecaphonists in a particular historical-cultural moment; they were overwhelmed by the extent of their freedom, having lost the foundation provided by functional harmony and its attendant conventions. Dodecaphony provided new rules, new labels. However, he cautioned, uniformity should not be confused with synthesis, a quality that was, as we have seen in Szymanowski’s Thaw-era reception, prized in Poland at this moment. In elucidating dodecaphony’s limitations, the composer was implicitly positioning himself, and his own aesthetic conception of the “accommodation of the ear,” as a response (and as a corrective) to the technique’s static, flattening qualities. Funeral Music was an aural manifestation of his ideas, unfolding musical connections in time and engaging with listeners’ perceptive faculties to create meaning. Lutosławski may have conceived of Funeral Music as an idiosyncratic response to the problem of pitch organization, but he could not control the perception of critics and composers who were ready to hear the work dodecaphonically, spinning narratives that situated him within broader arcs of progress in post-1956 Poland. Three main tropes arose in the critical reception of Funeral Music: first, critics framed Lutosławski’s musical language as being both innovative and influential, and they nearly always discussed his language in relation to dodecaphony; second, they lauded the expressivity of the work, relating this expressivity back to Lutosławski’s technical and structural ideas; and third, they hailed Lutosławski as a genius, predicating this claim upon the confluence of the first two tropes. This first critical trope exerted pressure upon Lutosławski’s insistence that his musical language had no connection with twelve-tone composition. Nearly all

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critics ignored these protests and described Lutosławski’s pitch organization in relation to dodecaphony. For example, Stefan Jarociński, who had in 1954 hoped ardently that Lutosławski would employ the dodecaphonic technique, was more than ready to hail Funeral Music as that evidence that he had done so. Lutosławski, according to Jarociński, had deployed his twelve-tone series polyphonically, producing a gradual accretion of texture and an ever-thickening “harmonic aura” (aura harmoniczna) of vertically sounding fourths, fifths, and octaves.75 Jarociński suggested that the work had thus avoided falling into the same trap as the more doctrinaire adherents of Schoenberg’s school, who “ignored the harmonic element and, more specifically, the direct role that the various interactions of specific harmonies and their succession has on listeners.”76 In writing Funeral Music, Lutosławski had exhibited his sensitivity to both the vertical and horizontal planes, and, in so doing, he had developed his own “organizational principle” for that “incomprehensible sound-magma, with which composers have been working since the shattering of the tonal system in the first quarter of the twentieth century.”77 For Jarociński, Lutosławski had succeeded in producing a work that was not strictly speaking dodecaphonic, but that was an improvement upon that technique. In his review for Życie Literackie (Literary Life), Bogusław Schäffer also focused on Lutosławski’s technique, congratulating the composer on his ability to use a “grouping-structural” (grupowo-strukturalny) conception of dodecaphony as a foundation for his own, unique processes for generating forward propulsion. The result was a work that exhibited “lively progress, internal tensions . . . [and] harmonic color (represented sometimes in full, twelve-tone vertical complexes) and a technique of formal foreshortening that allowed the music to fade away so perfectly.”78 Lutosławski’s innovations, in Schäffer’s assessment, demonstrated his mastery of craft (rzemiosło): the composer had engaged an important contemporary technique, taken the time to understand it completely, and deployed it in a novel manner. Schäffer was much less willing, however, to affirm the second discursive trope about Funeral Music and its communicative powers. On the contrary, Schäffer took this opportunity to argue defensively against unnamed critics who might attempt to ground the genius of Funeral Music in its “internal content” (treść wewnętrzna) rather than in its “external technological strata” (‘zewnętrzna’ warstwa technologiczna). An audience’s affective response to a composition, Schäffer claimed, had nothing to do with the work’s real value; especially in contemporary music, only the technical aspect of a composition could determine the significance of its contribution. In making this argument, though, Schäffer was yelling into the wind, as this trope about the expressivity of Funeral Music was nearly ubiquitous among other Polish music critics. Stefan Jarociński stated simply in his review that this was music to which one must listen with both the heart and the intellect: Lutosławski had employed tech-

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nique and form as a means of communicating something deeper. For example, in discussing the transition from the “Metamorphosis” to the “Apogeum” movement, Jarociński described formal construction in terms explicitly dramatic and affective: “As [the music] develops, the rhythmic values crumble imperceptibly (from whole notes to half notes, from halves to quarters, etc.) and only after a certain period, we suddenly realize that it isn’t clear when the tempo sped up sharply, simultaneously intensifying the expressive tension that reaches, at the climactic point—the Apogeum—a rhythmic debauchery that takes on a delirious quality.”79 Jarociński allowed himself to be swept away, to relive the real-time experience of hearing the composition and feeling his intellectual engagement suddenly give way to something else, a sensation of moving forward in time and space without knowing how it was happening. It was not only younger or more progressive critics and scholars who had powerful responses to Lutosławski’s Funeral Music. For example, Stefania Łobaczewska, whose earlier Szymanowski biography had expressed a negative view of dodecaphony, greeted Funeral Music as a work that employed the technique in the service of meaning. In her review of the 1958 Warsaw Autumn festival, she explained that Lutosławski’s composition revealed a truly contemporary expressivity. It was not based on a program or external “concrete life-content” (konkretne treści życiowe), but rather in the sound material itself, in the significance of specific intervals and their collections. This is undoubtedly a very difficult undertaking . . . [and] for that reason there are not many composers today who are able to achieve truly artistic results without falling into dry mathematics or simply creating new intervallic structures—not in a positive sense, but only in a negative one, creating them as an opposition to old [intervallic structures]. Lutosławski is among those few, who have been successful in discovering new constructive and expressive possibilities of the interval and who, with the help of this knowledge, creates wise music, maximally condensed in construction and expression.80

Łobaczewska presented Funeral Music as evidence of the potentially fruitful relationship between contemporary reality and tradition. Lutosławski had taken up the most contemporary musical problems and techniques of his period, using them in conjunction with his own finely tuned sense of musical content to create music that had an expressive resonance appropriate to the social reality in which he lived.81 This argument—that Lutosławski had engaged new techniques for expressive ends, creating a work that spoke to its audience in a language that they could understand instinctively—characterized most of the reception surrounding Funeral Music, and it was an argument that articulated the specific nature of Lutosławski’s creative genius. In his ability to marry contemporary form to

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contemporary content, he was held up as a model for other Polish composers as they sought to navigate the challenges and temptations of the post-revolutionary cultural environment. In his review of the premiere performance, Pilarski set up the composition as a new standard by which future compositions would be judged in postwar Poland: “At the moment when a new work appears—a work whose weight immediately gives it an exceptional significance—the established understanding of artistic phenomena is shaken. . . . This is not just because the work, as a result of its novelty, appears particularly interesting in the moment. Such a work moves the constellations, expands the borders of experience, of criteria and of outlook. . . . Funeral Music by Witold Lutosławski has this power to move the constellations. . . . Such achievements have not occurred in Polish music since Szymanowski.”82 This rhetoric elevated Lutosławski to an almost supernatural level, granting him a special national-cultural authority as the modern inheritor of the Szymanowski-Chopin legacy. Granting this authority to a living composer—one who was still in the earlier stages of his career, due to the interruptions of World War II and the ensuing Stalinist period—was a heavy responsibility, and it was one that Lutosławski himself tried to decline in his interview with Pilarski. He had described the significance of Funeral Music in very personal terms. Nevertheless, most music critics, composers, and scholars were anxious to brush aside these protestations. Nicholas Reyland argues that a side effect of placing Lutosławski on a pedestal of genius may have been a refusal to interpret his compositions’ personal meaning, even when those compositions (such as Funeral Music) seemed particularly rife with such meaning.83 In writing Funeral Music, however, Lutosławski had captured the imagination and the concerns of his contemporary moment so well that the composition took on its own life, which would spin out in ways that not even the composer would be able to control. Polish composers and Polish music culture had been in desperate need of a genius, a prophet who would help them to navigate the “atmosphere of true artistic freedom” that Lutosławski himself had declared in his 1957 speech to the Composers’ Union. They found what they needed in Lutosławski. His personal journey of development and stylistic evolution had been realized in Funeral Music at precisely the right moment to establish him as that new standard—synthesizing past and present in order to point to the future. THE LIMITS OF GENIUS

After the 1958 Warsaw Autumn festival, Lutosławski’s Funeral Music was widely praised as the strongest Polish composition on the program. There was, however, one critic who voiced some concerns. In his article reviewing all of the Polish contributions at that year’s festival, young critic Bohdan Pociej reported that he had “encountered here and there” criticisms about the work’s level of innovation. He

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hedged a little, but then explained the problem: “No one is trying to negate the absolute artistic value of Funeral Music, but the main ‘complaint’ goes more or less like this: the type of expression in this work—related to Bartókian expression—is not new today, and to a certain extent it is even traditional. . . . [And if] the most outstanding work of Polish contemporary music is ‘still’ operating within the mode of ‘traditional’ expression, [then it] presents convincing proof of Polish music’s ‘derivativeness’ in relation to the music of the Western avant-garde.”84 His heavy use of scare quotes here marked Pociej’s discomfort. In the face of the piece’s overwhelmingly positive reception, it was a difficult proposition for a critic to question its progressiveness. But, just as Bogusław Schäffer had done earlier, Pociej recognized that contemporary Western compositional developments were now pushing toward post-Webernian serial experiments. In the end, Pociej worked to avoid this clash between genius and innovation. He asserted that the descriptors “conservative” or “innovative” did little to capture the transcendent creative impact of a work like Funeral Music, which had an undeniable historical and evolutionary significance in the unfolding narrative of Polish contemporary music history. The discrepancy that Pociej had articulated, between the expressive Lutosławskian brand of genius and the anti-expressive aesthetic posturing of the postwar international avant-garde, was one that revealed the limitations of genius as a category. While a creative genius had the power to collapse the weight of the past into the present, that weight also precluded a certain agility, a flexibility to experiment with new ideas and techniques even if their resonance with longer-breathed traditions was not immediately apparent. It was also, it must be said, a category that presumed a narrowly homogenous identity for the transmission of those national traditions. Stefan Kisielewski acknowledged this narrowness glancingly in his second biographical sketch of Szymanowski, noting that conservative critics’ negative portrayals may have been colored by their response to the composer’s homosexuality. Although his aside was meant to reflect badly on those critics, Kisielewski himself reached for familiar language when he sought to redeem Szymanowski, praising his latecareer turn toward the “invigorating juices” of folk music, and especially to the “unusually distinct, masculine” (męska) influence of the highland people of the Tatra region.85 The connection between (a certain definition of) masculinity and genius became even clearer in the case of Grażyna Bacewicz. As seen in chapter 2, Bacewicz composed prolifically throughout the postwar decade, and the archival records of Polish musical institutions reflect that her colleagues held her in great esteem. She served on important committees, leaders sought her advice, she received commissions and publishing contracts, and her music was widely performed. But it was also clear that Bacewicz was never in the running to be elected the next genius composer in the Chopin-Szymanowski lineage. Usually, this bias

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was only implicit, but occasionally, it floated to the surface. For example, when Piotr Rytel was asked, in service of the Commissions Committee, to review one of Bacewicz’s ballet score drafts in 1951, he argued that the technical craftsmanship of the work evidenced only a kind of “temperament” for composition, not even real talent—let alone genius.86 Rytel’s dismissal of Bacewicz is not particularly surprising; as one of the interwar conservatives who had led the charge against Szymanowski, his opinion was bound to fall along such lines. But Kisielewski, who certainly demonstrated an appreciation for Bacewicz’s music on many occasions—in fact, he wrote one of the first lengthy published studies of her work— revealed a similar attitude in a 1962 Warsaw Autumn review.87 Dividing the Polish composers who appeared on the festival program into groups, he placed Bacewicz into her own “Women’s Category” (Kategoria kobiet).88 Later in the review, he acknowledged that Bacewicz was a composer of high standing, both at home and abroad, but he argued that she had remained too true to herself; she did her best to grow as a composer, but there was a limit to how much enrichment she could absorb. A quality for which Lutosławski had been so roundly praised—the ability to submit various techniques and forms to his own creative vision—somehow became a negative one in Bacewicz’s work, denoting stasis instead of forward movement. The designation of genius, and especially of “bard” (wieszcz), opened creative spaces for some artists, allowing them to disregard the anxieties arising from the relentless progress of a homogenous world timeline (and the sense of existing at a lagged point on that line), and instead to embrace the freedom that came from occupying their own national time. But this designation was not open to all artists. And, as the next chapter will demonstrate, some composers also felt suffocated by the conditions of lag discourse. They were not interested in the national past, preferring to imagine a contemporary Polish music community that was capable not only of catching up with international avant-garde movements, but also of surpassing them. This group of composers included the new postwar generation, who had completed their training after the war, and for whom the interwar years (and the presence of Szymanowski) were not a primary shaping force. Headed up by the iconoclastic Bogusław Schäffer, they were ready to put backwardness and tradition behind them and to start imagining a Polish avant-garde grounded in an entirely new model of modernity.

5

Modernity (Nowoczesność) Bogusław Schäffer and the Cult of the New

A N EW G E N E R AT IO N R I SI N G

At the 1958 Warsaw Autumn, the same festival that featured Lutosławski’s muchpraised Funeral Music, a new postwar generation of Polish composers emerged on the scene. These composers, most born in the late 1920s and early 1930s, received their training after the war, during the years of rebuilding and Stalinism. As they moved into their early maturity, they were able to take advantage of the institutional opportunities afforded during the Thaw. There was a new sense of generational conflict emerging within the composition community, and the dividing lines were those of age and experience rather than political and aesthetic-ideological orientation. For this younger group, the geographical locus of musical modernism had expanded somewhat; the sole referent was no longer Paris (with its implied connection to the Boulanger tradition), although certainly these young composers received that influence secondhand, through their Polish mentors. Especially as they stepped into the heady rush of lack-based language at the height of the Thaw, they were ready to demand more information about musical developments taking place across Europe and the rest of the world. At the 1957 Composers’ Union Congress, Zbigniew Penherski, the leader of the union’s Youth Circle, read a formal complaint on behalf of his colleagues. The members of the Youth Circle, which included advanced composition students and recent graduates, were not receiving the support that they deserved from union leadership. They demanded “radical remediation” of their isolated conditions; above all, this would mean providing access to “all available union resources for improving our abilities,” including increased contact with the international music 117

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community, support for studying abroad, and opportunities to participate in listening sessions (przesłuchanie) for their music.1 From union members there came a confused flurry of responses. Kazimierz Sikorski, who had long taught composition at the State Higher School of Music in Warsaw, argued that the Youth Circle’s public statement amounted to a kind of insurrection.2 Likely feeling wounded by the accusation that young Polish composers were not receiving sufficient support and instruction, he also suggested that the they should examine themselves, engaging in some self-criticism, before turning to the union with their demands. Sikorski’s call for “self-criticism” here is striking, as it could not help but recall the performative “mea culpa” statements that had often been required of composers and political leaders in the earlier 1950s. Others, such as Andrzej Dobrowolski, who had himself come up through the Youth Circle, were ready to ask more complicated questions about the group’s role within the union. What was it that membership in the Youth Circle signified? What were the responsibilities of the union to student composers, beyond the support that they received from educational institutions, and what were the signifiers of compositional maturity that would indicate a recent graduate’s readiness to ascend into the regular membership? There were more than a few traces in this debate of the genius discourses discussed in the previous chapter. While the assembled union composers were discussing various strategies for supporting the Youth Circle, they were also debating the process by which a person became a composer—and the point at which a young composer should be allowed to demand material compensation in exchange for compositional activity. The composers who were graduating from the conservatory system, Włodzimierz Kotoński reminded his colleagues, needed to be able to support themselves. Penherski stood up again, amid the debate, and expressed disappointment at the tone of his colleagues’ statements. More than the material gap, he decried his generation’s knowledge gap. During the interwar period, Polish composers had been able to learn about the music of early twentieth-century modernism, but those studying in conservatories after the war (and under Stalinism) did not have that opportunity. As a result, their familiarity with contemporary music, or even with the music of previous decades, was “trifling.” They needed access to scores and materials, but even more, they needed access to information about post-tonal compositional techniques. Schools were not providing that training, and without it, Penherski argued, they would never be able to develop into independent, mature composers. In his statements we may observe two concurrent layers of backwardness discourse. Penherski was invoking lag in comparing members of the Youth Circle to the older composers in the union, but he was also using claims of lack to articulate their displacement from the development of contemporary music more broadly. It was impossible to join the mission of rebuilding a national musical modernism when they had no real way to imagine what that might sound like.

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They did not need the guidance of a bardic genius so much as they needed a composition textbook. But who would write that textbook, and, in so doing, provide the leadership that the younger generation wanted? Several people at the congress acknowledged that it would be difficult for the older composers to bridge the gap between the two generations; musicologist Stefan Śledziński admitted that the “the youth are, in this respect, much more receptive than are the professors.” He continued: “for us [of the older generation] new music may seem like disorganized chaos . . . because we are not accustomed to it. . . . Taking up this [contemporary] worldview is not easy, as it requires [a person] to undergo extensive self-examination, for which not everyone has the time or resources. This kind of . . . modernization of a program, of a repertoire—this is a very difficult task.”3 Counterintuitively, then, it seemed that the leader of the younger generation would need to rise from among the ranks of that very generation. A little later in the same congress, there was a suggestion that someone might have already stepped into this role: the notorious enfant terrible, Bogusław Schäffer. Witold Rudziński, who had served as union president at the height of the Stalinist period, complained that the entire 1957 congress had turned into an excuse to criticize the union’s past actions and to change everything, even if no change was needed. The Youth Circle, he argued, had been established to introduce young composers into the profession, and there was no reason that it should not continue to do that. He also suggested that the Youth Circle’s existence allowed the union to monitor the education and development of the composers who, after all, represented the future of Polish music. Turning his attention to the imminent first issue of the journal Ruch Muzyczny, Rudziński modeled this oversight function when he explained that many union members were uninterested in submitting their writing to the journal for one reason: Bogusław Schäffer. Schäffer was listed on the journal’s editorial board, and the young composer had already accrued “a certain, established brand among us.” This “brand” had emerged when Schäffer wrote and published his 1956 Almanac of Polish Contemporary Composers (And an Overview of Their Work), in which he had systematically dismissed the contributions of almost every single living Polish composer.4 As noted in chapter 3, Schäffer was eventually shuffled away from the Ruch Muzyczny editorial board, but, ultimately, even his staunchest critics would be unable to ignore him. Throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s there was no more influential voice than Schäffer’s in explaining European and American postwar musical developments for the Polish-language audience. In his writing, and in his compositions, Schäffer articulated a completely different vision of nowoczesność (modernity) from that proposed by his older peers. He was not eager to adopt 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. At the same

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time, he also resisted the logic of lag language because, above all, he did not believe that developmental momentum could be built upon past traditions, national or otherwise. Schäffer’s understanding of progress was thoroughly and irrevocably grounded in a timeline that moved in only one direction: forward, into the future. In this chapter, I will follow Schäffer’s development of these ideas through his own writing and musical compositions, and I will also consider the impact of his work on his colleagues, and especially on members of the younger, postwar generation of composers and critics. B O G U S Ł AW S C HÄ F F E R , C O N T R OV E R SIA L P R O P H E T OF MODERNIT Y

Born in 1929, Bogusław Schäffer studied both musicology and composition in the early 1950s in Kraków. Under the guidance of musicologist Zdzisław Jachimecki and composer Artur Malawski, Schäffer managed to learn about dodecaphony and other modernist compositional techniques, despite the narrowly restricted official curricula in the state-sponsored conservatories. Musicologist Iwona Lindstedt has noted that Schäffer studied the dodecaphonic technique and contemporary aesthetics under Jachimecki’s tutelage at Jagiellonian University. Earlier in the century, Jachimecki had been a student of Guido Adler and also of Arnold Schoenberg in Vienna.5 In 1953, Schäffer completed a master’s thesis on the music of Witold Lutosławski (who had not even premiered his Concerto for Orchestra yet!), establishing him as a musicologist concerned primarily with contemporary music. By 1955, he was already writing music criticism for Tygodnik Powszechny, the Kraków-based Catholic newspaper for which Stefan Kisielewski also wrote. Beside the fact that they were both a part of a flourishing new music culture in Kraków, the young Schäffer and the elder critic-composer shared more than a few similarities. Like Kisielewski, Schäffer’s intellectual commitments betrayed the influence of interwar writer Karol Irzykowski more than that of Witkacy, who had been so important for the formation of both Szymanowski and Régamey. Schäffer mentioned Irzykowski in print several times, but his oeuvre also evidenced his interest: he drew the text and organizational scheme for his 1963 experimental music-theater piece TIS MW2 (published 1972 by PWM) from Irzykowski’s 1903 novel Pałuba, and he composed the Hommage à Irzykowski for instrumental ensemble in 1973.6 The influence of Irzykowski’s ideas, discussed briefly in chapter 1, could be sensed in both Kisielewski’s and Schäffer’s gadfly personae, always ready to challenge accepted beliefs and practices. More specifically, we might observe that both men shared Irzykowski’s fundamental aesthetic conviction that artistic form preceded (and even superseded in importance) artistic content, rather than the other way around.7 Instead of imagining the genius composer as one with a heightened awareness and sensitivity for life’s metaphysical content, therefore, Kisielewski

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and Schäffer both prized a composer’s ability to master the techniques and forms of musical craft and to build upon that craft in innovative ways. As early as his 1955 review of Lutosławski’s Concerto for Orchestra, Schäffer praised the composer primarily for his ingenuity in tackling the question of form, and for resisting the call of tradition. This might seem a strange argument to make about a work that, by virtue of its generic designation, explicitly engaged traditional forms. Schäffer assured his readers, however, that this was a “purely external invocation of tradition,” for Lutosławski’s true contribution here was the creation of “new forms, with new, completely different principles of construction and a new logical discipline.”8 The external shapes of the forms, therefore, were not of primary importance; more significant were the technical principles that animated the form. Schäffer argued that the most urgent task facing contemporary composers was finding new ways to generate forward momentum and to structure the experience of musical material as it moved through time. In relation to these goals, Schäffer highlighted Lutosławski’s use of meter and rhythm, textures, and instrumental color in the Concerto—three characteristics that, in the estimation of other critics, would link Lutosławski back to Szymanowski and even to Chopin. From Schäffer, though, there was no mention of a Polish national tradition, but only a resolute focus on the present moment as it projected into the future. Schäffer and Kisielewski may have shared an obstinate preference of form over content, technique over expression, but it soon became clear that, for Schäffer, a commitment to form was not enough. He also required a commitment to modernity and to change. This second theme became clearer in his notorious Almanac of Polish Contemporary Composers (And an Overview of Their Work), published by PWM in 1956. In the concluding “overview” essay, Schäffer vented his frustration with the post-Szymanowski generation, and especially with those composers who had studied with Boulanger. He acknowledged that this group had the best intentions of picking up where Szymanowski had left off, but they had been unable to recognize the older composer’s “innovation” for what it was. His music was always changing as he sought out the new sounds and ideas animating contemporary European musical culture, absorbing them within his own unique compositional voice. His students took to heart Szymanowski’s dedication to his craft, which they brought with them to France, but they lacked his hunger for newness. As a result, Schäffer explained, this generation of Polish composers had honed their craft to meet a neoclassical ideal, but their creative evolution ceased to unfold beyond the attainment of that goal. They were mired in their own “one-sidedness.”9 After the war, political conditions had exacerbated this situation, and Schäffer argued (with little empathy for the complicated situation that his elder colleagues had been navigating) that this generation had turned inward, joining their neoclassical formal language to national content grounded in folk music traditions. In so doing, they had shifted their priorities, from signaling contemporaneity to establishing a national style.

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Schäffer was nothing if not thorough in his assessment; after providing an overview, he worked his way through the group of composers one by one. Although he often had positive things to say regarding technique, he also offered astoundingly harsh critique of these composers, among them some of the most powerful leaders in the Composers’ Union. Of Kisielewski himself, for instance, Schäffer used the word “conventional,” surely one of the most insulting things he could have said to the older composer. Mycielski he described as an original and creative talent, but an ultimately unsuccessful one. Of Witold Rudziński, who had complained so bitterly at the Composers’ Union Congress in 1957, Schäffer wrote that his music was “not very modern in its [creative] invention, expressing none of the essential tendencies of development.”10 Such commentary was certainly not the way to ingratiate himself within Polish musical life. Schäffer saved his positive comments for composers who had consciously sought to reach beyond their interwar, neoclassical foundations. Bolesław Szabelski, for instance, was an older composer who received praise for his employ of modern textures and musical language; Schäffer also pointed to Witold Lutosławski, Grażyna Bacewicz, and Artur Malawski as representatives from a middle generation who were less encumbered by the weight of interwar neoclassicism. But even in relation to these composers, Schäffer expressed caution; for example, in discussing Bacewicz, he noted that her work did not exhibit as many “strongly marked innovative tendencies” as others in her cohort.11 Middle generation composers (and even younger, postwar generation composers) wanted to catch up with the contemporary moment, but Schäffer did not trust the momentum of lack discourse to generate true progress. He warned, at the very end of the book, that there was a dangerous new “third style” (trzeci nurt) of composition arising between the conservative traditionalists and the aspiring contemporary composers: these were the Polish composers who wished to freeze contemporary musical techniques into a convention or stereotype. Schäffer’s critique of “third style” composers resonates clearly with Theodor Adorno’s assessment of “moderate modernists” in his 1949 Philosophy of New Music. Musicologist Seth Brodsky argues that Adorno’s distaste for this group of composers, which included Shostakovich and Benjamin Britten, was predicated on their embrace (rather than rejection) of the past. Refusing to repudiate their predecessors, the moderate modernists sought instead to synthesize, to repeat, and to revise the tradition that came before them.12 Schäffer, who was indeed reading Adorno’s work at this moment, took a similar approach in evaluating the music of the post-Szymanowski, middle generation of Polish composers, for whom synthesis had been such an important compositional principle. He felt that they had rushed to mimic contemporary music in order to fill a perceived gap in Polish culture. In so doing, they had created “contemporary” music, in the sense that it resembled other contemporary compositions, but it would never be innovative or

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interesting; it would be derivative (wtórny), assembly-line reproduction, popping easily from the mold into which it had been poured.13 PWM’s archival records indicate that there was some critical pushback even before Schäffer’s book was published. Stefania Łobaczewska, who was by then the head of musicology studies at the Jagiellońian University in Kraków, wrote an internal peer review in which she raised serious concerns.14 This book was an unapologetic, blatant evaluation of Schäffer’s peers. It was opinionated, reductive, and sometimes hurtful in its selective narration of history. On the point of historical narrative, Łobaczewska was particularly unhappy with Schäffer’s design of the book, which was meant to provide a picture of Polish music “in the current moment.” This, she argued, was an artificial restraint that had resulted in many ridiculous omissions; Schäffer had not included an entry, for instance, about Szymanowski’s peer Ludomir Różycki, who had only died in 1953, or even about Andrzej Panufnik, who had emigrated in 1954. No other criticism, however, could have more clearly expressed the difference between Schäffer’s outlook and that of the other composers and scholars who surrounded him at the time of this book’s publication. Schäffer had no interest in creating a logical historical narrative. Indeed, he had almost no interest in history at all. Instead, he focused all his energy on the present moment and the moments that would follow. Schäffer made these very points in his response to PWM: it might be true that he did not have the right to judge unilaterally the success or backwardness of Polish contemporary music, but he protested that it was vital that they all have open discussions about what constituted contemporaneity—discussions that would not fall back into “desultory formulations, sliding politely across the surface of things.”15 Instead, composers needed to analyze their own creative output, and they needed to compare their achievements against recent developments in the worldwide music community. For Schäffer, forward momentum could not be internal, national; instead, it had to be measured against a homogenous world timeline, in which the contemporary “now” was a moment shared by everyone. If such a comparison revealed Polish cultural backwardness, then so be it. Bold as it might seem coming from a writer who was still in his mid-twenties, it was precisely Schäffer’s plea about the urgency of developing a world-historical scale for musical contemporaneity that won him the support for publication. Despite Łobaczewska’s misgivings, she ultimately advised publication (with revision), because Schäffer was “probably the best expert on contemporary music in Poland right now,” praising his independence and clarity in assessing each pressing question.16 There was such a need for educational materials in Polish about contemporary music—this cry of lack was a near constant refrain at PWM board meetings in 1956 and 1957—and Schäffer’s book was poised to fill that gap. Shortly after publishing the book, Tadeusz Ochlewski, the director of PWM, admitted privately that they probably should have restricted the Almanac to its

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more objective material, omitting Schäffer’s long concluding essay. There would “probably be a storm” following the publication of the book, he noted, but perhaps that was what they all needed. “The discussion and the uproar might do a lot of good,” he mused. “After all, it must be said: there is a certain lifelessness, a schematism, in new contemporary music.”17 And a storm there was, although it did not break until after the big political events of 1956 had passed. Then, everyone began to ask hard questions about what the new “decentralized” music culture might look like (and what its limits might be). Chapter 3 showed how that demand for information about contemporary music motivated the establishment of new cultural institutions: the Polish Radio Experimental Studio and the journal Ruch Muzyczny. The official discourses that sprang up around these institutions attempted to check Polish composers’ headlong rush toward the West and enforced their participation in broader cultural outreach initiatives. But criticism did not come only from the state; there were also people within the music community who were worried about the voracious appetite everyone suddenly had for postwar Western European music. These concerns often traced generational, rather than political or ideological, fault lines. The loudest complainants were members of the two generations that Schäffer had excoriated in his Almanac, the conservative composers who had harassed Szymanowski during his lifetime and the post-Szymanowski neoclassicists. Many representatives of the latter group had decried the isolating effects of top-down Stalinist cultural controls in the earlier 1950s, but they felt suddenly vulnerable in 1957. The rush toward new techniques, new styles, and new cultural referents threatened to displace the vision of modernism that composers such as Zygmunt Mycielski and Stefan Kisielewski had thought they were protecting. In its place was a different form of modernity, which, as Śledziński had argued at the 1957 congress, was the purview of a new generation. For better or worse, Schäffer was the most visible member of this younger group. As one might suspect, the composers who found themselves excluded from Schäffer’s vision of musical progress were less than thrilled. In January 1958, PWM held a meeting of its Publishing Council, and there was only one topic that commanded the gathering’s attention: What were they going to do about Bogusław Schäffer?18 The stimulus for this discussion was a proposed second edition of Schäffer’s Almanac, which was one of the press’s most highly sought-after publications. The room erupted with protests, mostly from prominent members of the post-Szymanowski generation. Tadeusz Szeligowski complained that the timing of the book’s original publication had been disastrous; its arrival in conjunction with the 1956 revolution and the push for cultural decentralization had lent Schäffer’s criticisms greater weight, and he had ignited an “unexpected movement.” Kazi­ mierz Sikorski, who was then serving as the union president, argued that PWM should not reprint such a hotly contested overview of Polish musical life, especially

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“in relation to the younger composers, who are still constantly changing.” As the chair of the committee, Lutosławski was less worried about the specific damage that Schäffer’s characterizations might wreak upon the reputations of his colleagues—or upon the impressionable youth—and more concerned about the implications of Schäffer’s notion of musical progress itself: “the criteria for analyzing creative activity cannot be reduced to its relationship to innovation.” The committee finally voted against reissuing Schäffer’s Almanac. In his objection to the Almanac, Lutosławski had successfully articulated the difference between Schäffer’s discourse of modernity and the genius discourse that was beginning to surround Lutosławski himself. Schäffer’s blinkered focus on innovation presumed a different relationship to time, and thereby threatened carefully constructed narratives about reconstructing and reanimating Polish national tradition. Particularly in this moment when everything else seemed to be changing so quickly, it made sense that cultural institutions like PWM might take pains to marginalize Schäffer strategically, rapping his knuckles in hopes that he might turn his considerable influence toward more suitable goals. If he was going to be a leader of the younger generation, they needed to make sure that he was leading them in the right direction. Any effort that PWM or the Composers’ Union may have exerted in trying to restrict Schäffer’s critical voice was doomed to backfire. Schäffer, perhaps frustrated with the pressures he faced at Ruch Muzyczny (which was, after all, a PWM publication), began writing for the journal of the Polish Writers’ Union, Życie Literackie (Literary Life). One of the first articles that he wrote for that publication, titled “The Situation in Polish Contemporary Music,” set out to diagnose the ills of Polish postwar musical life in terms more incendiary than those in the earlier Almanac.19 Guaranteed to provoke a powerful reaction from his older colleagues, Schäffer opened his piece with the speculation that the ideological repressions of the early 1950s had not been so bad. Polish composers used the specter of the Łagów congress to explain their inertia, their lack of engagement with stylistic or technical markers of musical modernism, such as dodecaphony. If they had wanted to write such music during these years, Schäffer argued, they would have done so, and they would have faced no consequences from authorities who, after all, did not know about these things. Of all the negative things he could have said about his colleagues, this was the most hurtful—and inaccurate, ignoring the complicated institutional negotiations that composers had to navigate under Stalinism to receive commissions, publications, and performances. While party officials might not have understood dodecaphony or atonality, there had certainly been gatekeepers who did; post-tonal harmonic languages had been the most contentious signifiers of Western modernism even for the most powerful composers in the early 1950s. Extending his critique into the present moment, Schäffer characterized the post-1956 rise of lack-based language, and its attendant furor for all things

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modern, as a related problem. This language allowed his colleagues to escape their embarrassment over their earlier rapprochement with socialist realist aesthetics by claiming coercion. In rushing toward the West, though, Polish composers were not examining themselves and developing their own creative paths. Instead, these “worshippers of modernity” were simply mimicking style markers of modernism, deploying them at a surface level without understanding them, and they were producing mediocre work. This was not real modernity. To build an elite musical culture that simply replicated the innovations of others would simply, he suggested, reinscribe the very backwardness they were trying to ameliorate. Schäffer proposed an alternative: “Be [true to] yourself. For composers, the new slogan should be: ‘don’t go chasing prematurely after any new slogans.’ If necessary, create them yourself, and only do that if they will speak convincingly to the form of lively, organic art.”20 In order to reach this all-important level of self-knowledge, Schäffer argued that Polish composers needed to develop a healthy relationship to the evolving nature of their craft. Rather than the pursuit of genius, then, Schäffer privileged the notion of “craftsmanship,” which he defined as “the group of skills that will transmit musical material to the listener in the form that is most materially and thematically ideal, the most cohesive and organic—in a form that proves that the work, in its ultimate coloristic-sonic appearance, is an integrated composition in which all of the elements perform a specific structural and constructive function.”21 It was the mastery of craftsmanship that would allow composers to write with intentionality and control, approaching the level of the ideal. “Craftsmanship or its lack,” Schäffer argued, “is the characteristic that will determine whether a musical work is a living organism or a barren document of an unsuccessful creative intention.”22 Schäffer’s article sounded the opening volley in a lengthy press battle with Zygmunt Mycielski.The older composer’s first response, grumpily titled “Why Am I Not Writing about Our Contemporary Music?,” was pure reaction: Schäffer’s accusations about the early 1950s and also his critique of neoclassicism (a style grounded in craft, but pointed toward the past rather than the future) felt like a personal attack.23 But it was also a defense, not only of himself or his generation, but of Mycielski’s own definitions of genius and of cultural progress. Above all, Mycielski did not agree that the most pressing problem facing Polish composers was their relationship to craft: I do not perceive the weakness of our contemporary music in either a lack of craft or in some kind of backwardness (zacofanie), but in INTERNAL weakness. . . . The fissure lies, in my humble opinion, not in the material, but in the man. To me, he seems insufficiently fevered, excited, and he neither believes enough in the mission and the calling of the art that he creates, nor in his own mission and calling. [He does not believe] in his own [creative] power to serve humanity or ideals above and beyond the realm of humanity.24

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Drawing on Régameyan (and Szymanowskian and Witkacian) aesthetics, Mycielski emphasized the significance of composers’ self-awareness above all. While it was of course important to learn the basic techniques of good compositional practice, it was internal development that would distinguish a great composer from a merely adequate one. Great composers would reach for new compositional techniques or tools only when led to do so by an internal source of inspiration; the form and material of their compositional practice would always be preceded by their own creative vision. In Mycielski’s view, then, the notion of chronological, forward-marching progress was antithetical to the creative process. “The real artist,” Mycielski explains, “doesn’t think about newness. He thinks only about expression of the self, about finding his own way and his own language; this does not correspond to the concepts of newness and modernity.”25 Just as Lutosławski had argued behind closed doors at PWM, Mycielski accused Schäffer of using the wrong criteria in measuring progress. For the older composer, the relative value of music could never be dependent on its technique or form; rather, it emerged as a function of composers’ connection to a deeper stratum of meaning. To a certain extent, therefore, this debate between Mycielski and Schäffer was really a debate about time as it related to aesthetic value, national identity, and modernism itself. If Mycielski was defending interwar modernism, Schäffer was ready, as a prophet of postwar modernity and futurity, to challenge the value of the entire modernist project. A N EW T H E O RY O F M U SIC A L M O D E R N I T Y: S C HÄ F F E R’ S N EW M U S I C ( 1 9 5 8 )

As Schäffer began to deploy his critical voice outside the PWM–Composers’ Union orbit, those music institutions also found themselves unable to avoid acknowledging his expertise and seeking his continued participation in Polish musical life. In part, this was because other rising members of the postwar generation were ready to force the issue. In early 1957, just before the PWM Publishing Council refused to reissue Schäffer’s Almanac, director Tadeusz Ochlewski received a written ultimatum from several of his younger editors within the publishing house. They demanded that PWM begin to dedicate itself primarily to the spread (upowszechnienie) of the “most contemporary currents” in music. To that end, they argued that PWM should be seeking input from the most progressive voices in Polish musical life, including Józef Patkowski, the soon-to-be director of the Polish Radio Experimental Studio, and, of course, Bogusław Schäffer. The original archival document, signed by Ochlewski’s second-in-command, Mieczysław Tomaszewski, and several other editors, includes Ochlewski’s indignant marginal notes. In response to the demand that he should include younger

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voices on the Publishing Council, he wrote: “Of course. But Schäffer, Patkowski . . . they are not indispensable.” He also noted at the end that he had sent his own confidential letter out to several (older) editors and composers, including Lutosławski, seeking their support and guidance in this matter. Even in the face of internal pressure, Ochlewski was ready to resist Schäffer’s participation. It must be noted that Tomaszewski and Ochlewski had a close working relationship; later in life, Tomaszewski would recall that Ochlewski was like a father to him. Therefore, the fact that he was the first signatory on this letter indicates the urgency of the stakes in this matter.26 This show of support was not enough to push through a second edition of the Almanac, but an explicit endorsement from young editors such as Tomaszewski was surely influential in green-lighting Schäffer’s next book, New Music: Problems in Contemporary Compositional Technique (1958). In the first chapters of New Music, Schäffer made it clear that he, as a representative of the postwar generation, was not writing this book for the “middle and older generations of composers and musicologists” from which he and his younger colleagues were “clearly separating themselves.”27 Repeatedly, he also underscored that this book was not intended to participate in the mechanisms of outreach or education for the mass audience. This was a composition manual for a specialist audience of composers and theorists who were eager to learn more about the contemporary musical landscape outside Poland. To that end, he included no musical examples from Polish composers in the book, and he cited only sources from Western European composers and intellectuals: Adorno’s aforementioned Philosophy of New Music appeared alongside texts from the 1940s and early 1950s by Josef Rufer, Olivier Messiaen, Paul Hindemith, Pierre Boulez, and Herbert Eimert.28 To a certain extent, Schäffer used New Music to construct a historical narrative and a canon for contemporary music, tracing its development from dodecaphony to the postwar European avant-garde. The cover of the book, shown in figure 11, reinforces Schäffer’s historiographical goals; scattered blue and green bars, intersecting at right angles, bear the names of the composers who Schäffer featured in his analyses. These range from the expected representatives of the early twentiethcentury modernist generation (Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Bartók, Webern) through the interventions of several key middle-generation figures (Hindemith, Messiaen) to the notorious postwar avant-gardists (Boulez, Stockhausen) and even to several less well-known artists who were also working, in Schäffer’s estimation, to extend the legacies of dodecaphony (Boris Blacher, Rolf Liebermann). The design supports Schäffer’s larger argument in the book about the multidirectionality of contemporary music, as some names appear multiple times across the cover in different intersections. Pierre Boulez, for instance, appears in conjunction with both Anton Webern and Olivier Messiaen.

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figure 11. Bogusław Schäffer, New Music: Problems in Contemporary Compositional Technique (Nowa Muzyka: Problemy współczesnej techniki kompozytorskiej) (Kraków: Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, 1958).

In 1957, Schäffer had complained in Ruch Muzyczny that “the word ‘dodecaphony’ is today—especially in Poland—understood and treated as if it were a synonym for ‘modernity.’ ”29 He pushed back against his colleagues’ mania for dodecaphony, which I discussed in chapter 3. In New Music, Schäffer did not minimize the significance of dodecaphony, but instead framed it as a starting point or a precondition for musical modernity, rather than its lone signifier. The earliest practitioners of the system (he pointed to Schoenberg and to J. M. Hauer, and then to a whole host of composers who followed them) had begun to explore the implications of pitch and interval relativization, but they had not escaped the gravitational

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pull of traditional harmonic and formal conventions. In the postwar world, Schäffer argued that composers needed to take up the mantle of Webern, who had recognized the structural potential of dodecaphony, privileging interval over pitch, motive over melody. They needed to think of dodecaphony not as a closed, rulebound system for organizing pitch content, but as a flexible set of principles that would allow them to explore “the possibilities of new formal dispositions.”30 In the rest of the book, Schäffer traced various pathways that branched out of dodecaphony, with the implication that contemporary composers should feel free to explore and combine any and all of them. It is not a coincidence that New Music appeared at the same moment when Schäffer himself began to compose large-scale forms, and when his music began to attract attention in Polish compositional circles. The book can be read not only as a textbook, but as a personal treatise, tracing the formation of Schäffer’s own aesthetic convictions and technical obsessions. For example, picking up the same theme that he had articulated in his 1955 review of Lutosławski’s Concerto for Orchestra, Schäffer declared in New Music that the most pressing task facing contemporary composers lay not in the invention of new forms, but in the animation and structuring of those forms. He called for the development of a new musical “techtonics,” pointing to time (metric-rhythmic structures), texture, and timbre as three of the most important areas for innovation. More broadly, he insisted that the thing that separated contemporary music from its classical and romantic forbears was the use of new sonic material. Taken together, his technical concerns thus coalesced into a desire to explore sound as it moved through space and time.31 Here, Schäffer’s ideas bear the traces of an influence that he does not disclose in his citations: musicologist Józef Chomiński. Chomiński had been one of the voices critical of contemporary atonal and dodecaphonic composition at the 1949 Łagów conference, but in 1956 he published an article that betrayed his interest in those and other developments in twentieth-century music. Or, perhaps, instead of a betrayal of secret desire, we might read Chomiński’s article, “On the Problems of Compositional Technique in the Twentieth Century,” as a continuation of phenomenological questions that he had already been asking in the 1930s and 1940s.32 Schäffer was aware of Chomiński’s work along this vein. In 1956, he published a historiographical survey of the older musicologist’s analytical writings from the early 1950s, noting with particular interest Chomiński’s extension of German theorist Hans Mersmann’s phenomenology of musical energetics.33 In the interwar period, Chomiński had been a proponent of Mersmann’s ideas, with their capacity to describe the dynamic unfolding of musical form in time.34 He became disenchanted, however, with the limitations of Mersmann’s theory. Writing in 1948 to Régamey, Chomiński complained that the German theorist’s prioritization of melody and harmony ignored the alternative energetic parameters that animated many

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contemporary compositions, including Régamey’s own Quintet (discussed in chapter 1).35 By the early 1950s, Chomiński had already turned his attention to the energetic potential of sonic qualities such as timbre and texture, which Mersmann had considered to be “secondary” musical elements.36 Schäffer, in his first major article for the musicology journal Muzyka, traced this thread through Chomiński’s recent work and (although he was supposed to be writing a review essay of current Chopin scholarship) he paid considerable attention to the older musicologist’s original contributions in theorizing a broader spectrum of energetic parameters. He argued that Chomiński’s recognition of the “techtonic” interplay between “secondary elements” and other musical-formal forces was extremely important in understanding the networks of transformations and tensions that generated musical movement. Such a phenomenological perspective offered a powerful corrective to notions of musical forms as externally mediated schema, instead proposing form as an emergent construct shaped from the inside out in real time. In his 1956 article, “On the Problems of Compositional Technique in the Twentieth Century,” Chomiński developed these ideas further, arguing that, in the twentieth century, composers had shifted their attention to the role of space (register), time (rhythm/meter), and color (timbre), as prime movers in articulating form, fully displacing the “primary” structural role of harmony; similarly, motivic transformation had displaced melody.37 It was in this article that Chomiński first invoked the term “sonoristic values” (“wartości sonorystyczne”) to describe contemporary composers’ use of sound to constitute form. He argued for the development of a new theoretical language that would allow scholars, composers, and musicians to describe more accurately the function of “pure sound” in contemporary music, rather than trying to draw analogies to music from an earlier time. Schäffer did not use Chomiński’s term “sonoristic values” in writing New Music, but he did incorporate the idea of sonic energy in his analysis. This was even (or especially) true in relation to aesthetic questions. Schäffer took great pains in Nowa Muzyka to argue that musical expression was inherent within the musical material and had no external referent. If audiences felt an emotional quality in the music, it was due to the “degree of condensation, concentration, and intensification of expression [ . . . ] not resulting from the musical materials themselves, but from their specific grouping or relationships.”38 In other words, expression was a function of the technical deployment of sonic material. This language was not so far from the perception-tinged Régameyan discourse about artistic content made manifest in musical “nodes,” or Lutosławski’s concerns in deploying musical material to create affective structures in Muzyka żałobna.39 There was, however, an important difference. Schäffer did not believe that there was a metaphysical stream of content that composers must tap into with their work. Just as with his understanding of artistic progress, which demanded constant creative reinvention, Schäffer’s aesthetics of beauty and expression in music were linked to his understanding of time as a

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unidirectional, forward-marching force. He believed that the affect of any given contemporary composition arose out of the composer’s realization of a creative vision for that specific piece, and could not be linked to external expressive conventions of the past; to compose a piece with a specific goal to produce emotional affect would result in derivative (wtórny) work.40 The criteria according to which Schäffer was ready to judge the success or failure of a piece of music were different from those employed in the tradition-oriented genius discourse that surrounded Lutosławski. To question whether a composition was “good,” or even to ask why a composer had written it—these were the wrong questions. “It’s difficult to judge whether or not [Stockhausen’s Klavierstück XI] will have significance from the point of view of the development of history,” he shrugged in his review of the piece. “We aren’t clairvoyants.”41 But was it interesting? Did the piece accomplish something new? Would it beget further experiments from other composers? These were the important questions for Schäffer, and they motivated his own compositional activity. T R A N SL AT I N G M O D E R N I T Y I N T O S O U N D : S C HÄ F F E R T H E C OM P O SE R

In New Music, Schäffer had posited dodecaphony as a foundation for further experiment in contemporary music, and this was indeed his own approach. Five years later, critic Bohdan Pociej would argue that Schäffer had absorbed the principles of dodecaphony at such a deep level that, for him, it was less a set of tools and more a creative creed. Schäffer deployed rows and interval patterns effortlessly, manipulating the material to construct his forms. Even more important, though, was the way that dodecaphony had shaped his understanding of compositional practice: “Schäffer has taken up the cardinal and most fundamental rule [of dodecaphony]: the permutatability of material, the changeability of structure, the non-repetition of form, and, as a general result, the nonrecurrence [jednorazowość] of experiment.”42 It was this principle of non-repetition that would come to characterize Schäffer’s work—so much so that it is difficult, really, to talk about a style or sound associated with his music. Schäffer expected his audience to meet him anew each time, ready to start from zero in building a perceptual relationship with his propositions. Such an approach demanded an openness to “possibility” (możliwość), which, as Krzysztof Szwajgier has noted, is a word that suffused Schäffer’s writings and interviews throughout his career.43 Each new composition offered a unique set of possibilities, and Schäffer asserted in 1959 (citing Régamey as an inspiration) that composers could only reveal and explore those possibilities if they remained true to their own creative vision. This last sentiment did not separate him from the preceding generation of Polish composers, but where Szymanowski and his followers had urged an approach grounded in synthe-

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sis, Schäffer resolutely embraced experimentalism; in his view, it was the composer’s responsibility to select the most appropriate musical materials, and then to use them “differently than [they had ever been used] before.”44 This commitment to experiment (and resistance to codification) is clear in Schäffer’s output from the late 1950s, including especially the three large-scale pieces with which Schäffer made his first big mark in the public sphere: Quattro movimenti for piano and orchestra (1957), Tertium datur for harpsichord and orchestra (1958), and Monosonata for six string quartets (1959). The first and the third of these pieces were recognized at the Grzegorz Fitelberg competition in 1959, with Monosonata receiving second prize, and Tertium datur became Schäffer’s Warsaw Autumn debut in 1960. All three pieces are built on predetermined dodecaphonic or serial foundations, and, at least to a certain extent, all of them demonstrate Schäffer’s overarching concerns about timbre, texture, and time. But each of the three compositions is also distinct, foregrounding a particular problem. Therefore, each of the three compositions sounds very different, despite having been composed in such quick succession. Quattro movimenti for piano and orchestra bears clear traces of a neoclassical aesthetic and does not immediately, in its sound world, distinguish itself from the work of Schäffer’s older colleagues. At the climax of the first movement, however, listeners may have recognized that they were hearing something different. As the piano articulates consecutive statements of the row—the clearest presentation of that all-interval-class series that has yet appeared in the piece—the divisi strings play a sustained twelve-note chord before launching into whole-octave glissandi, smearing across the texture that had been, until that point, clearly articulated and percussive. In the third movement, the timbral articulation of form joins Schäffer’s most urgent concern in the piece: the employ of Boris Blacher’s “variable meter” as a structural force running alongside the dodecaphonic rows that organize his pitch content.45 Even from the first measures of the first movement, it is clear that Schäffer is permuting pulse-patterns to disrupt standard metrical hierarchies, but his Blacherian experiment does not fully click into place until the third movement, Moderato animato. At that point, Schäffer overlays fifteen-bar numeric patterns onto his musical material, with each numeral designating the number of beats in the corresponding bar. As seen in figure 12a, he begins with the symmetrical ordering 2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-(2).46 Over the course of the movement, he slowly transforms the pattern from the center outward, systematically jettisoning the longer durations. At the movement’s climax, this process of permutation culminates in a 2-3-2-3-2-3-2-3-2-3-2-3-2-3-(2) pattern, juxtaposed against the movement’s most minimal intervallic and timbral material. In the movement’s conclusion (figure 12b), Schäffer returns to the original metrical pattern, allowing the final iteration to unroll over a cluster that grows and diminishes along with the ebb and flow of the metric symmetry.

figures 12a and 12b. Bogusław Schäffer, Quattro movimenti (1957), pages 45 and 60. Copyright © 1960 Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, Kraków, Poland. Excerpt used by kind permission of the Aurea Porta Foundation.

figures 12a and 12b (continued).

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In a 1959 interview, Schäffer shrugged off his elegant formal experiments in Quattro movimenti, describing the piece as a synthesis of techniques and languages from the first half of the twentieth century; for him, it was a “farewell” to the past, leaving him free to explore new pathways.47 Quattro movimenti functioned as a clear analogue to the concerto, and Schäffer’s organizational schemas were laid bare on the surface, inviting his audiences to decode the material and to admire his cleverness. By contrast, Tertium datur and Monosonata were both inscrutable, prickly, and both moved beyond dodecaphony into a broader engagement with serialism. In these pieces, Schäffer required his listeners and would-be analysts to set aside their preconceived understanding of serialism as an inflexible system. He wanted to move beyond efforts to organize and relativize musical material, which he felt that Boulez and Stockhausen had already accomplished, and instead to use serial techniques as an opening to explore various formal-structural, textural, and temporal possibilities.48 In Tertium datur, which bears the not-insignificant subtitle “A Compositional Treatise,” Schäffer worked to realize in sound the principles that he had been puzzling out in his theoretical writings of the same period. In an immediate sense, Schäffer’s decision to write a work for soloist and ensemble again recalled the concerto. He was also aware that his choice of the harpsichord would naturally resonate with past traditions, but he took this as a challenge. He reported in 1960 that he had rejected the only two options available to composers who wanted to compose for the harpsichord: to acknowledge tradition, or not to compose for the instrument at all. This either/or condition (tertium non datur, or “law of the excluded middle”) was unacceptable to Schäffer. Instead, he insisted on blazing a third path (tertium datur) that would allow him to generate new associations, new relationships with existing sounds and musical materials.49 One way that he addressed this challenge was in embracing a greater degree of flexibility—and by inviting the possibility of chaos—in the piece’s realization in both pitch space (register) and time. In Tertium datur, Schäffer employs a twelvetone row of pitches, but more important than the pitches themselves are the intervallic relationships between them, which form an all-interval-class palindrome: 1-4-3-2-5-6-5-2-3-4-1. As he indicated in New Music, intervals were more interesting to Schäffer than pitch, and he thought of his pitch series as a particular instantiation of his series of undirected pitch-class intervals, or interval classes.50 Because he was unconcerned with interval direction, Schäffer recorded interval classes with numerals 1–6; all higher number relationships were simply equivalents. These all-interval-class rows included at least one example of each interval class, but some interval classes would appear more than once. He could realize pitch class interval 1 as a minor second or a major seventh—either interval moving up or down in registral pitch space—or, with octave equivalence in play, as a minor ninth, and so on.51 As musicologist Iwona Lindstedt has shown in her analysis,

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figure 13. Bogusław Schäffer, Tertium datur (1958), Movement 2, harpsichord score for

Variations 5. Copyright © 1962 Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, Kraków, Poland. Excerpt used by kind permission of the Aurea Porta Foundation.

Schäffer’s realization of the all-interval-class row in Tertium datur also took the form of an all-interval row: Interval Classes: 1   4       3     2    5  6   5   2        3    4    1 Directed Pitch-Class Intervals: 1   4       9   2   5  6  7   10  3   8    11 G♯ A C♯ B𐌜 C F B F♯ E G E𐌜 D Pitches:

Schäffer’s privileging of interval class over pitch shines through in Tertium datur because, as Lindstedt has demonstrated, Schäffer freely subdivides his pitch series into partially ordered trichord sets, which allows him to highlight specific pairs of interval classes. He orders these intervallic building blocks to construct new patterns of expansion and contraction, mimicking the palindromic contour of the original pitch-class interval series. He also uses the series of interval classes (and especially the first four, 1-4-3-2) to generate the metric-rhythmic foundations of the work, but, just as with his pitch row, he begins systematically reordering and permuting these patterns as soon as he introduces them.52 Building on the freedom born of transformational permutability, Schäffer also experimented in Tertium datur with one branch of postwar compositional developments that fascinated him, although he had not yet written about it in New Music: indeterminacy, or “aleatorizm.”53 In the second movement, made up of nine variations, Schäffer juxtaposes the ensemble’s fixed material against the harpsichord soloist, for whom he provides a series of graphic notations. While these

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notations, such as the one in figure 13, lay out the parameters for realization, they also require the performer to make interpretive choices in shaping the musical material. In the graphic notation here, Schäffer uses the horizontal lines of a grid to indicate duration and vertical lines to indicate the interval relationships between pitches, leaving the question of starting pitch and register to the performer. The performer’s choices are constrained by Schäffer’s own underlying dodecaphonic logic, which hinged on the conception of interval classes as a unifying force. The variance in the degree of fixity in the notation, however, opens up an infinite number of possible realizations and invites the creative participation of the performer. Monosonata, a theme and variations for six (1 + 2 + 3) string quartets, was the piece for which Schäffer won second prize in the Fitelberg composition competition. Even though it was the last composed in this group of three, it was the first composition to earn him serious attention as a composer from the Composers’ Union and Polish Radio (which sponsored the competition). While Tertium datur had attacked the problem of musical form and momentum by setting up a productive tension between Schäffer’s control of the material and the performer’s interpretation, Monosonata evidenced a different approach, one mediated primarily through musical texture, or, perhaps, through Chomiński’s “sonoristic values.” Schäffer composed Monosonata in 1959, just one year after the premiere of Lutosławski’s Funeral Music. As noted in chapter 4, the younger composer had appreciated his colleague’s achievement in that piece, with special emphasis on Lutosławski’s structural use of dodecaphony and his flexibility in manipulating the system to suit his own compositional goals. Monosonata is Schäffer’s response to Lutosławski’s composition, especially in its prioritization of perception over complicated manipulations of serially derived pitch content. Just as Lutosławski had done in Funeral Music, Schäffer taught his audience how to listen to the piece by gradually introducing formal principles in a manner that would allow them to understand the rest of the composition as a “good continuation” of those principles.54 In Monosonata, Schäffer uses the first five measures to introduce the series (figure 14). In contrast to the row from Tertium datur, which can be rendered as a complete pitch aggregate, one statement of the row in Monosonata cannot, because here Schäffer uses a series of only seven interval classes (4-1-5-2-7-5-6-3), thus rendering only eight pitches (G♯-E-F-C-D-G-C♯-B𐌜).55 As in Schäffer’s previous compositions, the interval-class series provides a structural foundation for other musical parameters, including pitch and rhythm/meter, throughout the rest of the work. In Monosonata, though, he is newly interested in exploiting specific realizations of these interval classes. In these first measures, we may observe that the first three pitches (G♯-E-F) contain the same interval classes (4, 1, 3) as do the lower three notes in the second half of the theme (C♯-D-B𐌜). However, it is only possible to perceive this similarity because of the way that Schäffer employs partially ordered sets in realizing his interval-class series, allowing him to highlight specific

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figure 14. Bogusław Schäffer, Monosonata (1959), opening bars. Copyright © 1960 Polskie

Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, Kraków, Poland. Excerpt used by kind permission of the Aurea Porta Foundation.

pitch-class relationships between non-contiguous pitches of the row and to create a mirror contour that is not explicitly present in the interval-class series. The most important feature of this mirror is the third (major third in the first case, minor third in the second) which first precedes, then follows a minor ninth. In Schäffer’s pitch-class interval series, there are several possible expressions of interval-class 1, and yet, here, it is specifically the minor ninth that plays an important role in articulating the gestural movement from small interval to large, and then from large back to small. Schäffer also uses dynamics to heighten the mirrored structure of the motto, providing yet another layer of change over time. Therefore, in Monosonata, while undirected pitch-class intervals still formed the underlying foundation of the material, Schäffer’s affinity for the specific interval of the minor ninth, or pitch-interval 13, indicated a new sensitivity to the realization of those interval classes in registral pitch space. This sensitivity, demonstrated also by Krzysztof Penderecki just one year later in his Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima (1960), allowed Schäffer to use texture to articulate formal structure.56 In Monosonata, contrasts in register and dynamics play an important role in generating momentum both within and between the variations, even as they are all

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figure 15. Bogusław Schäffer, Monosonata (1959), distribution of performers. Copyright ©

1960 Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, Kraków, Poland. Excerpt used by kind permission of the Aurea Porta Foundation.

grounded in Schäffer’s intervallically conceived serial technique, which a reviewer would later describe as “murky dodecaphony.”57 In the first variation, he announces yet one more crucial parameter that would inflect the texture of the piece: physical space. While the opening motto had been played by the core string quartet, setting up a quasi-concertino/ripieno relationship between that group and the remaining five string quartets, the first variation explores spatial symmetries within the larger ensemble. Referring to Schäffer’s recommended seating arrangement (figure 15), we see in figure 16 that he shifts to the outermost corners of the group, pairing Violin 7 with Cello 4 and Violin 10 with Viola 4. These five measures contain two repetitions of the same interval-class sets that had been set up in the theme. Schäffer told an interviewer that he had intended in Monosonata to take advantage of the technical advances offered by Polish Radio, and it does seem that he was exploring a complex stereophonic effect in his play with space, here and elsewhere in the piece.58 As the variations unfold, Schäffer’s textural contrasts become particularly experimental at important structural points. In the central fifteenth variation (figure 17), all twenty-four instruments play in static, sustained chords, rearticulating them according to a beat pattern that matches the original pitch-interval class series. The top-most four voices (the core quartet) replicate the interval-class set from the first half of the theme, while the lower twelve voices play six pairs of minor ninths. Weirder and more disorienting, though, is Schäffer’s use of dynamics in this

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figure 16. Bogusław Schäffer, Monosonata (1959), Variation 1. Copyright © 1960 Polskie

Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, Kraków, Poland. Excerpt used by kind permission of the Aurea Porta Foundation.

variation; from within his “murky” twelve-note sound mass emerge widely dispersed triads (articulated by raising the volume of specific tones within the mass), each one linked to the next through semitone relations. While these would certainly not be heard as functional harmonies, the triads cut through the sound mass as a kind of pulse, creating movement even as all the pitches remain absolutely still. By contrast, the next variation (espressivo, cantabile) is one of the piece’s most minimal in texture, and one of the most conventionally melodic. Perhaps nowhere else in the piece do we feel so strongly Schäffer’s affinity for Chomiński’s argument that contemporary musical forms were bound up with the energetic qualities of “sonoristic” material. In fact, it was Schäffer’s own testimony that, in Monosonata, form emerged not from “the structure of the work, but rather the constructively organized intensity of time.”59 The contrast between the two variations—the giant, immobile sound masses, haunted by their interior triadic ghosts, and the two-line polyphonic figure—produces a sequence of varying intensities, driving the piece forward. Schäffer gradually shortens the variations toward the end of the piece, allowing the increased rate of change to build to an expected state of climax. In the concluding variation (figure 18), he initiates a process of gradual textural accretion, with instruments entering in paired unisons (tracing an elaborate geometric

figure 17. Bogusław Schäffer, Monosonata (1959), Variations 15 and 16. Copyright © 1960

Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, Kraków, Poland. Excerpt used by kind permission of the Aurea Porta Foundation.

figure 17 (continued).

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figure 17 (continued).

spatial pattern across the ensemble) before opening outward to minor ninths. This final cadence effectively reverses the mirror gesture of the opening theme, filling in from the top to the bottom and then from the bottom to the top, yet it signals closure with total chromatic saturation and fading dynamic levels. It might seem strange to compare this dense, shimmering mass with the solo cello conclusion of Lutosławski’s Funeral Music, but the similarity lies in this: the willingness of both composers to subvert precompositional processes in favor of their own creative visions, and their shared investment in the audience’s phenomenological experience. What distinguished Schäffer from his older colleague, however, was his utter embrace of the experiment—even experiments that did not work (such as, one might argue, dynamics-articulated triads at the center of Monosonata). Monosonata demonstrates Schäffer’s ingenuity, but it does not bear the mark of genius as genius was constructed in postwar Poland, with its ties to the national past. Instead, Monosonata, together with Tertium datur and even Quattro movimenti, reflect their creator: these pieces are restless and difficult, and they march forward, focused resolutely on the diachronic passage of time. Schäffer had no patience for the tradition-building function of lag discourse, predicated on a logic of eternal return. Instead, he invested in the promise of possibility, in the third path that lay between tradition and silence. A S SE S SI N G S C HÄ F F E R’ S T H I R D PAT H : W HO I S I T F O R ?

Responses to Schäffer’s writing and composition of the late 1950s tended to repeat several common themes. First and foremost, his colleagues and critics recognized

figure 18 . Bogusław Schäffer, Monosonata (1959), Variation 29. Copyright © 1960 Polskie

Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, Kraków, Poland. Excerpt used by kind permission of the Aurea Porta Foundation.

figure 18 (continued).

figure 18 (continued).

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his output as a reflection of Schäffer’s own personal understanding of the goals and concerns facing contemporary music. His “third path” was for himself. Second, they acknowledged Schäffer’s dedication to experimentation as an aesthetic, and they linked the implications of that aesthetic to Schäffer’s understanding of time. And, third, they sometimes speculated about whether Schäffer’s path might also be a path forward for Polish contemporary music—specifically, for the youngest generation of composers. In tension with the previous two themes, this last concern raised a question: Even if Schäffer was uninterested in starting a national movement, or in leading his young colleagues, was it possible that he was already doing it anyway? In both his interviews and his public-facing music criticism from this period, Schäffer went out of his way to stoke his own reputation as an idiosyncratic thinker and composer. In 1959, he acknowledged his shunning that had followed the publication of his Almanac, going so far as to apply the hot-button words censorship and repression to his experience with PWM and the Composers’ Union. He did not pass up an opportunity to underscore his response: he would keep on writing and composing, regardless of his peers’ estimation for his work.60 His primary concern was deepening his own engagement with the “craft” of composition as it was being practiced in Western Europe and elsewhere. He was not particularly interested in other Polish composers (with the exception of Lutosławski), and, doubling down on his Adornian convictions, he also dismissed Shostakovich and Britten.61 Despite the fact that he had studied with Artur Malawski and others in Kraków, Schäffer described himself as an autodidact; he did not want to connect himself to a lineage of Polish composers (or genius-bards) stretching back to Szymanowski.62 His attitude to his colleagues also extended to audiences. Schäffer was unabashed in presenting New Music as a book for specialists—or even for specialists among specialists. He used the word “elite” to describe this audience, but with a qualification. This wasn’t an intellectual or professional elite, but rather a select group of people who truly cared about the contemporary development of music—a group that excluded peasants and factory workers, but also (potentially) musicologists who cared more about their own ideas than about the future development of music.63 Critics read New Music through this lens of peculiar elitism. In its one major print review, young critic Bohdan Pociej wrote in Ruch Muzyczny that New Music represented an important development of Józef Chomiński’s ideas. Schäffer’s contribution here lay in translating these theoretical-analytical ideas into a practical form aimed at contemporary composers. Pociej acknowledged that Schäffer’s language was often unclear, and that his book was very difficult to read, but defended him on the grounds of his “passion for exploration.”64 He suggested that the book might productively be translated into English and German because, in his estimation, readers there might have more to say about its contents than readers in Poland. Schäffer was participating in a one-sided conversation, and his interlocutors were elsewhere.

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That was not entirely true, though. Schäffer’s colleagues were hyper-aware of the book, and the reputation of New Music began to outshout the controversy that had been associated with the Almanac. His name and its title were often uttered in the same breath, whether in praise or as an epithet. Stefan Kisielewski, for instance, pointed in 1958 to Schäffer and New Music as the primary Polish source for information about new developments in contemporary music. He acknowledged that the young Krakowian critic was “a maniac, a doctrinarian, a weirdo, a singleminded, unpleasant, stubborn, uncompromising fanatic.” But, in spite of (or perhaps because of) those characteristics, Kisielewski argued that Schäffer was, “in our music and our music criticism, one of only a few—and maybe the only—real Columbus: he discovers his new lands and fights for his truth, throwing caution to the wind.”65 Schäffer’s stalwart sparring partner, Zygmunt Mycielski, despaired at what he perceived as his younger colleague’s pompous elitism, but he also expressed more than a little admiration for Schäffer’s work. Not necessarily, he clarified, admiration of what Schäffer wrote, but of the passion with which he believed his own ideas, holding himself to the very standards that he proposed. “We call that ‘writers’ morality,’ ” Mycielski proclaimed, “and I value that, as if I had found a pearl with the purest shine.”66 Polish composers’ familiarity with Schäffer’s writing, and their understanding of that writing as a kind of personal artistic credo, inevitably colored their reception of his music. This was even true for the jury in the 1959 Fitelberg competition. Bogusław Szabelski, an older composer from the post-Szymanowski generation, would later recall that he and his fellow jurors had been particularly interested in both Quattro movimenti and Monosonata. Despite the anonymity of the submissions, it was clear to them that the composer(s) had been very familiar with Schäffer’s New Music. When they learned that Schäffer had composed both pieces, they were surprised because he was not yet known as a composer.67 But the differences between the pieces themselves, and their experimental quality, must have fallen right in line with what they knew of him. Indeed, it was the differences between his compositions—and even the differences within each one—that critics recognized as the most defining quality of Schäffer’s style. The first major articles about his music began appearing in 1960, in conjunction both with Tertium datur’s Warsaw Autumn premiere as well as the publication of a collection of his keyboard compositions, spanning an entire decade of his compositional activity. In the introduction to a lengthy interview with Schäffer, Tadeusz Wysocki used a highly marked word to describe the composer’s compositional output: “awangardowy.” In defining this quality, Wysocki argued that the young author of New Music was “compelled constantly to create new, often yet-unknown possibilities” in his music. Later, in the interview, he asked Schäffer if he really tasked himself with reinventing his musical language with each new composition, and the composer obligingly responded thus: “I don’t recall

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writing even two pieces in the same manner . . . [because with every piece] I place on myself the condition . . . of absolute innovation.”68 Over and over again, writers used the word “possibilities” to gloss Schäffer’s technical and creative restlessness. In an internal review written for the Composers’ Union, Witold Rudziński—who was hardly one of Schäffer’s biggest fans—used a different word: “ambition.” Despite his own reputation for conservatism, Rudziński’s assessment of Monosonata was very positive, noting the interesting relationship between its “modified dodecaphony” and musical parameters lying outside the realm of pitch, including texture and metric organization. The older man judged that the piece certainly proved Schäffer’s maturity, his readiness to participate fully in the union as a composer, but he also emphasized that, while his younger colleague’s insistence on reinventing himself in every composition might draw him closer to Stockhausen’s example, proving his dedication to newness in all its forms, it did not always result in a successful composition.69 Rudziński did not define what success meant to him in this context. If we revisit, however, the criteria according to which Lutosławski’s Funeral Music was received as a work of genius, then Schäffer’s failing becomes clear. Critics had praised Lutosławski for taking up the signifiers of musical modernity, while subverting them to his own creative vision; Schäffer also accomplished this creative subversion in his work. But they had also praised Lutosławski for creating art that connected with the audience in a meaningful way. This was not true with Schäffer’s music—or, at least, his interlocutors felt that way. Schäffer had proclaimed publicly that he believed music to be an autonomous art, without external meaning, and interviewers continually returned to this point. Where Pilarski had needled Lutosławski to explain his use of dodecaphony, Wysocki asked Schäffer to clarify his thoughts about expressivity, meaning, and beauty in art. Repeatedly (and with increasing exasperation), the young composer insisted that musical ideas did not gain meaning through connection with external content. He could not control whether audiences would have emotional responses to his music; he could only control the rigor with which he consciously worked out the implications of new musical ideas on their own terms. In a 1960 interview, Schäffer retorted: “would you ask such a question of Tadeusz Baird?” He knew that the press was framing him as someone who did not believe in the expressive capacity of music—in contrast to Baird, in whose music questions of dodecaphonic technique remained subordinate to the lyrical, expressive mode. While Schäffer was often more than happy to play into his public “maniacal” persona, he also seemed frustrated by the way people flattened out his aesthetic position in such stark terms.70 As a result of Schäffer’s iconoclasm, audiences and performers sometimes felt lost. Everyone agreed that his music was future oriented, but practical questions about realizing his creative intentions sometimes went unanswered. Musicologist Leon Markiewicz wrote in frustration about the graphic notation in Schäffer’s col-

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lection of piano music; yes, the composer had included explanations, but these were “laconic and unclear,” leaving too much to the judgment of performers. If they wanted to realize Schäffer’s intentions exactly, then there was nothing left but to demand a personal explanation: “I could make a pilgrimage to [the composer’s home in] Nowa Huta. But . . . is that the goal of publishing a score?”71 Bohdan Pociej, who had written with such admiration about New Music, also wrote a review of Tertium datur for Ruch Muzyczny. After the premiere, Pociej praised Schäffer for creating a fascinating, “singular sonic atmosphere.”72 The composition was disorienting as it unfolded, in part because Schäffer had privileged his experiments with graphic notation and aleatorism over structural logic. “In its premise, Tertium datur is, above all, a composition made up of new, striking ideas about space, time, and color. It is a complex of creative propositions bound up in a threemovement form.” This was not meant to be a critique, so much as a recognition of the type of attention that the piece demanded. Tertium datur was a “display of innovation in and of itself,” and listeners could not expect to perceive or understand all of Schäffer’s experiments. Structural or deep listening, which required a facility with listening across prolonged periods and relating the present back to the past, was not the mode conjured by Schäffer’s music. Schäffer’s third path unfolded, inexorably, in real time. Pociej pointed, bewildered, at the transition between Tertium datur’s second movement, with its furiously active graphic notation– based variations, and the third, in which the harpsichordist moved to the piano and finished out the piece in a mood of contemplative improvisation. Why? This was an impossible question to answer, and listeners just had to hold on as best they could. AWA N G A R D A ?

Taken together, these assertions about Schäffer’s idiosyncrasy and his absolute dedication to newness made him an unlikely leader for a movement. In fact, in 1958, Schäffer himself declared at the end of one of his many credo-manifesto articles: “I do not want to represent the younger generation . . . I want to represent [my own] distinct, individual position—the only one that I can accept.”73 Despite these protests, his colleagues could not help but frame him as a kind of Pied Piper, leading the postwar generation forward. Mycielski privately described Schäffer as the “pope” of the young “Webernists,” who acted as though the center of all artistic knowledge lay in the West.74 But even as frustrated as he was, the older composer also publicly acknowledged that Schäffer’s perspectives were vitally important for young Polish artists to hear. “Nothing is new under the sun,” he cautioned, “but for this one detail: Schäffer has revealed [his ideas] afresh, he has spoken and written them right now. It is in [that fact] that the true newness lies! . . . We need him, and especially the youth need him. [Everything] that has been said in the past must be

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spoken yet again in the present, in order that it might glitter with the sheen of newness.”75 There was more than a trace of condescension in this statement from Mycielski, who, in the course of his lengthy press battle with Schäffer, had argued that his younger colleague’s mania for newness and modernity represented a kind of counterfeit. Between Mycielski’s warring impulses—to scoff at Schäffer’s ostentatious newness and to recognize that the younger generation needed a leader—the balance tipped toward the latter position. This was a discursive gesture that was repeated over and over in Schäffer’s reception. Even as critics raised concerns about his ideas and his compositional approach, they often concluded in a posture of acquiescence. They were not the audience for Schäffer’s shenanigans. He was for the young people! Along with this impulse to describe Schäffer as a leader of a youth movement came a twinned reflex to apply to this group the same word that they had begun to use in describing Schäffer’s work: “awangardowy.” Schäffer himself was not so sure about this designation. While he did not flinch at its application to his own work, he reacted strongly against the notion that there was a burgeoning avantgarde movement in Poland. When asked in 1959 about the status of avant-garde composition in Poland, he demurred: “Let us not exaggerate; there is no Polish avant-garde yet.”76 Wysocki pressed him to speculate about the potential for the youngest Polish postwar generation of composers to make significant contributions to European music culture, but Schäffer protested that it was still too early to tell. There was great talent and potential among these composers, but they had not yet proven themselves, and, he added ominously, “it would maybe be easy to squander [that potential].”77 Solitude was a powerful position for Schäffer, allowing him to cultivate a privileged status within the Polish music community. As the first representative of avant-gardism in Poland, he could use his authority to define the nature of Poland’s backwardness and to determine whether true progress had been achieved. Schäffer would never have accepted the label of bard (wieszcz), because of the implications of national tradition attached to that notion. He certainly did not see himself as a continuer of a Chopin-SzymanowskiLutosławski line; more likely, he saw himself as its interrupter. But still he embraced the premium of “firstness” attached to that cultural role, and he was not about to cede his position. Schäffer’s protests were already too late. As noted in chapter 4, Bohdan Pociej had written with some concern about Lutosławski’s Funeral Music at the 1958 Warsaw Autumn festival, noting that the composition did not reflect the most contemporary compositional techniques of the postwar period. In seeking alternatives, Pociej turned with great interest to a group of compositions by three younger Polish composers, Włodzimierz Kotoński, Kazimierz Serocki, and Henryk Mikołaj Górecki.78

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These compositions all showcased elements that Pociej associated with the postwar avant-garde: they all evidenced an interest in serialism, in pointillism (with its “atomization of musical elements”), and in making a radical break from symphonic conventions. And, although their works all proved that the Polish school of avant-gardism was still “green,” Pociej insisted that the essential spark was there, and that it could only grow in interesting directions in the future. Mycielski articulated something similar after the 1958 festival, locating the “combatant” and “aggressive” Schäffer at the head of a group made up of Kotoński, Serocki, Górecki, and also the very young Wojciech Kilar.79 A year later, after the 1959 festival, however, Schäffer’s name was nowhere to be found. His music was not on the festival program (a fact that Mycielski had acknowledged earlier in the year, asking why none of Schäffer’s prize-winning compositions had been included on the program).80 And yet, the group of Polish “post-Webernist” avant-gardists were beginning to come into their own, earning considerable attention from all of the festival reviews in that year. By the time that Schäffer received his Warsaw Autumn premiere with Tertium datur in 1960, his name was irrevocably bound up with the very youth movement he had tried to deny. In an interview that appeared in conjunction with that premiere, Tadeusz Wysocki asked Schäffer the same question that he had asked in 1959: did he agree that the youngest Polish composers could now be described as an avant-garde group. Schäffer responded at length: To speak of an avant-garde in the current situation is certainly premature. Above all, an avant-garde is always small in number, and further, it is unconsolidated, and the enterprises of its specific members are, in spite of a common point of departure, different, independent. Five years ago, Boulez, Stockhausen, Nono and Pousseur created such an avantgarde in European music. . . . To speak about a Polish avant-garde, before having become familiar with the evolution of the composers, is indeed hasty. . . . I personally believe that the degree of [their] “avant-gardism” is still small, in consideration of the young composers’ work. . . . (Irzykowski spoke of a “plagiaristic character”— but I, as you can see, am polite.) The analysis of several scores has proved to me (insistently enough) that young composers often do not know what new music is about: from this is derived a purely ornamental treatment of new compositional problems; any contribution to the fundamental work of the European avant-garde is rather symbolic.81

It was a fiery response. In particular, Schäffer’s curious reference to plagiarism stood out, suggesting a serious disconnect between his own aesthetic goals and those of the group with whom he had become associated. The Polish avant-garde was coming, whether Schäffer wanted it to or not. It was being framed as a burgeoning national movement and as evidence that Polish backwardness was finally flowing in reverse, toward forwardness. Such a reading required a major revision

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and a willful misapplication of Schäffer’s own aesthetic ideology, reflecting a conflation of his ideas with the lag-based national genius discourses that had swirled around Lutosławski. In the next chapter, I will trace the implications of that conflation as they played out in the articulation and promotion of a Polish avant-garde school in the early 1960s.

6

Awangarda The Polish Avant-Garde as Tradition

A C A SE O F P L AG IA R I SM ?

In October 1962, Bogusław Schäffer filed a complaint with the publishing firm Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne (PWM), accusing Henryk Mikołaj Górecki of plagiarizing technical and notational innovations from Schäffer’s own 1960 composition Concerto per sei e tre.1 Schäffer demanded that PWM desist from publishing Górecki’s Elementi (1962), in which the alleged plagiarism had occurred, and he also wanted the firm to reprimand Górecki for his substandard compositional practices. In writing this letter, Schäffer was making a statement about creative authority and artistic identity: he was arguing that composers should hold the proprietary rights to their own technical innovations, which were inextricably bound up with the individual compositions in which they appeared. He was also staking a claim on his own “firstness.” He had been the first avant-garde artist in the Polish music community, and he felt that he had been displaced from that position by the composers who had come up behind him. Immediately upon receipt of Schäffer’s accusations, PWM director Tadeusz Ochlewski turned to the Composers’ Union for guidance. Within the union there was an internal review board, the Colleagues’ Tribunal, whose main responsibilities included both the investigation of members’ infractions against the union’s statutes and the arbitration of disputes between members. In the case of infractions against statutes, the tribunal had the authority to suspend or even expel a member from the union, an action that would have rendered a composer practically incapable of participating in Polish musical life. In the case of disputes between members, the tribunal was able to issue warnings and to require members 155

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to retract their accusations.2 Upon review of the situation, the Union’s Governing Committee referred Schäffer’s accusations to the Colleagues’ Tribunal.3 This was not the first complaint that the union had received regarding Schäffer, and it seemed like this new situation warranted serious attention.4 After their initial review, the tribunal decided that Schäffer’s accusations were so problematic that they actually reclassified the case; it was no longer merely an arbitration of a dispute between members, but rather a case of Schäffer versus the Composers’ Union itself.5 In his first letter to PWM, Schäffer argued that, in his Concerto per sei e tre, “I used a number of technical innovations. These appeared both in the technical disposition of the work and in the formation of notation, which is tightly bound to the technical conception of the music. I emphasize: the convergence of sonic technique and notation in this work is almost ideal; this means that the composition’s notation cannot be separated from its origins—that is, from the composition itself. I want to underscore here that the idea behind that technique and its notation is exclusively my own property and is bound up with the evolution of my music alone.”6 And then in a second letter, addressed to the Union, he further specified his definition of plagiarism and the nature of his claims against Górecki: “Undeniable plagiarism occurs . . . when someone takes up several aspects of compositional techniques that have been developed by someone else, and uses them simultaneously. . . . The author of Elementi took up my . . . notation, special treatment of string instruments, ‘thematization’ of structures notated in wavy lines of a specific shape, [my] way of arranging these structures, etc.”7 In this second letter, Schäffer accused another colleague, Tadeusz Baird, of committing a lesser form of plagiarism, which he termed “appropriation” (zapożyczenie). Appropriation occurred when a composer took only one technique from another composer; in this case, Schäffer accused Baird of appropriating his notation for his Etude for vocal orchestra, percussion, and piano (1962). It would have been easy enough to dismiss Schäffer’s accusation of plagiarism against Górecki and Baird as a manifestation of professional jealousy. In fact, this seems to have been the opinion of many of the composers involved, who responded mostly with annoyance. Ochlewski exclaimed to union leaders that Schäffer was acting worse than a “hysterical biddy” (histeryczna baba).8 Witold Lutosławski testified that Schäffer’s claims were grounded in “pure imagination,” and that he felt only “deep distaste” at the young composer’s insistence in pressing the charge.9 And Zygmunt Mycielski, the chair of the Colleagues’ Tribunal, recorded in his diary that the case had ended when Schäffer had finally “retracted all of his stupid accusations.”10 However, while Schäffer’s letters do demonstrate a degree of jealousy directed toward Górecki (in his letter to the union, he seemed particularly galled by the fact that Górecki’s Elementi had been published before his own Concerto), his concerns clearly extended outside the bounds of this particular case and reflected his broader understanding of artists’ relationship to their art.11 In fact,

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Mycielski confirmed this, writing that it was “typical of Schäffer’s thinking, that he would want to claim superficial forms and musical notation as his own exclusive property.”12 The level of frustration here indicates that there was something more at stake in this case than a simple question of musical notation. Schäffer’s insistence upon the similarities between his score and Górecki’s and Baird’s, taken together with the tribunal’s marked lack of concern about any resemblances (real or imagined), support my hypothesis that this tribunal hearing was not really about plagiarism. Neither Schäffer nor the other participants were able to understand or to give credence to one another’s claims because they were situated on opposite sides of a major discursive shift—a shift between two different models for understanding creativity and artistic identity as they related to avant-gardism. In chapter 5, I discussed the first of these models, predicated on newness and experimentation, as Schäffer himself had presented it in the late 1950s. In this chapter, I will demonstrate that Schäffer’s model of avant-gardism initially attracted a cluster of young acolytes who were eager to build upon that model. These critics and composers were ready to announce their own artistic iconoclasm and their orientation toward the future. Like Schäffer, they turned away from tradition and from backwardness, and they entrained to a timeline that moved only in one direction: forward. Together, their nascent avant-gardism resonated with some of the definitions of earlier twentieth-century avant-garde movements laid out by Peter Bürger in his Theory of the Avant-Garde.13 Poland had not seen the rise of such a movement in music earlier in the century. Schäffer’s particular brand of agonism, his rejection of nineteenth-century aesthetics and his critique of institutions, had some precedent (as we saw in chapter 1 in Stefan Kisielewski’s writing, and even perhaps in some of Szymanowski’s later work), but his predecessors had never rejected tradition with Schäffer’s degree of glee and finality. At the same time, Schäffer’s avant-gardism of the late 1950s lacked the political engagement of the earlier twentieth-century movements described by Bürger. In political terms, Schäffer’s embrace of abstraction and elitism resonated more clearly with the discourses that surrounded his postwar avant-garde colleagues in Western Europe, where critiques of artistic genius and of the ideality of the artwork were often bound up with Cold War critiques of (Soviet) politicized art.14 It was no accident, then, that Schäffer and the other young Polish avant-garde composers began to attract attention in precisely the moment when it was possible to express some of the same critiques in Poland. In the wake of the 1956 revolution, Polish artists could safely reject the institutional and aesthetic premises of socialist realism, and, as we have seen, there was room for the pursuit of specialized intellectual activity. At the same time, their commitment to abstraction mitigated any perceived threat to the party-state cultural apparatus, thus allowing Schäffer and others to experiment without falling prey to the post-1957 political retrenchments.

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This was not a movement defined by dissent or even by a retreat from politics, unlike the unofficial Soviet avant-garde about which Peter J. Schmelz has written.15 Already in 1960, though, the discourse about avant-gardism in Poland had begun to shift toward a second, tradition-oriented model. A broader community of critics, scholars, and composers began to wrap the young avant-garde group into aesthetic discourses of genius and national tradition, and therefore into the same looped conception of time that had characterized Lutosławski’s reception in 1958. This second definition of avant-gardism falls closer to art critic-historian Hal Foster’s description of the post–World War II “neo-avant-garde,” especially as regards its embrace of both the “temporal, diachronic” and the “spatial, synchronic” axes of creative activity. “A chief merit of the neo-avant-garde,” Foster explains, “is that it sought to keep these two axes in critical coordination. . . . [It] sustained the vertical axis or historical dimension of art. At the same time, it turned to past paradigms to open up present possibilities, and so developed the horizontal axis or social dimension of art.”16 A major difference between this tradition-oriented Polish avant-gardism and the American art movements discussed by Foster was its specifically national component, which stood in for the (leftist, Marxist) political convictions of Western neo-avant-garde artists. This Polish avant-gardism was a national development to which any progress-aspiring Polish composer might belong, and, as a group, they would come to be known in the early 1960s as a “Polish School” of composition. Martin Iddon, in his discussion of the “Darmstadt School,” has shown that this construct was generated by critics and often applied in retrospect, glossing over important differences in technical and aesthetic development between the composers in question.17 The Polish designation was similar, grouping composers of different generations and stylistic affiliations together (and excluding those, like Schäffer, who refused to bend to the construct). The existence of this school—and its recognition abroad, as well as at home—proved that Poland was no longer backward, no longer isolated from the cultural developments that were taking place all over the world. On the contrary, the Polish school was contributing actively to those developments. Responses to Schäffer’s plagiarism case demonstrated that, by 1963, the institutional weight of the Composers’ Union had moved behind the new definition of the Polish avant-garde. Union leaders, together with critics and representatives of other cultural institutions, had sanctioned avantgardism as a contemporary manifestation of a national tradition. T H E F I R S T P O L I SH AWA N G A R D A : P R I V I L E G I N G T H E N EW

As noted at the end of chapter 5, Bogusław Schäffer was rather hostile to questions in 1960 about whether there was a Polish avant-garde movement. Beyond his spe-

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cific hostility to the idea of a national movement, Schäffer had long been ambivalent about the use of the term avant-garde to describe any contemporary music after World War II.18 In an essay from 1958 entitled “The Musical Avant-Garde,” he had argued that this term was more appropriate in describing the work of the “first avant-garde,” who had worked earlier in the twentieth century to break with existing traditions and musical conventions. He proposed six names for this group: Stravinsky, Bartók, Schoenberg, Hindemith, Prokofiev, and Honegger.19 The variance in age, context, and style of these composers suggests that, already, Schäffer was trying to make a point about the uselessness of the designation, which he argued had only become more loosely defined over time. The most recent generation of avant-garde composers, born in the 1920s, was unified only by a shared commitment to “the renewal of musical material” and a thoroughgoing rejection of tradition. “The word avant-garde ceases to have a sense and a meaning,” he warned, “when the number of avant-garde musicians grows beyond today’s eight or ten [composers].”20 Again, the list that Schäffer provided is so varied (Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luigi Nono, Iannis Xenakis, Henri Pousseur, Jacques Wildberger, John Cage, and Bo Nilsson) that it is difficult to discern any real “sense and meaning” in it. In place of the word avant-garde (awangarda), Schäffer preferred the term new music, (nowa muzyka), and its related characteristics, “modernity” (nowoczesność) and “newness” (nowość). In a 1958 article about Stockhausen’s Klavierstück XI, Schäffer acknowledged that the German composer certainly represented a new “musical avant-garde,” but he used more specific language to signal his estimation of the composer’s contribution: Stockhausen had “broken away radically from existing conventions, even the newest ones,” and, in so doing, he had “surpassed all of his peers and even himself.”21 Stockhausen was on the forefront of the forefront: “He has pointed the representatives of today’s avant-garde toward new possibilities, and he has proposed new solutions to compositional problems.”22 As seen in chapter 5, these concepts of newness, of constant reinvention, and of possibilities were key to Schäffer’s own personal aesthetics, and they were all related to his forward-marching conception of time. Temporal concerns suffused his analysis of the Klavierstück XI. The piece’s modular structure captivated Schäffer; Stockhausen had arranged nineteen musical fragments on one large sheet, and the performer selected the order in which to perform the fragments. Schäffer reported with great interest Stockhausen’s suggestion that a concert should present several different performances of the composition, demonstrating for the audience its fundamental changeability. Despite the highly determined nature of the score itself, each performance represented a new instantiation of those sounds moving through time and space. Schäffer’s hostility to the notion of a Polish avant-garde stemmed from this same fixation on time and newness; he felt that young Polish composers were

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simply building on the innovations of others, and this did not qualify them as avant-garde artists in their own right. However, Schäffer was not the only young Polish critic working in the public sphere at this time, and his definitions were not the only ones that mattered. By the late 1950s, there was a strong influx of new voices who, like Schäffer, had completed degrees in musicology after the war; for instance, we have already encountered both Bohdan Pociej and Bohdan Pilarski, both of whom studied with Józef Chomiński and Zofia Lissa.23 Like Schäffer, these young critics were given a certain pride of place in the field of music criticism, accorded with a degree of special authority in relation to postwar contemporary music. The influx of their publications challenged Schäffer’s perceived monopoly. After the 1959 Warsaw Autumn festival, Bohdan Pociej wrote a review for Ruch Muzyczny titled “The Dawn of the Avant-Garde,” in which he employed Schäffer’s own criteria for avant-gardism to argue for the emergence of an avant-garde movement in Poland. In Pociej’s view, the new group of young Polish composers, including Henryk Mikołaj Górecki, Krzysztof Penderecki, and Witold Szalonek, had demonstrated not only their facility with techniques and aesthetic concerns associated with the West European avant-garde, but also their commitment to developing their own voices. Pociej pointed to Górecki as the “most contemporary” of the three, and he employed Schäfferian temporal language to describe the way that the composer felt “very powerfully the fevered, accelerated rhythm of the epoch, the pulsing of a great unrest— the ‘cosmic catastrophism’ of contemporaneity.”24 Pociej argued that Górecki manifested this fevered contemporaneity in his music by synthesizing two very different compositional ideas: post-Webernian pointillism, which spread itself out in all directions, and a unidirectional developmental drive, which generated horizontal momentum through successions of harmonic verticalities. As a result, his compositions of this period existed in an unsettled, disjointed time-space. Pociej noted that this strange temporal quality had distinguished Górecki’s music since his Webern-inspired cantata Epitafium (1958). That cantata had been programmed alongside Webern’s Das Augenlicht, op. 26 (1935) in the previous year’s Warsaw Autumn festival, and, at the time, Pociej had praised the composition for demonstrating its composer’s ability to take inspiration from a model and to do more with it: the pointillistic textures were more austere, the homophonic textures more distinctly faithful to the poetic text. Now, one year later, Pociej was highlighting the uniqueness of Górecki’s creative voice in the Symphony no. 1, “1959.” The critic was especially interested in Górecki’s verticalization of the horizontal, using twelve-tone rows to suffuse both dimensions in the first movement, “Invocation.” As evident in figure 19, Górecki generated tension and momentum by contrasting “maximally intensified” twelve-note string clusters with pointillistic action in the percussion.25 Pociej concluded his discussion of Górecki’s piece with a question that drew on Schäffer’s own language of possibilities: “In what direction will the composer’s evolution go next?” It was an exciting question, one that pointed to the future.

figure 19. Henryk Mikołaj Górecki, Symphony no. 1, “1959,” opening page. Copyright © 1961 Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, Kraków, Poland. Transferred 1998 to Chester Music Limited. U.S. Renewal Rights Assigned to Boosey and Hawkes, Inc.

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Pociej also devoted considerable attention to Krzysztof Penderecki, who was a brand-new fixture on the Polish music scene. The 1959 festival had featured Penderecki’s Strophes for soprano and mixed instrumental ensemble, and, while Pociej had compared Górecki’s work to Webern and to Nono, here he called on the example of Boulez. Earlier in the year, Penderecki had swept all three prizes in the Composers’ Union youth composition competition. The blind jury had been unable to discern the fact that a single individual had authored all three compositions. It has often been noted by biographers and critics that Penderecki took pains to disguise his hand when he submitted all three manuscripts to the competition jury, but an overview of the three scores suggests that their stylistic dissimilarity probably accomplished this bit of subterfuge for him. Psalms of David (1958), written for choir and mixed percussion ensemble, demonstrated an engagement with prewar stylistic and technical influences. Adrian Thomas has pointed out that the third psalm’s percussive rhythmic pulse and choral writing is derivative of Igor Stravinsky’s Les noces (although in its rather straightforward execution it perhaps more closely recalls Carl Orff ’s Carmina Burana, which was, of course, also heavily influenced by Les noces), while the second psalm’s melodic treatment of a twelvenote row points to Alban Berg.26 Emanations (1958), on the other hand, focused on one specific technical problem: the production of unconventional colors and textures with stringed instruments. Strophes, which received top honors at the union competition, signified that Penderecki had begun to move beyond his prewar models. The composition did evidence the post-Webernian pointillism that was the calling card of the nascent Polish avant-garde movement. However, critics were more excited about indicators that Penderecki was looking beyond Webern to Boulez. For instance, Pociej saw Strophes as an indication that Penderecki was, above all else, a lyricist who was interested in expanding the “sphere of coloristic nuances” by reaching outside “purely musical” considerations to incorporate poetic and theatrical impulses. The collection of ancient texts (taken from Menander, Sophocles, the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah, and Omar Khayyám) served a purpose that was “half-semantic.” Pociej suggested that Penderecki was interested in these texts simultaneously for their sonoristic qualities and for their expressive content, finding a balance between content and form—a balance that, in Pociej’s estimation, recalled the example not of Boulez, but of Konstanty Régamey.27 Penderecki’s play with time also caught the attention of critics. Henryk Schiller, in an overview of the three prize-winning compositions for Ruch Muzyczny, praised the young composer for his innovative use of a solid black line along the bottom of the score to indicate shifts between three different metronome markings (figure 20).28 In this way, he controlled the relative speed at which the music unfolded while avoiding the “backbreaking” metric shifts that many contempo-

arrangement Copyright © 2020 Deshon Music Inc. All Rights Administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, 424 Church Street, Suite 1200, Nashville, TN 37219. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard LLC.

figure 20. Krzysztof Penderecki, Strophes (Strofy) (1959), pages 10–11. Copyright © 1960 Deshon Music Inc. Copyright Renewed. This

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rary composers employed. Like Pociej, Schiller shored up the significance of Penderecki’s handling of color, texture, and meter by drawing comparisons directly to works such as Boulez’s Le marteau sans maître (1953–1955) and Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge (1955–1956).29 It was thus his perceived connection to the West that fueled discussions about Penderecki’s potential, but the discourse did not stop there. Both Pociej and Schiller took great pains to articulate Penderecki’s “unorthodox response” to his Western compositional colleagues. Originality was paramount to their critical framing. Pociej’s language, and that of other young critics at this time, resonated with Schäffer’s focus on idiosyncrasy. These composers might be united by “certain ‘universals’ of contemporary technique,” but they were each developing individual styles and those styles were constantly changing. “I am much more interested in artists who are ‘unfaithful’ to themselves,” Pociej declared. “We are living in an epoch in which faithfulness [to oneself] has ceased to be a virtue—worse, it has often become a synonym for artistic fossilization. An artist only believes in himself in the precise, actual moment of creation, in the present tense. The past is counted only as a sum of experiences. The rules are changing from artwork to artwork.”30 Unlike Schäffer, however, Pociej was willing to see the experiments of Polish composers as proof that they constituted their own avant-garde group. And the existence of that group, in turn, proved that Poland should no longer be subject to accusations of “imitation, dependence, or delay” (naśladownictwa, zależności czy opóźnień). Schäffer had objected to the notion of a Polish avantgarde, in part because he resisted the notion of an avant-garde group at all. Speaking of a “group” presupposed shared characteristics, and attaching the group to national identity rendered that presupposition even more urgent. Pociej crafted a response to this objection as well. “New Polish music is developing according to principles of impulse,” he proposed. “This is the ‘national characteristic’ of all our art: [its] high potential for invention, often uncontrolled.”31 The Polishness of this group lay, therefore, in the artists’ independence, in their lack of shared characteristics. By 1959, though, dissenting voices were arising, raising concerns about the direction that this Polish avant-garde seemed to be taking. Lisa Jakelski has demonstrated that Soviet visitors certainly felt that these Polish artists had gone too far in emulating the West, even as Western visitors often remarked on the distinctiveness of the Polish music performed at the festival.32 But critique also came from Polish voices, all of whom brought a variety of experiences, aesthetic criteria, and artistic tastes to their analysis. Outside a few extreme opinions, most of these critics were not refusing the legitimacy of these new artistic manifestations, but they were concerned with their heavy reliance upon a perceived Western European model. A year earlier, in 1958, Zygmunt Mycielski had been hopeful that the activity of a new youth generation in Poland might signify an important new national

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development, breaking away from the neoclassical or neoromantic traditionalism of most explicitly “national” music. He had blithely dismissed any suggestion that the experimenters’ music was less valuable because it did not resonate with the taste of the broader audience or because it incorporated external influences. Mycielski had argued that there were different audiences in Poland, and that they needed different things; this music was an expression of “today’s intellectual (umysłowych) tendencies.”33 After the 1959 festival, Mycielski and some of his middle-generation colleagues were beginning to feel less certain about this avant-garde turn. Stefan Kisielewski declared that avant-gardism was in crisis, and he demanded a complete reevaluation. He agreed that the young avant-garde composers (mentioning Boulez and Penderecki in the same breath) were moving forward and rejecting the past, and that they were right to do so; he clarified that he was not suggesting that composers should pick up the older, prewar traditions and continue with them. However, Kisielewski argued, while he might affirm their fundamental instinct to move forward, he did not always believe they were moving in the right direction: “It might be possible to put it thus: I agree with the avant-garde on [their] ‘no,’ but rarely, or not always, do I agree with them on [their] ‘yes.’ ”34 Their compositions were boring, Kisielewski complained; listening to them “filled me . . . with doubts and caused me to wonder if these are, generally speaking, compositions, or [are they] only technical-stylistic experiments?”35 Mycielski’s assessment was more hostile than Kisielewski’s, as he likened the spread of Western avant-gardism to the spread of the Spanish influenza in 1918. These avant-garde composers were not, in his estimation, engaging in a creative act; they were generating strings of effects, colors, atomized tones: “This is a [musical] world, which I do not want to call a mechanical world, but it is certainly a world in which it is possible to amuse oneself unto infinity. It is a world of play, like a world of chess, crossword puzzles, business machines, and, I dare say, also of computers.”36 These compositions were thought experiments; they were intellectually interesting on the surface, but they were not rich with artistic expression. Worse, in Mycielski’s view, a commitment to experiment had simply become a posture, a reified form of tradition. The rhetoric of iconoclasm was less convincing, after all, when the young generation traveled in a pack. They might have rejected the past, but they had not escaped the gravitational pull of convention. It was not only the older critics who were criticizing the failure of avant-garde music to connect to its audience in a meaningful way. Contra Schäffer’s notion of the artwork as “par excellence, a technical entity,” there were also younger writers who believed that artists should not divorce technique from expression—form from content.37 Such a division initiated an ever-deepening fissure between artists and their audiences, and the process of alienation threatened to halt the progress of art and of society as a whole. Ludwik Erhardt, who was swiftly becoming a

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major voice in the contemporary music scene, contributed an aphoristic essay to Ruch Muzyczny in 1958, conjuring a dystopian vision of an avant-garde future: Life is a function of numbers; we have become the property of learned specialists, on whom our physical existence depends. [These] specialists are reaching toward the world of human emotions—toward the modest remainder of individual humanity— [and they are] offering in exchange the cold world of the intellect and art [conceived on a high plane] of consciousness. A group of initiates maintains control over color and form, which they use [to create art] for a circle of adepts. Music has also surrendered to them. The specialist-musicians present to their specialist-listeners arrangements that have been conceived with chilly caution—arrangements of proportions, of mutual interrelations and connections, over which rule the all-powerful numbers, consequences, and logic. The external form [of the music] draws its significance from the purity of its internal construction. The price of initiation is, however, too high for everyone to be able to pay it. Today, man is too poor in the values that are demanded of him by art. The negotiations continue. And the results of [these negotiations] will determine whether sad silence and quiet will reign over the earth.38

Erhardt envisioned an ever-narrowing group of elite artists and a broader disenfranchised audience, languishing without access to art. The lack of vital interaction between these two key groups would finally spin the avant-garde drive for progress out to its logical conclusion: a silent world. The collective heft of these critiques, which all centered around a failure of communication, suggested that an aesthetic redefinition of avant-gardism might be imminent. In fact, even in Bohdan Pociej’s “The Dawn of the Avant-Garde,” there were already hints of a shift in perspective. In more than one case, Pociej emphasized the expressivity of the Polish avant-garde composers: their sensitivity to the affective shades of tone and instrument color (Penderecki) and their appreciation for the sensory charge arising from huge masses of sound (Górecki). These qualities signaled a fundamental concern for the perceptual and emotional experience of the audience—and they were qualities that Pociej specifically associated with a national style. Even more telling was Pociej’s shift at the end of the article to include more names within the nascent avant-garde movement than the few young composers he had discussed at the beginning. Alongside Górecki, Penderecki, and Szalonek, Pociej pointed to a number of older artists, including Lutosławski, Kazimierz Serocki, and, most notably, Bolesław Szabelski, who was Górecki’s composition professor.39 Pociej had argued that the avant-garde artists were united by their disunity, by their extreme independence, but his own concluding observations belied his observation, opening up a space to imagine an avant-garde group with a shared program that had “matured on our soil.” The specific qualities of that shared program would be hammered out over the course of the next year.

Awangarda    167 T H E SE C O N D P O L I SH AWA N G A R D A : A M A N I F E S TAT IO N O F P O L I SH NAT IO NA L T R A D I T IO N

There was certainly no denying the excitement that the music of the young Polish avant-garde had already generated in the Polish music community, injecting a dose of vitality and new ideas into the available pool of shared technical and stylistic influences. For the first time since the end of World War II, there was a real hope that Polish composers were neither lagging nor lacking in their development, but that they might have finally “caught up” with the contemporary moment. Nothing suggested this more than the international attention that the Polish avantgardists had already begun to attract. For example, Penderecki’s Strophes received a Parisian performance in early 1960, and later that year he premiered his Anaklasis at the Donaueschingen Festival. The promise of Polish composers mixing freely with their international colleagues, particularly at these stomping grounds of youth-based avant-garde culture, such as Donaueschingen, Darmstadt, and the various centers of electronic music, was a powerful one both for musicians and for cultural and political authorities, who were only too happy to see Poland build an international reputation for its progressive culture. With increased prestige came an increased urgency in the matter of defining what Pociej called “the desires, directions, and borders of innovation” in Polish music.40 The drive to identify and promote a national school of composition was deeply rooted in the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Polish musical discourse, but it had certainly gained intensity in the interwar and postwar decades. The articulation of a “Polish School” had always been closely bound up with the modernist aspirations of the middle, post-Szymanowski generation; as a concept, it was a signifier of progress and of confidence both within the nation and internationally. As early as 1955, Mycielski had argued in his keynote speech to the Composers’ Union that a Polish school of composition had arisen in the first postwar decade, but he had been vague about the characteristics or mission of that school. In fact, beyond pointing to a general “liveliness” in Polish postwar music, he was really much more interested in identifying the conditions of backwardness and lack that had hampered composers in their development to that point.41 It is notable, then, to see Mycielski in 1959 proclaiming the presence of an internationally renowned Polish school of composers. Writing for Przegląd Kulturalny, he crowed about Polish composers’ strong showing at that year’s UNESCO-hosted International Rostrum of Composers competition (Tadeusz Baird and Witold Lutosławski had jointly won the first prize for their Four Essays for Orchestra and Funeral Music respectively). Instead of defining the group by what it was not, or by what it lacked, Mycielski reported that the jury had praised the Polish contingent for their “humanistic [musical] language.” These composers had embraced contemporary technical developments, signifying their knowledge of dodecaphony

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and Webernian pointillism, while simultaneously demonstrating their commitment to using these techniques in service of expressive content.42 By 1960, it was clear that Mycielski’s description of the Polish school was insufficient, because it did not account for the presence of the new avant-garde group. In response to the first flurry of critical discourse about avant-gardism, with its privileging of newness, a definition of Polishness in contemporary composition could not be predicated on content alone; it also demanded a robust technical dimension. Therefore, during this period, critics began to collapse together the affective, tradition-facing qualities of Mycielski’s Polish school with the futurefacing experimentation associated with the young avant-garde to call into existence a Polish avant-garde school. They worked to identify “shared features” (wspólne cechy), or identifiable style markers, with which composers from other nations would have to contend.43 Rather than seeking legitimacy through comparison to Western European models, then, many Polish critics and composers were ready to present the Polish avant-garde as a model in its own right, grounding them within a historicized tradition of the current moment. At this early stage, in 1960 and 1961, there was still considerable variability in the language that critics used to describe the Polish composers’ shared features, but there were also certain observations that arose with increasing frequency. Chief among these was the assertion that Polish composers were moving away from systems of formal organization predicated on the operations of functional harmony or even the operations of post-tonal systems that supplied cotemporary analogs to those earlier harmonic structures. Polish composers, critics insisted, were interested in exploring alternate parameters for generating movement and resolution in their music, and most often these alternatives included the use of instrumental color and texture as a means for structuring musical time and space. For instance, young musicologist-critic Tadeusz Zieliński observed that Polish composers shared an interest in the nature of sound itself. They wanted to construct a “sonic arabesque” (dźwiękowa arabeska), finding new ways to exploit the “functioning of sound in time and ‘space.’ ”44 Bohdan Pociej, in his review of the 1960 Warsaw Autumn festival, identified the same two elements—coloristic and structural-spatial—as the foundation of the “new sonoristic inventions” (nowe odkrycia sonorystyczne) in Polish music.45 The first, the “creation of new values of sound ‘in and of itself,’ ” represented a concern with the internal reality of sound on a microcosmic level of the musical work. The second, the exploration of “new organizations of sonic space,” represented an attempt to deal with the external and structural properties of sound, which functioned at the macrocosmic level.46 The word sonoristic here—and, really, all of the observations that Pociej and Zieliński were making about contemporary Polish music—recalled musicologist Józef Chomiński’s 1956 article, “On the Problems of Compositional Technique in the Twentieth Century,” discussed in chapter 5. This resonance was certainly not

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coincidental, as Chomiński (together with Zofia Lissa) had been one of the major voices in establishing musicology studies in postwar Warsaw, and, as indicated earlier, many of these young critics had earned master’s degrees from the Institute of Musicology at the University of Warsaw. In the years since he had published that influential article, Chomiński had continued to develop his phenomenologically based theory of sound and form in contemporary music. Even though he had not yet fully worked out his theory of sonoristics as a lens for analyzing contemporary music (that would come in 1961, and he would continue to develop his critical language throughout the 1960s and 1970s), a 1957 article demonstrated that he was already thinking about the implications of a music-theoretical approach that focused less on pitch and harmony, and more on sound itself.47 In this article for Muzyka, Chomiński argued that new pedagogical tools were needed for inculcating musical literacy in students. Current approaches focused on the functional harmonic relationships between vertical and horizontal planes in compositional practice. This myopic focus on harmonic implications, however, meant that students were not sensitive to the sonic implications of vertical sonorities, and the horizontal movement generated through changes in those sonic qualities. He challenged his colleagues to call students’ attention to parameters such as articulations, dynamics, agogics, register, and density, because this would help them to understand the power of timbre and texture in generating musical structure. Significantly, Chomiński never used the word Polish in this article and neither did he name a Polish composer in discussing the sonoristic values of twentiethcentury music. He did not seem to be thinking in terms of a national school of composition here, and he was not conceiving of his theory as a prescriptive one, projecting a path for contemporary Polish composers. Rather, he meant to offer a descriptive analytical model, capable of explaining the techniques that composers were using to break away from tired conventions of melody, harmony, and form. That did not mean, though, that other scholars and critics were not thinking about Chomiński’s ideas in relation to Polish musical tradition. Chomiński himself might have set a precedent for this connection in a lengthy 1956 article about Szymanowski and musical impressionism.48 In that piece, the musicologist had emphasized the composer’s use of sound—density, volume, color—to generate dynamism in his compositions, even when he adhered to traditional forms grounded in German and Russian antecedents. Two of Chomiński’s students followed suit, with articles about sonoristic values in the work of Szymanowski and Chopin, respectively.49 None of these essays argued that these composers’ sensitivity to sound was peculiarly Polish, but it is notable that they turned to these important composers from Poland’s musical past for their analyses. It was the younger music critics—Bohdan Pociej, Bohdan Pilarski, Tadeusz Zieliński, and others—who made the explicit connection between sonoristic qualities and Polish musical tradition in their discussion of Polish avant-garde

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composers, starting in 1960 and stretching forward throughout the decade. They applied Chomiński’s critical language to the compositions that they were hearing, and, instead of using that language to link Górecki and Penderecki outward to international developments in contemporary music, they used the terminology reflexively, as a descriptor that bound Polish composers inward, to the nation (and to one another). These composers’ exploration of the structural and expressive potential of texture, timbre, and time became their most salient “shared feature,” and “sonorism” quickly became synonymous with the avant-garde instantiation of a Polish school of composition. Chomiński had written mostly about the technical-structural power of sonoristic values, but this group of music critics returned again and again to the question of expressive power. The first condition was one that Bogusław Schäffer had found so suggestive in his own work, and it was not incompatible with his vision for avant-gardism. Schäffer’s compositions, such as Monosonata, had certainly experimented with sound masses, dynamics, and articulations as a means of generating musical movement through time. The notion that such sound experiments also bore affective resonance was, however, anathema to Schäffer and to his entire aesthetics of musical progress. Instead, the linkage of sound and affect bore a closer affinity to the Witkacian, Régameyan aesthetics discussed in chapter 4; this was the same aesthetic discourse that had elevated Lutosławski to genius status just a few years earlier. If musical progress arose out of the expression of metaphysical content through innovative forms—an expression that would excite an affective response in its audience when they recognized familiar content in an unfamiliar formal guise— then progress also depended on the community-building, relational force of musical activity. Critics argued that these composers were constituting the nation in the same moment that they were urging the nation forward. The result was a uniquely Polish avant-garde movement that was invested in extending the legacies of Polish cultural tradition. In other words, this was an avant-garde movement that would finally realize the “progressive” middle generation’s postwar vision for modernity, discussed in chapters 1 and 2. Those intellectuals and composers had believed that Poland would ameliorate its cultural lag through the creative efforts of a newly revitalized, socially and historically conscious contemporary cultural elite, and, in 1960 it seemed (to some observers, at least) that this was finally happening. Reception of both Penderecki’s and Górecki’s compositions at the 1960 Warsaw Autumn demonstrated the shift to this new paradigm of avant-gardism. Rather than reading these works as quixotic experiments, likely to be succeeded by completely different creative explorations in the next year, critics were beginning to read the output of these composers as mature statements, representative of something fundamental in their creative voices. Lisa Jakelski has rightly argued that

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Górecki’s composition at the festival, Scontri for large mixed instrumental ensemble, was something of a lightning rod, attracting the bulk of negative attention from those who did not support the avant-garde.50 Detractors found the composition, whose twenty-eight sections are characterized by the titular “collisions” between contrasting textures and instrumental forces, to be ugly and alienating. It epitomized everything that, for more conservative critics, had become a symbol of the dangerous “new.” In the reviews produced by the cadre of pro-avant-garde critics, by contrast, Scontri appeared as proof of Górecki’s compositional development and his independence from Western models. Pociej’s review of Scontri announced his evolutionary focus from its very first sentence: “The maturation process for composers is proceeding at a clearly accelerated tempo.”51 No one could have guessed, he argued, that the young composer of Epitafium would, in just two years’ time, inhabit such an established position in Poland and, perhaps more importantly, in the circles of the Western avant-garde. In previous reviews of Górecki’s works at the 1958 and 1959 Warsaw Autumn festivals, Pociej had predicated his justification for Górecki’s significance on the composer’s mastery of post-Webernian pointillism and serialism. In his review of Scontri, Pociej constructed a different narrative, employing terms that were positively Chomińskian: “At the foundations of this work lies the tendency that probably characterizes Górecki’s entire oeuvre: a desire to find new organizational principles [related to] ‘time and space’ in a musical work. Górecki’s oeuvre is thus, in this sense, a continuous search—an experiment—and the subsequent stages of this quest are realized in works that are both mature and crystallized in their artistic operation.”52 Górecki was still employing serial procedures in Scontri, but Pociej explained that this was no longer the most important element of the work. Rather, Górecki was more interested in the “Mersmann-esque” (mersmannowskie) formal energies projected by masses of sound as they moved in space. These energies arose not out of pitch organization, but out of Górecki’s refined manipulation of the “coloristic-contemplative” qualities of each sound mass. Whereas music grounded in functional harmony might rely on the tension between sonorities/chords and motives/themes in order to create movement, Pociej argued that Górecki was exploiting the tension between bands of sound (vertically organized, simultaneously sounding sonorities) and complexes of sound (diffuse masses of sound that might expand outward on both the vertical and horizontal planes).53 In figure 21, we can see the interplay of these two different sonic axes: here, in the sixth subsection, Górecki sets up interplay between vertically oriented “bands” in the upper two instrument groups, while the lower two groups explore horizontal space. Górecki’s sound mass-collisions enacted precisely the revision of Hans Mersmann’s theory of energetics that Jozef Chomiński had called for in 1956, renewing the relevance of that theory in contemporary practice.

Transferred 1998 to Chester Music Limited. U.S. Renewal Rights Assigned to Boosey and Hawkes, Inc.

figure 21. Henryk Mikołaj Górecki, Scontri (1960), Section 6. Copyright © 1960 Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, Kraków, Poland.

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With regard to Penderecki, the sense of settling into a clear and identifiable compositional identity was maybe even more marked, because his chameleonic shifts in style had previously been one of his most defining characteristics. When critic Henryk Schiller reviewed the premiere of Dimensions of Time and Silence (Wymiary czasu i ciszy) at the 1960 Warsaw Autumn, he introduced a new narrative of the young composer’s development, which he divided into two periods. From 1955 to 1958, the young composer’s experiments with both traditional and avant-garde musical ideas had resulted in a wide variety of compositions that each exhibited different style characteristics. According to Schiller, Penderecki’s early changeability was proof not of his avant-gardism, but of his youth. The second period, by contrast, was “striking in its uniformity and consistency, [in its] density, and moreover [in] his own brand of evolutionism, which demands [that he] constantly rethink [his] earlier achievements and extract new conclusions from them.”54 Schiller was eager to demonstrate the consistency of Penderecki’s more recent compositional development, drawing a straight line between Strophes from 1959 and Dimensions of Time and Silence. For instance, while Strophes had allowed Penderecki to exploit the different instrumental colors available within a limited chamber ensemble, Dimensions accomplished a similar feat with the “whole instrumentarium,” demonstrating the composer’s increased mastery and imagination. In 1959, Schiller had been particularly taken with Penderecki’s employment of text fragments in different languages, using them for their sonic value. One year later, the critic noted Penderecki’s “progression of innovation” from this earlier experiment. While the texts in Strophes had been employed in part for their sonic, rather than semantic, value, here Penderecki moved further away from languageas-meaning. He employed the same twelve-syllable, five-line Latin “magic square” whose permutability and esoteric resonances had fascinated Webern in the 1930s.55 S A T O R A R E P O T E N E T O P E R A R O T A S

Finally, in his review of Dimensions, Schiller compared the two compositions’ formal orientation toward time. In Strophes, the solid line at the bottom of the score, denoting relative metronomic speed, had signified Penderecki’s engagement with postwar avant-garde techniques for generating formal momentum. It had also signaled his interest in challenging performers’ and conductors’ relationship

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figure 22. Krzysztof Penderecki, Dimensions of Time and Silence (Wymiary czasu i ciszy) (1960/61), page 7. Copyright © 1962 Schott Music GmbH & Co. KG, Mainz, Germany. Copyright © renewed. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission of European American Music Distributors Company, sole U.S. and Canadian Agent for Schott Music GmbH & Co. KG, Mainz, Germany.

to time in the context of performance. In Dimensions, the composer had taken this second interest to a whole new level. Dispensing with the solid line oriented to metronome markings, instead Penderecki used one solid time line that indicated the duration (in seconds) of each individual musical “sound complex.” In tension with this high degree of specificity was the progression of events within the sound complexes themselves, within which individual sounds or sonic effects only received approximate, relational indications. In figure 22, the subsections marked 16 and 17 are intended to stretch for fifteen and thirty seconds, respectively. However, within subsection 16, the upper strings are directed to execute rapid tremolos between the bridge and the tailpiece while the lower strings produce percussive sul tasto effects at a rate and pitch level that can only be determined in performance; the pitches and durations will necessarily be governed by a certain degree of indeterminacy. Subsection 17 exhibits a different notation, instructing middle strings to bend specific pitches with vibrato of varying speeds. Thus, while Penderecki’s provision of a specific duration for each subsection exerts the will of the composer, the composition of the sound complexes themselves calls the constructed nature of that will into question and fore-

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grounds the unpredictable nature of performance. Schiller took note of the introduction of aleatorism into Penderecki’s music and proclaimed its similarity to a new avant-garde model, that of John Cage.56 The critic did not stop there, relying on a connection with the Western avant-garde to establish Penderecki’s significance. Instead, he firmly asserted the composer’s own innovation in the work. This was a level of innovation that indicated not only Penderecki’s promise, but rather his mastery of the craft and, more importantly, his ability to use compositional technique to create “new emotional values.”57 In the view of many Polish critics, this explicit engagement with emotion separated Penderecki from Cage’s example. Tadeusz Zieliński, for example, emphasized the affective impact of Penderecki’s Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima (1960). Threnody had won third prize at the 1960 Fitelberg competition, just one year after Schäffer won with Monosonata, and there were some interesting similarities between the two works; both composers were experimenting, just as Górecki was doing in Scontri, with the potential of textural and timbral contrasts to articulate musical form. The A sections of Threnody’s ABA′ form moved away from the serial procedures that were still operative in both Monosonata and Scontri. Instead, the composer relied on texture and timbre to generate contrasts on local and large-scale formal levels.58 As music theorist Danuta Mirka has argued, this compositional approach was the foundational premise of “sonorism” as it was realized in the work of Penderecki and others.59 In this context, we might define sonorism as a shared determination among many of these young avant-garde Polish composers in the early 1960s to explore the principles of Chomiński’s theory of sonoristics in their compositional practice—or, perhaps more accurately, as a shared commitment among Polish music critics to articulate an aesthetic and technical program that united the Polish avant-garde composers. Zieliński was interested in explaining the theoretical implications of Penderecki’s experiments, but he paused in his analysis to note, breathlessly: “In examining the score, one might wonder at Penderecki’s coloristic ingenuity. But it is really only possible to judge the piece after hearing it, [at which point] we come to the surprising realization: all of these [sound] effects turn out to be a pretext for the creation of a deep, dramatic, and even harrowing composition!”60 Zieliński was more than ready to acknowledge what audiences ever since have done: that listening to Penderecki’s Threnody was an emotional experience. He noted that this dramatic turn was “a shock,” in comparison with the composer’s earlier, more abstract work, but he was enthusiastic about its implications. “[Threnody] is (in my opinion) the best of Penderecki’s compositions; it is simultaneously the most innovative work [that has been produced] on our soil and the most expressive. . . . In combining these two qualities, the artist deserves special, fervent recognition.”61 It was this synthesis of technical innovation and expressivity that was swiftly becoming the most recognizable “shared feature” of the Polish avant-garde. Critics held

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this synthesis up as proof that Polish composers had not merely caught up with the West, but that they had begun to contribute something unique to the international contemporary music community. The successful reception of Dimensions of Time and Silence just a few months later at the 1961 ISCM festival in Vienna could only have underscored this conviction.62 C OM P E T I N G NA R R AT I V E S : W HO I S I N A N D W HO I S O U T ?

In locating Polish avant-gardism at the intersection of newness and expression, and by using Chomiński’s analytical language to characterize the energetic soundscape of that intersection, these critic-advocates pointedly omitted one of Schäffer’s most conspicuous criteria for participation in an avant-garde movement: youth. Even though most of the composers they were discussing were, in fact, young, the emergent discourse about their maturity and evolutionary development opened up a space for situating the Polish avant-garde within new historical narratives. Time within these narratives did not always move, as Schäffer had conceived it, in a straight line. Instead, relative newness might be measured by different criteria, such as a composer’s ability to communicate meaningfully with an audience by implicating them within a shared sonic experience—one that, in Hal Foster’s terms discussed above, engaged both the “temporal, diachronic” and “spatial, synchronic” axes of cultural production. Just as Chomiński and his students were extending their study of sonoristic values into the Polish past, applying contemporary analytical terms to the music of Chopin and Szymanowski, the pro-avant-garde critics were also willing to read the past through a contemporary lens and, in turn, to read contemporary music as a fulfillment of past potential. Building this narrative of tradition for the avant-garde had a dual effect: it validated the work of younger composers while also allowing composers from older generations to conceive of themselves flexibly as predecessors and even as participants within the movement. Tadeusz Zieliński, who wrote so enthusiastically about Penderecki’s Threnody, worked to articulate exactly this kind of tradition-based narrative in his January 1961 Ruch Muzyczny article, “The New Situation in Polish Contemporary Music.” He opened with an acknowledgment that Polish music had recently experienced an “epochal breakthrough” (potężny przełom) unlike any that it had seen since the appearance of the “Young Poland” movement at the beginning of the twentieth century. This new, post–World War II breakthrough had established a “new image of [Polish music]” in Europe, allowing Polish composers to assume a newly authoritative role in international contemporary music circles.63 In order to understand this recent cultural shift, Zieliński argued that his readers would need to think back to the period stretching from the 1920s through the 1950s, for in the past they would find the roots of their current cultural flowering.

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Zieliński looked to Szymanowski as the true foundation of the postwar avantgarde movement. Like these younger composers, he argued, Szymanowski had come of age in a period dominated by concerns about Polish backwardness, and he had been driven forward by his ambition to absorb as many contemporary European ideas as possible, in order to “lead Polish music out of the conventions of the nineteenth century and to bring it up to the level of the achievements of European contemporary art.”64 The generation after Szymanowski had not, in Zieliński’s view, realized the potential generated through his efforts; instead of striving for innovation, they had become mired within a backward-facing neoclassical style. Without the constant drive forward, Polish composers had begun to lag even before the interruptions of the war. Then, after the war, Stalinist political interventions had halted any semblance of progress, fossilizing Polish cultural lag as cultural lack. It was in the electric atmosphere of the Thaw years, Zieliński argued, that composers finally began to pick up Szymanowski’s legacy of innovation after a long pause. In so doing, they were breaking down the walls that had isolated Poland for so long, and they were becoming international leaders in their own right. Although Zieliński framed the initial “breakthrough” group as a collection of mostly postwar-generation composers, he argued that many representatives of the older generations had been awakened through the efforts of their younger colleagues. This is an interesting point, because the older, “pre-breakthrough” artists named here (Szabelski, Lutosławski, Baird, Serocki, Bacewicz) were cast as the inheritors of the younger composers’ new world. Inspired in some cases by the work of their own students, these composers were reversing the expected directionality of creative lineage. In passing over the transitional years of the Thaw in his historical narrative, Zieliński ignored the earlier efforts of these middle-generation composers to rebuild Polish culture and art in the 1940s and 1950s. He skipped them entirely, presenting the postwar generation as the direct inheritors of Szymanowski’s line. In Zieliński’s estimation, the middle generation’s legitimation of the emergent avant-garde movement further cemented the status of that movement as a true manifestation of Polish cultural tradition. If composers such as Lutosławski (whose authority and genius had already been firmly established) were ready to align themselves with the “side of the revolution, sympathizing with the ‘rebels,’ ” then this meant that the revolution represented an acceptable (or even the acceptable) aesthetic path. Avant-gardism had become synonymous with Polish contemporary music as a whole, and it was now necessary, Zieliński warned any remaining detractors, to recognize this shift as “a completed, irreversible fact.”65 Despite the determination behind Zieliński’s statement, there were composers and critics who were unwilling to accept the discursive collapsing between Polishness and avant-gardism that was happening all around them. Zieliński’s dismissal

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of the middle generation, who had attempted to realize a specific version of Polish cultural modernity by establishing connections to international modernist movements in the interwar period, cut deeply. Even if the second definition of Polish avant-gardism was not limited based on age/generation, it certainly was limited based on techniques and musical languages. Not all Polish composers were enthusiastic about jettisoning their engagement with traditional harmonies and forms for sonoristic experiments in timbre and texture, and it must have been hard for many readers to digest Zieliński’s erasure of the music written in the first fifteen years after the war. According to such an argument, even pieces such as Lutosławski’s Concerto for Orchestra “produced no revelations on any grounds, and they turned rather to the past than to the future, toward the old achievements of the masters born in the nineteenth century.”66 This judgement hinged on questions of technique and form, and it failed to recognize the fundamental debt that the aesthetics of this new avant-garde group, with its tropes of expressivity, communication, and even genius, owed to discourses stretching back to the 1930s and 1940s. The sonic difference of this new music notwithstanding, the terms of its progressiveness grew directly out of the discourses traced in the previous chapters of this book. The increasing insistence with which avant-garde technical experiments were being heard and interpreted as a signal of Polish cultural progress left many members of the middle generation in a difficult position. If they challenged this emergent avant-gardism, did that automatically locate them within the arriere-garde? Was this an all-or-nothing proposition? Nowhere were the stakes of these questions felt so clearly as at the 1960 Composers’ Union Congress.67 The tensions at the congress, held in December, arose as a result of many months of debate in the press, and also in response to the ever-increasing renown enjoyed by the union’s youngest members, whose compositions had dominated that year’s Warsaw Autumn festival. The congress therefore provided a space for composers across the whole spectrum of Polish musical life to air their concerns. Opponents and supporters of the avant-garde alike were determined to influence the union’s official response to the movement, which would have institutional implications for funding, programming, and promotion. Composers on either side of the issue advocated for their own interests, and, to do so, they invoked the particular definition of avant-gardism that would be most effective in staking their respective claims. This meant, of course, that they were using the term avant-garde to mean very different things. One faction comprised older and middle-generation composers who had invested a great deal of creative energy in generating traditional markers of cultural prestige: opera, symphony, ballet. It was not a coincidence that this group included composers from the interwar “conservatives” group, as well as composers who had embraced socialist realism in the early 1950s, in part because its monumental, spectacular (nineteenth-century) aesthetics overlapped with their own goals for elevat-

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ing Polish institutions and audiences to the level of other European cultural centers. Representatives of this group used the term avant-garde as invective. For them, Polish avant-gardism was simply a cheap copy of a Western European (and especially West German) model and, as such, it had nothing to do with Polish cultural tradition. Tadeusz Szeligowski opened the congress with this logic, suggesting that Polish composers who wanted to emulate the West had fallen sway to a “cult of idols,” which exposed them to dangerous German influences.68 “In the psyche of [the German] nation lies discrimination, [ranging] from artistic to racial,” he warned, drawing on recent wartime trauma to support his argument. “We have learned this the hard way. I don’t know if my colleagues who speak about the West understand the danger lurking here. Their influence has never done us any good.”69 A second major claim that this group raised against the Polish avant-garde composers was that their music represented a breach of the all-important cultural outreach mandate discussed in chapter 3. They argued, pointing to Schäfferian rhetoric, that avant-gardism privileged innovation over communication, and that these young artists were only interested in serving their own creative interests. With their inward focus, they would fail to lift the level of Polish culture as a whole. In deciding whether union resources should be thrown behind this avant-garde movement, then, Piotr Perkowski asked the assembled composers to consider: What will our musical art be? What function will it fill in the world and in the nation? By what path will it pursue [its] goal? It seems to me that if I were to ask each of you in turn, “what, brother, would you prefer: to compose for yourself, for your friends, or for your nation,” you would each reply that you wanted to compose in order to please the nation. In practice, though, [the results] tend to be varied. We often forget about the role that is, in a certain sense, a service to the nation that produced us.70

By implication, Perkowski here framed avant-gardism as a fundamentally unnational or anti-national artistic development. He urged his colleagues to remember that art should not only appeal to artists or to a small group of expert initiates; it should also serve a practical and social function for the nation that had nurtured them. Among the pro-avant-garde group at the congress there were representatives from both the middle and younger postwar generations. Some of these voices were not, themselves, closely associated with the avant-garde group, and others, like Józef Patkowski, the head of the Polish Radio Experimental Studio, were more personally implicated. Patkowski challenged the notion that the new music gatherings in Germany were national indoctrination centers. Lutosławski was even more specific in his response to Szeligowski: Darmstadt was “a [cultural] center, at which are gathered together all of the newest [musical] directions and developments from a large portion of the world. If we are speaking about the Darmstadt summer courses, then this is not Germany.”71 From this point of view, the avant-garde music

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culture situated in Darmstadt was not national in orientation, but international. Therefore, Poles who visited would not be endangering their Polishness. Rather, they would be representing Poland in an international (or supranational) contemporary music culture. Perhaps contradictorily, avant-gardism defenders framed the Polish avant-garde in different terms than they had the Darmstadt-based coterie. Drawing on the newly emerging second definition discussed above, advocates argued that, after an initial (and understandable) burst of infatuation with Western models, the Polish avant-garde artists had turned their attention to their national audience. Lutosławski, for example, proclaimed that “the psyche of the young Polish composers has allowed them . . . to shake off any implication of imitation or derivativeness. Really, they have been superbly successful in producing their own [work] and relying on themselves; [this is music] specifically connected not only to their individual nature, but also to their Polish temperament.”72 Tadeusz Marek was even more enthusiastic, arguing that the native avant-garde movement could even be understood to function as a “Polish School”: “Among the older and middle generations, there arose in the difficult years 1950–1956 a Polish school of composition, which has been discussed time and time again. We did not only proclaim [this school’s] existence here [in Poland]; foreign observers also hailed its appearance. It seems to me that, within a segment of the young generation—the segment characterized by more experimental, avant-garde endeavors—a Polish school has arisen that is, in a certain sense, a continuation of these [earlier] ambitious traditions of the Polish school in contemporary music.”73 Notable here is Marek’s insistence that the Polish avant-garde represented a logical extension of middle-generation composers’ efforts in rebuilding Polish music culture after the war, despite the “difficult” political conditions in which that rebuilding was taking place. The fact that Penderecki and Górecki were engaging with postwar musical developments, while middlegeneration composers were still mostly oriented toward earlier styles and aesthetics, did not signify the two groups’ essential difference. Rather, all these composers were bound together by their participation in a shared tradition and especially by their commitment to ushering that tradition into the future. The incompatible definitions of avant-gardism in play at the 1960 Composers’ Union Congress rendered the debates unproductive. Perkowski exclaimed at one point, frustrated, that he felt like he now understood the biblical story of the Tower of Babel: “In many [of these] issues, we are not able to understand one another, even though we are speaking the same language.”74 Beyond this fundamental misunderstanding, which set participants at cross-purposes, the discourse at the congress was immediately wrenched up to a powerful emotional level by the speakers’ repeated recourse to arguments (and scare tactics) grounded in the discourse of backwardness. Both sides used threats of a disastrous return to a previous, traumatic point in Polish cultural history to bolster their cases for or against avant-

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gardism. The avant-garde supporters had a convenient referent in the Łagów Composers’ Union Congress from 1949. Numerous speakers warned of a return to Łagów. The pursuit of progress, and the rejection of previous backwardness, was the all-important goal. In the end, the supporters’ referent was the stronger one because it was based on a lived experience from the recent past. Although composers like Perkowski and Szeligowski protested that they would be disenfranchised if these avant-garde experiments continued to attract the bulk of official institutional support, their claims of professional discrimination were incapable of outshouting the supporters’ potent equation of avant-gardism with progress. Any attempt to cool Polish composers’ enthusiasm for avant-gardism, even through unofficial censorship mechanisms (the diversion of institutional funds, the removal of critical support, or the enactment of limitations on travel or performance opportunities), would represent a return to the backward past. And the fear of such a return was the most powerful motivator of all, allowing supporters to silence their opponents and to solidify the official endorsement of the union for the legitimacy of Polish avant-garde as a contemporary extension of a forwardmarching Polish musical tradition.75 There were some indications that the composers at the center of the avantgarde movement were also ready to frame themselves with the same language Witold Lutosławski and Tadeusz Marek had used at the 1960 congress, and to define Polish avant-gardism within a narrative of development and growth. For example, in a 1962 interview for Ruch Muzyczny, Górecki spoke of the gradual refinement of his personal style. When asked to explain the organization of his newest composition, Elementi, Górecki pointed out that this work represented a new direction for him. Pitch, he argued, was only a tiny part of the equation, whereas he now felt that the most fundamental elements in composition were “agogics—including all phenomena related to time, dynamics—regulating tensions and their relief, and color—which I understand both as the change in tones’ pitch and also their complexity.”76 Górecki’s comments, which resonate with Józef Chomiński’s theory of sonoristics, suggest not only that he was moving forward, but also that he was attempting to establish a foundation for his future work. This was not the pose of a reactive avant-gardist who was too wrapped up in his own experiments to think about the significance of his art for the world and for the nation. On the contrary, Górecki asserted very clearly that, for him, art was a “manifestation of life,” and that the creative act of manifestation demanded both a facility with technical craft and a sensitivity to the “secret part of music that makes it art.”77 And, while Górecki himself made no claim to have joined a national school, his interviewer, Leon Markiewicz, took pains to do it for him by describing the composer’s workspace, festooned with physical artifacts of the Polish nation: pictures of Chopin and Szymanowski, books by Przerwa-Tetmajer and Witkiewicz, collections of Highland folksongs, and reproductions of contemporary art by

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Tadeusz Kantor and Jerzy Tchórzewski. This was an artist who understood the connections between national past and national present. Lutosławski, who had defended the avant-garde group at the 1960 congress, was increasingly interested in adopting some aesthetic and technical signifiers of the new Polish school in his own music. As seen in chapter 4, the older composer had harbored real concerns about the implications of serialism as a foundation for contemporary music; however, he found the sonoristic experiments of his younger colleagues intriguing. Lutosławski was especially interested in the timbral possibilities afforded by the nontraditional treatment of “traditional” (non-electronic) instruments and in the textural and formal dynamism afforded by indeterminacy.78 He was not willing to declare, along with Górecki, that pitch and harmony were no longer significant in his music, but he did recognize the affinity between his own phenomenologically tinged formal principle of “accommodation of the ear” and the way that younger Polish composers were employing contrasts at local and large-scale levels to generate affective-expressive logics that operated alongside technical-formal ones. In 1961, Lutosławski’s Venetian Games (Gry Weneckie) for chamber orchestra announced in a more public way his incorporation of some of these timbral and textural ideas. Adrian Thomas has argued that Lutosławski used Venetian Games to work out a balance between large-scale formal unity and local-level dynamism and indeterminacy. Although he retained conventional meters and his own idiosyncratic dodecaphonic language, he also clouded both of those parameters in order to manipulate audience perception of formal structure. Lutosławski courted chaos in Venetian Games. In relinquishing some of the elegant design and organic unity that had characterized Funeral Music, the composer allowed himself to explore new mechanisms for creating dramatic tension and momentum. Most notable among those mechanisms was his use of “limited aleatorism,” which would become a major hallmark of Lutosławski’s mature compositional style. Thomas points out that, in the first movement, Lutosławski populated his passages of “aleatoric counterpoint” with motives that were not clearly related to one another, and that this characteristic of “profligate motivic invention” generated extremely heterogenous textures.79 Questions of pitch and harmony remained important, though, and, just as he had done in Funeral Music, Lutosławski employed limited interval content. As a result, the new composition maintained its creator’s finely grained manipulation of harmonic accommodation and linear motivic development, even as it also demonstrated a new willingness to challenge listeners’ understanding of form as it emerged in both horizontal and vertical space. The reception of Venetian Games followed much the same lines that the reception of Funeral Music had done three years earlier. Critics presented Lutosławski as an avant-garde composer who took up contemporary techniques and submitted them to his personal expressive intentions. In an article tellingly titled “Lutosławski’s

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Individuality” in Ruch Muzyczny, Stefan Jarociński explained that, “in our world . . . [a composer] is not only the architect of music, but also the building technician; in addition to serving as the master bricklayer, he must also make the bricks.”80 Jarociński pointed back to Funeral Music as a demonstration of Lutosławski’s success in doing just that: “We have seen already the example of the twelve-tone series that he used in Funeral Music, which achieved results totally distinct from those which an academic dodecaphonist might have expected to obtain.”81 Venetian Games, Jarociński argues, was another example of the same phenomenon. Here, Lutosławski had taken up “aleatorism,” but once again he had used this technique in service of his own goals. Regardless of technique, then, Lutosławski’s compositions demonstrated a unity of voice and of vision, instilled by his overarching determination to “create and expand upon his own musical language.”82 It was this individuality and unity of voice that Jarociński used to identify Lutosławski’s role within the postwar compositional sphere, situating him as a composer who was more genuinely avant-garde than most other composers in the international avant-garde community. Always true to himself, Lutosławski was able to “retain the individual features of his own musical thought amid the sea of anonymous music that has flooded European festivals and publishers.”83 In this sentiment, perhaps, we can see that the narrative of Lutosławski’s genius, which had first coalesced around Funeral Music, had been extrapolated into an ideal to which all Polish avant-garde composers might aspire. Like Lutosławski, who both preceded them and composed alongside them, they should seek out contemporary techniques, but they should never be satisfied to apply those techniques arbitrarily. Rather, the Polish avant-garde composers would be expected to manifest their own Lutosławskian creative powers by subsuming the demands of technique and form within their own musical language. P L AG IA R I SM R E D U X

In late 1960 and 1961, critics of the Polish avant-garde gained a strange bedfellow in Bogusław Schäffer. At the end of chapter 5, we saw that Schäffer denied the existence of such a group. In a 1960 interview, he had described his young colleagues’ music as “ornamental” treatments of European avant-garde techniques; in a parenthetical aside, he even suggested that their work might have a “plagiaristic character.” Schäffer’s criticisms indicated that he was still clinging to his own convictions about avant-gardism and that he was resisting the process of redefinition that was happening around him. Based on his own criteria, this group of Polish avant-garde composers was not living up to their name because they were readily adopting a tradition grounded in “shared features” that had been developed by others; for Schäffer, such creative practice could only ever be derivative.

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In Schäffer’s aside about his colleagues’ “plagiaristic character,” he was referencing Karol Irzykowski, discussed in chapter 5. Irzykowski’s 1922 article “The Plagiaristic Character of Literary Breakthroughs in Poland” had accused Polish authors of shamelessly copying their avant-garde European colleagues: “[Modernist tendencies] showed up too unexpectedly [in Poland]; . . . people who on their own would never have arrived at Dadaism or Futurism do not have the right to copy [them]; . . . in their very bones, [they] are not pioneers.”84 For Schäffer, there was no question that this situation was recurring in the context of Polish postwar contemporary music. Composers from the Polish avant-garde were inserting themselves into developments that had originated elsewhere, and, in so doing, they were confirming their own backward, marginal status within Europe. The only solution would be for these Polish composers to develop their own technical resources; if they were not willing to take the necessary time and effort to accomplish this, then they should not be composing at all.85 This line of reasoning was logically incompatible with the newly dominant definition of Polish avant-gardism, according to which composers such as Lutosławski and Górecki had gained prestige precisely because of their ability both to draw upon and to contribute to postwar European musical developments. It was through such contributions that critics, composers, and institutional leaders hoped to create a new balance of power, establishing Poland as an active participant in the international contemporary music community. As a result of his refusal to adapt to the new discourse, critics gradually began writing Schäffer out of the Polish avant-garde in 1961. After the 1962 Warsaw Autumn festival, Tadeusz Zieliński confirmed this shift in critical opinion when he omitted Schäffer from his list of that year’s “most interesting” Polish composers. The critic described Schäffer’s Musica ipsa with a damning mixture of regret and confusion: “Bogusław Schäffer has recently been writing music that gets stranger all the time, although that strangeness does not indicate any kind of radical avantgarde tendency, or a search for new material or texture. This is music that is simple in its elements (at times even traditional) and completely colorless, generally shunning any kind of sophisticated sounds. However, the arrangements of the elements and progression of sounds and rhythms is shocking, and I must admit it is often difficult for me to find any sense in [the music].”86 Zieliński here accused Schäffer of failing to meet the benchmarks of Polish avant-gardism. He was writing strange music, but it was not a strangeness that was subordinate to affective “sense.” It was not music that evinced the “shared features” characteristic of the Polish avant-garde composers: it was colorless, unrefined, simple. As his influence in the contemporary music community waned, Schäffer’s rhetoric in the press about the avant-garde and about Polish music in general intensified. In a 1961 article, “Polish Musical Modernism,” he again raised the question of plagiarism, before declaring flatly that “there has never arisen in Poland even one

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composition that would have had any kind of influence on European music, or that would have actually (not nominally) represented European art.”87 In a reply, Zygmunt Mycielski reminded Schäffer that music was not happening in a vacuum; rather, it was produced in a given social environment, in which “everything is always a continuation of something else.” Mycielski responded with confusion to the accusation of plagiarism: “What does Schäffer understand, for instance, the word ‘plagiarism’ to mean? Does he use the term seriously, or is it just [for the purpose of] journalistic provocation?”88 When Schäffer made a formal accusation of plagiarism against Górecki and Baird in 1962, it suggested that, yes, he was indeed serious. This was evident from his very first letter to PWM, in which he had argued that his creative innovations were linked to the specific composition in which he had used them, and that these innovations should not be replicated by anyone. The Union Colleagues’ Tribunal met three times to consider Schäffer’s case before offering their ruling. In November and December of 1962, tribunal members gathered information, studied the musical scores, and requested an expert opinion from Lutosławski. During the third meeting, in January 1963, they heard testimonies from Schäffer, Górecki, and Baird, and they consulted Lutosławski’s opinion. At this final meeting, a general tenor of confusion confirmed that, except for Schäffer, everyone else (Górecki and Baird, the members of the tribunal, the expert witnesses) was operating under a definition of avant-gardism as tradition. They were so firmly oriented to this new model that they were not able to understand Schäffer’s complaints. In response to Schäffer’s insistence that a comparison of the scores would support his arguments, both Baird and Górecki protested vigorously that their usage of notation and techniques reflected their own creative development.89 In fact, a comparison of the scores is quite telling. From the published scores of Schäffer’s Concerto (PWM published it in 1963, after the trial), Górecki’s Elementi, and Baird’s Etude, it is not entirely clear which notations were supposed to have been plagiarized.90 The very existence of the ambiguities, however, highlights the challenges of the question at hand. Figure 23, an excerpt from Schäffer’s Concerto, includes the graphic notation that he describes in his testimonies. String instruments are meant to begin on a specific pitch and with a specific articulation, and then to follow the general curvature of the line as it waves across the staves. This is an indeterminate notation intended to produce a general contour. Baird’s Etude did include some similar notations, scored for voice instead of strings. Figure 24 includes an example from the score, circled in pen by Schäffer. In Górecki’s Elementi, the notation bears little resemblance to Schäffer’s work. Figure 25, from Górecki’s composition, includes two different notations that take the shape of wavy lines, but neither of them have the same meaning as Schäffer’s graphic notation. The first, which looks like a bold-face “tilde” symbol, directs the

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figure 23. Bogusław Schäffer, Concerto per sei e tre (1960), page 81. Copyright © 1963 Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, Kraków, Poland. Excerpt used by kind permission of the Aurea Porta Foundation.

performer to articulate the pitches indicated ahead of the notation in a random pattern. The second, an ascending wavy line in the cello, indicates that the performer should perform an ascending pitch, applying a vibrato whose intensity and relative speed matches the shape of the waves. Both of these notations are indeed indeterminate, but neither is related to contour. Further, both Górecki and Baird maintained that Schäffer’s notation in the Concerto was not original to him, but that it was part of a longer European tradition. Górecki pointed out that Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo had developed nontraditional notation earlier in the twentieth century; Baird reached back even further to the medieval orthography of neumes. According to their logic, their use of such notation merely affirmed their inheritance, as Polish composers, of a European musical heritage. Members of the Colleagues’ Tribunal agreed. One member commented that “notation is common property,” and then, later, a second member pointed out that Penderecki’s notation was also similar to the scores in question.91 In his expert opinion, Lutosławski expanded on the theme of compositional tradition. Like both Baird and Górecki, Lutosławski argued that Schäffer’s notation was not new; such graphic symbols had already been used by Stockhausen, Earle Brown, and Luigi Russolo before 1960. Even more interesting is Lutosławski’s personal response to the question of stylistic plagiarism between composers:

figure 24. Tadeusz Baird, Etude for vocal orchestra, percussion, and piano (Etiuda na orkiestrę wokalną, perkusję i fortepian) (1962), page 11. Copyright © 1962 Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, Kraków, Poland. All rights reserved. Markings in pen by Bogusław Schäffer. From the Archive of the Polish Composers’ Union/Polish Music Information Centre POLMIC.

figure 25. Henryk Mikołaj Górecki Elementi (1962), page 18. Copyright © 1962 Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, Kraków, Poland. Transferred 1998 to Chester Music Limited. U.S. Renewal Rights Assigned to Boosey and Hawkes, Inc.

188     Awangarda I do not understand Schäffer’s objection at all. More than once, I have found resemblances—sometimes striking ones—between my earlier compositions and the compositions of my younger colleagues, [but] I have never felt that this was a reason to get upset. If this [resemblance] resulted from someone listening so closely to my composition, then it proves that, evidently, there is something attractive about that composition. And this can only make me happy. After all, in my young years, I myself engaged in such “close listening,” as have many, many better than I; the proof lies in the entire history of music.92

Lutosławski cast the act of imitating as an important and natural part of young composers’ development. As such, “resemblances” between compositions became very significant indeed, linking composers to one another in a living tradition. According to this vision of the creative process, it would be impossible to plagiarize technique or style, as these elements belonged to a collective compositional tradition. Far from wanting to discourage such “plagiarism,” the union wanted to encourage its composers to build upon this tradition and, therefore, to continue to lead Polish music forward. After hearing this testimony, the tribunal ruled that no plagiarism had taken place and required Schäffer to sign a statement, which was then printed in both the union’s newsletter and in Ruch Muzyczny: “After acquainting myself with the arguments of Colleagues Henryk Górecki and Tadeusz Baird, I withdraw the accusations that I made in a letter to PWM on 14 October 1962. In addition, from my letter to ZKP on 10 November 1962, I withdraw the accusation that ‘Górecki’s Elementi has its origins in plagiarism’ and also the accusation that ‘Baird’s Etude has appropriated its notation.’ I acknowledge that these accusations are groundless.” This outcome was probably no surprise to any of the participants. In arbitrating this case, the union leadership had officially delegitimized Schäffer’s definition of avant-garde creativity. Composers did not own their technical innovations, and their identities were not bound up with them. Techniques, once created, should become communal property, as this was the natural process of cultural evolution. In this new era, Polish composers’ relative avant-gardeness should be measured as a function of how they responded to this evolutionary process. Schäffer was certainly not the only Polish composer to question or resist the shift toward the greater institutionalization or traditionalization of the Polish avant-garde. Shortly after the hearings had ended, tribunal chair Zygmunt Mycielski recorded his private doubts in his diary: Currently, the Composers’ Union is predisposed from the top-down toward the fashionable avant-garde. Because of this . . . Polish music is gaining favor in the West, particularly at festivals—especially because we are the only country from “behind the curtain” that has put forth such [music]. Thus, the West is curious. I don’t know if this is valid or not. The Union believes that the only interesting music lies in those sonic experiments, fields ripe for overuse and mystification, but [it is]

Awangarda    189 also an easy platform from which to butter up Donaueschingen and the various Venetian Biennales.93

Unlike Schäffer, Mycielski was ready to recognize that, for better or worse, institutional support had now moved toward a new construction of avant-gardism. For a wide variety of political, aesthetic, and historical reasons, this move was a fruitful and an advantageous one for Polish composers—not only for younger ones, but also for representatives of the older generations, who were able to use this association as a means to vault themselves to new fame in the West. Mycielski’s insight is an important one. The move by the union leaders to recognize the Polish avant-garde as the next legitimate manifestation of a longer trajectory of Polish tradition was an expression of cultural and institutional authority. Ultimately, this was a move that finally solidified the kind of top-down elite aesthetic power that many middle-generation modernist Polish composers had theorized and desired after the war. The union and its leadership, which still included a majority of members from that generation, were now in a position to lend institutional weight to the perpetuation of a particular brand of Polish forwardness. The effects of the union’s legitimization of this narrative of progress would reverberate outward, empowering some artists and disenfranchising others, who did not wish to participate in this version of the Polish musical avant-garde, including Mycielski himself. It was a narrative that would continue to shape the aesthetic identity of Polish music throughout the 1960s and 1970s and beyond.

7

Backward and Forward The Polish Avant-Garde as Progress

In this study, I have traced a historical arc stretching from a storm of interwar and postwar rhetoric about Polish cultural backwardness to the eventual establishment and promotion of an avant-garde movement, which, in its very name, asserted that Polish culture had overcome its backwardness and was now facing forward. It must be underscored that this achievement of progress was, in itself, a construct; the rise of the avant-garde movement in the early 1960s did not represent the final triumph in a battle with “real” Polish backwardness. Such an evolutionary narrative would locate backwardness and forwardness as fixed points on a timeline, upon which the engine of progress would propel a subject (or a nation) relentlessly toward the future. The trajectory from one position to the other would necessarily appear unidirectional, as a movement from a position of weakness and underdevelopment to one of strength. According to such a chronological schema, the achievement of progress would preclude a continued engagement with backwardness, now left behind in the past. As I have demonstrated in the preceding chapters, notions of forwardness and backwardness remained closely intertwined in the fifteen to twenty years after the war, and it was never possible to extricate one from the other. The relationship between the two concepts did not function according to chronological logic. Rather, they served as a pair of dialectical terms whose clashes continually produced energy. Even in light of the domestic and international successes enjoyed by Polish avant-garde composers, the notion of backwardness functioned something like a shadow, hovering always just behind its twinned notion of forwardness; the implied threat of the former continually animated discourse about the latter. Just as we saw in the case of the 1960 Composers’ Union Congress, discussed in chap190

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ter 6, the fear of a return to backwardness was an extraordinarily powerful catalyst for action. Supporters of the avant-garde were able to draw upon this fear—the fear that Polish music might swing back into the mythical backward past, displaced from its rightful position in time and space—to sway the support of the union, despite the protests of composers who feared that this new development would lead to their eclipse. One of the composers who refused to participate in performing the narrative of Polish avant-gardism-as-tradition was, unsurprisingly, Bogusław Schäffer. Before the plagiarism case that would pit him against the Composers’ Union, Schäffer was already prepared to move ahead with his own definitions of avant-gardism and musical progress. In 1960, his nonstop for baritone and pianist reflected the influence of Stockhausen’s Klavierstück XI (in which Schäffer had been so interested in 1958). At the same time, it was equally evident that Schäffer was holding himself to his own criteria for avant-gardism: he was not merely interested in reproducing Stockhausen’s innovations. Rather, he wanted to extend them in new directions. As is evident in figure 26, the format of nonstop immediately recalls Stockhausen’s piece; like Klavierstück XI, the piece is on one sheet, and is comprised of independent cells. Schäffer might have borrowed the conception of mobile, indeterminate structure from his German contemporary, but there were also major differences. For example, Schäffer’s cells are not filled with traditional notation. Instead, he used a series of symbols that demand the performer’s interpretation. There are no pitches, registers, rhythms, or metric pulses, but only symbols that appear to denote particular kinds of musical gestures or sonorities. In addition, Schäffer included indications for the performer(s) to make various exclamations (including the phonemes of his own name) and movements. The performance of nonstop should take between 6 and 480 minutes, depending on the ways that the performer chooses to combine elements from the cells.1 Beyond his notation in the piece, the fact that Schäffer did not originally publish nonstop with PWM and that the premiere did not occur as part of the Warsaw Autumn festival or in any of the other traditional venues for Polish contemporary music suggests that he was already moving away from that milieu. Instead, the official premiere, framed as a “happening,” took place in November 1964 with pianists Zygmunt Krauze and John Tilbury, and it was held in Galeria Krzysztofory, a gallery in the basement of the Krzysztofory Palace in the center of Kraków’s Old Town.2 This gallery had been a central gathering-place for avant-garde culture in Kraków since the 1930s, and, after the war, avant-garde artist Tadeusz Kantor used it for exhibits and theater. By the early 1960s, Schäffer had begun to associate more readily with the avant-garde theater community in Kraków, becoming loosely affiliated with Kantor’s “Kraków Group.” At this performance, which ran for seven hours and thirty-seven minutes, the piano stood in the middle of the gallery, and enlarged reproductions of the score hung from the walls and low, brick ceilings.3

figure 26. Bogusław Schäffer, nonstop (1960) Copyright © 1964 Przedstawicielstwo

Wydawnictw Polskich. Excerpt used by kind permission of the Aurea Porta Foundation.

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Kantor worked with Schäffer to develop the “scenography” of the event, and he painted advertisements. By affiliating himself with the Kraków Group, Schäffer found colleagues who shared his definition of avant-gardism.4 Although he did continue to participate in Polish contemporary music culture, especially as an educator, his artistic activities were more and more often situated outside the mainstream—and certainly outside the bounds of the “Polish School.” Indeed, until the end of his life (Schäffer passed away in July 2019 at age 90), he retained his commitment to individualism and his dedication to the new.5 For example, when musicologist Iwona Lindstedt wrote to Schäffer in preparation for her 2010 book, she asked him about his definition of sonoristics. His reply revealed astounding consistency with his aesthetic position from the 1950s, resisting any suggestion of a consistent tradition or convention for Polish music: “I think that the phenomenon of sonoristics emerges when the artist works as an innovator, rejecting all old canons and working to derive new aesthetic properties. In a word, [the artist] consciously avoids contact with the experiences of earlier composers and creates his own methods, thanks to which [his] music will appear as a new formal and material construction.”6 Schäffer’s prickly outsider status would recommend him to a younger generation of composers (including Zygmunt Krauze), who were less indebted to the cultural capital associated with Polish avant-gardism. Schäffer’s status today is still bound up with his enfant terrible persona, and contemporary musical institutions like Bôłt Records are now rereleasing and rerecording his idiosyncratic music. The qualities that forced him out of the narrative of Polish musical avant-gardism in the 1960s have become the very qualities for which he is now celebrated as the avant-garde of the avant-garde. While Schäffer may have rejected the impulse to look backward to tradition, or to invoke backwardness to generate agency, the power of those interrelated discursive gestures did not diminish throughout the 1960s, even as Polish composers gained greater confidence and established their international reputations in the Western European, US, and Latin American avant-garde musical scenes.7 Sometimes spoken, sometimes unspoken, the trope of Polish music as an outgrowth of long-breathed national traditions continued to foster and solidify the institutional and political legitimization of avant-gardism as an invaluable manifestation of a forward-facing Polish culture. Polish composers, intellectuals, and politicalcultural leaders were all united in their sense that Poland could slip once again, and that all this hard-won progress and prestige could be lost. Backwardness did not only function as a threat, though; it was not only a negative motivator. On the contrary, the overcoming of backwardness became an important part of a triumphalist narrative that distinguished the particular aesthetic value and national valor of avant-garde artists. According to this narrative, these composers had begun from an underprivileged and isolated position, but nevertheless they had managed to revitalize the Polish tradition with their musical

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and aesthetic innovations. And, in bringing that tradition out of its backwardness and into the contemporary moment, they had also contributed to contemporary musical development worldwide, thus reclaiming for Poland its rightful (non-displaced) identity as an active participant in Western culture. When, for example, critic Ludwik Erhardt wrote a recommendation for Krzysztof Penderecki to receive a State Award (Nagroda Państwowa) for composition in 1966, he invoked the discourse of backwardness in both its negative and positive senses: [Penderecki’s achievements and his compositional innovations] evidence a talent of unusual independence. Let us return again to the composer’s curriculum vitae. He completed his studies in 1958, which means that his musical consciousness was formed during the period of isolation, without closer acquaintance with the postwar experiments and achievements of Western music. Penderecki’s first important compositional attempts and his debut took place during the period of the belated (spóźnionego), but intense Webern cult, and also [during] the invasion of all the diverse post-Webern styles. It is a phenomenon probably without precedent that, under these conditions, a young composer (at the time, only 26 years old) would be able to devise such a completely independent and innovative creative [intersection of formal musical technique and expressivity]. Its musical clarity first won him prizes, and today [it has won him] imitators all over the world.8

In this recommendation, which he submitted to the official state prize committee, Erhardt reminded his readers that Polish composers had been forced to contend with both the conditions of lag and of lack in the 1950s. Therefore, he argued, Penderecki’s achievements were even more impressive in light of the young composer’s ability to overcome the political and cultural conditions of backwardness and to become, in his own right, an influential figure in contemporary music. Erhardt interpreted Penderecki’s influence in a very specific way, drawing on the same definitions of creative genius that I discussed in chapter 4 in relation to Witold Lutosławski in the late 1950s. Drawing on the heft of the national wieszcz (bard) tradition, he asserted boldly that Penderecki was “the first Polish composer since the time of Chopin who had achieved, at such a young age, such a prominent position.”9 The next paragraph is worth quoting at some length, because it demonstrates Erhardt’s framing of Penderecki’s creative genius: For about five years, Penderecki’s compositions have been performed around the world, from Washington to London, Paris, and even in Osaka, inspiring enthusiasm or condemnation—but never ambivalence. This results from [his] exceptionally original and daring approach to music, which is evident in even the composer’s earliest works and which has decidedly distinguished his oeuvre from the intellectual speculations [produced by] the majority of the contemporary avant-garde. . . . The architectonic [structures] of Penderecki’s compositions are simple, clear, and logical. He does not employ mathematical calculations or serial constructions. [His] entire

backward and forward    195 effort is concentrated on the creation of music that is maximally expressive, and in which innovation appears in the form of searching and application of new [technical] materials that serve the invocation and intensification of expression. [Penderecki] has discovered a great richness of possibilities, never before used, inherent in the employment of stringed instruments and the human voice.10

For Erhardt, Penderecki was a composer who took up contemporary musical techniques and innovated upon them, but he never devised innovations for their own sake; rather, the composer’s innovations grew out of his creative intentions. Form thus arose organically out of Penderecki’s engagement with an (unchanging) content, in the Régameyan sense. And, because he submitted all technical innovations to his creative vision, Erhardt argued that Penderecki’s music was clear, understandable, and deeply expressive. Erhardt’s deliberate separation of Penderecki from other avant-garde artists— Western artists—probably speaks to his strategy in describing Polish avant-gardism for an official, state-affiliated audience. But it also speaks to his own personal distaste for contemporary music that privileged form over content. In chapter 6, I discussed an article from the late 1950s in which Erhardt had decried an avantgarde apocalypse, leading to a devastated and silent world—an echo of Stefan Kisielewski’s article “Is This the End of Music?” from 1936. In 1960, during the battles between two different models of Polish avant-gardism, the Schäfferian model and the avant-garde-as-tradition model, Erhardt fought consistently against the former on the grounds that this variety of musical avant-gardism failed at the most important musical task: communication. In his 1960 article, “For Everyone? Or for the Chosen [Few]?” for Ruch Muzyczny, Erhardt argued that “modern” composers had sacrificed their connection to musical content in favor of ideal musical forms— forms so complicated that even the most sophisticated listener might not be able to comprehend them in performance. The choice between form and content was, for Erhardt, a false one. Even the very newest, most experimental music had the potential to connect with audiences. Through a shared psychological perception of rhythm, color, and sound—elements that we may recognize as Józef Chomiński’s parameters for sonoristics in music—listeners would be able “to understand and contemplate the construction of the work . . . to feel and to experience the music.”11 If contemporary composers understood this fact, Erhardt asserted, then there would be no further debates about popular versus art music, or about how best to educate or “musicalize” the mass audience. Any music was capable of initiating a communicative exchange with any audience. Ludwik Erhardt, despite his early writings against avant-gardism, has long been one of Penderecki’s most ardent supporters and collaborators. And this is not a contradiction; it was in Penderecki’s music that Erhardt found the example for which he was looking. This was music that had enormous affective power, even as

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it also demonstrated a care for formal innovation, and, therefore, it had the power to reach its audiences. Penderecki’s was the right kind of avant-gardism. And other critics and audiences agreed. In 1963, Stefan Kisielewski ran an experiment: he played a variety of music by Polish composers for a non-specialist audience of Catholic intellectuals. When he played music by the more moderate Polish composers (Tadeusz Baird or Grażyna Bacewicz, for example), his audience was ambivalent. But when he played Penderecki’s Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima, the audience had a strong reaction, and they reported that the music made a lasting impression on them.12 While unscientific, the outcome of Kisielewski’s experiment resonated with Erhardt’s prize recommendation letter above: both of these critics were proposing that Penderecki’s music (and other avant-garde music like it) could be a powerful tool in connecting with a contemporary audience. It was its ability to build connections and to communicate content through form that attracted domestic and international attention to this music. Ultimately, it was this heady blend of communicative power—with attendant implications for cultural outreach to new audiences—and international prestige that won official party-state support for the Polish avant-garde movement. Certainly, such support was not consistent, and it could be challenged at any time. Lisa Jakelski writes, for example, about occasions where authorities from the Ministry of Culture challenged the programming choices at Warsaw Autumn because those choices exhibited a preference for experimental, avant-garde forms of music making (and a bias against music that aligned more closely with socialist realist aesthetic principles).13 Despite these challenges, defenders of avant-gardism were able invoke the same logics that I have outlined above to argue that contemporary music had more transformative power than other forms of music. The ministry’s concerns became quite clear at a 1961 meeting of its internal advisory board, the Arts Advisory Council (Rada Kultury i Sztuki). While this meeting featured the same complaints that conservative composers had been raising within the Composers’ Union for several years—complaints about the marginalization of composers who were not interested in adopting “formalist” innovations—the responses from Zofia Lissa and the Minister Tadeusz Galiński are more interesting. Neither Lissa nor Galiński argued against avant-garde experimentation. In fact, they both affirmed the significance of this new Polish avant-garde movement. Lissa commented that it was only natural that young composers should be interested in experimenting. “In an epoch, wherein technology impacts even the smallest detail of an artistic creation,” she argued, “it is difficult to cut oneself off from the possibilities afforded by such technology.”14 Mentioning, as an example, the exciting practical applications of electronic music and musique concrète for film and radio, Lissa indicated that she recognized the value of the avant-garde in generating new ideas and forms of music.

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On the other hand, Lissa also noted that the state’s support for avant-gardism represented something of a paradox. Political leaders were willing to provide resources for this unquestionably valuable artistic ferment, but, at the same time, they recognized that the resultant artistic experiments were not always relevant to the project of building socialism in Poland. Lissa argued that it was not necessary to worry about this problem; certain experiments would someday prove to have larger significance to the nation’s cultural and political progress, while others—the failed experiments, the dead-ends—would fall away from historical consciousness. In other words, she was adopting a historically deterministic stance, according to which the chaos of the immediate postwar avant-garde was both understandable and inevitable, so long as it was understood that this chaos represented an early evolutionary stage of social development. The state and the party would need to continue to encourage artists’ further development by insisting that they remain dedicated to the uplift of the entire Polish audience. Galiński’s stance on this matter was more pragmatic, but, in its essence, his point lined up with Lissa’s. The Ministry of Culture recognized the value in promoting a strong elite core, but he emphasized that this core needed to be surrounded by a wide variety of artistic manifestations: “We want this [Polish] culture to be fertile, so that innovative activity will arise out of the healthy nucleus of the group. For, without that middle ground [between mass culture and the avantgarde], there would be no communicative, good works on an artistic level. And [without the aim to produce such works], who cares about innovation? What— and who—is it for?”15 Above all, he urged composers to remain mindful of their audience. They should think about ways that their experiments and innovations might be applied in writing music that would engage listeners actively in the processes of social and cultural development. Lissa and Galiński thus both legitimized the existence of the Polish avant-garde, but they also both suggested that it was time to restore some balance. The period of experimentation had been essential to Polish cultural development (Lissa, in particular, framed this evolutionary stage as a significant step toward overcoming Poland’s inferiority complex). But now it was time for a course correction. This demand that Polish contemporary composers continually perform their commitment to audience education would be repeated again and again by state and party authorities throughout the 1960s and especially during the millennial celebrations in 1966. Political leaders were ready to allow and, indeed, to enable the artistic sphere to engage with progressive international aesthetic and technical currents, just so long as that sphere was also generating art with demonstrable ideological and national significance. Although they did not often express it so openly, state and party officials were also enamored with the international prestige that the Polish avant-garde movement had attracted. A report prepared for the party’s Culture Department in 1963

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about the state of musical life in Poland reflected a real tension in its messy, convoluted recommendations.16 While the report included language about the insufficient social benefit of Polish avant-garde music—and frustration about the resources accorded to its support—the authors could not stop themselves from commenting repeatedly on the international, Western reception of this music. “Polish music, from Chopin to contemporary music, is currently being performed on many concert stages around the world,” the report glowed, even after the authors had just castigated avant-garde music culture for silencing other forms of music.17 It therefore became the responsibility of composers, critics, and scholars to generate new scripts about contemporary music making, emphasizing that it was not only good for generating international renown. It was also a powerful tool in connecting with Polish audiences. Composer Andrzej Dobrowolski modeled this very defense at the 1961 Arts Advisory Council meeting: “These are artists who have the ability to create artworks that are essential to their nation.”18 Maintaining this precarious balance between contemporaneity and social, national relevance enabled Polish artists to cultivate thriving careers both inside Poland and internationally. Even as many cultural actors from both the middle, post-Szymanowski generation and the younger postwar generation worked hard to navigate that balance, ensuring the continued vitality of Polish contemporary music culture, there were tensions between those actors’ own internal and external voices. What individuals said in the public sphere did not always reflect their internal convictions; sometimes the conflict between these two layers might become evident in inconsistencies or surprising complexities in their speech. Or in some cases, we might have brief and imperfect insights into their internal thoughts, through letters or diaries—remembering, of course, that these sources still represent a constructed performance of self. It is useful to note, for instance, that Mycielski repeatedly wrote in his diaries that he did not care for Penderecki’s music, and he expressed doubts about the value of the Polish avant-garde in relation to other avant-garde movements. In public, Mycielski mostly kept these opinions to himself, and he offered his general support to the “Polish School” as a whole. He recognized this disconnect explicitly in a diary entry from early 1962, admitting that he very often sympathized with the anti-avant-garde arguments put forth by the disenfranchised conservative members of his own interwar generation. As a public figure (and especially as the chief editor of Ruch Muzyczny), Mycielski felt that he had a responsibility “to look also toward the avant-garde, and to find some kind of reasonable balance with my generation.” He acknowledged, however, that “all of this would be easier for me, if I just liked today’s ‘avant-garde’ a little.”19 This kind of tension between public and private voices—between public and private identities—led to constant ripples over the surface of the discursive field, as artists, intellectuals, and political figures all sought ways to protect and advance their own goals while reaching some kind of shared understanding with their contemporaries. I have, in this book, attempted to trace the kaleidoscopic patterns

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spinning outward from these complex relationships: the tentative agreements and overlapping commitments that were inevitably disturbed by disagreements and renegotiations, which led, in turn, to new discursive patterns and new social, political, and cultural constructs. In the end, even such a powerful construct as the Polish school of avant-gardism, which functioned in the later 1960s and 1970s as a sort of “brand” for the promotion of Polish musical innovations domestically and internationally, was destined to dissolve under the pressure.20 The leading composers of this group— Penderecki, Górecki, and their elder colleague Lutosławski—all began after 1962 to move in new stylistic and creative directions. All three went on to develop international careers (Lutosławski and Penderecki more so than Górecki, until the famous Nonesuch release of his Symphony no. 3 in the 1990s), as did many other Polish composers of the interwar and postwar generations. The stylistic markers and aesthetic underpinnings of the Polish avant-garde, once they had been subsumed generally into a broader Polish musical tradition, were available for adoption by any and all Polish composers. Thus it was that the “Polish School” broadened to encompass even some composers, such as Witold Rudziński, who had once been staunch opponents of Western formalism. These developments, together with the constant influx of younger generations of composers and critics into the cultural sphere, allowed for greater diversity and activity in the Polish contemporary musical world. As artists began to push against the conventions that had accrued to the Polish avant-garde in the early 1960s, they developed new aesthetics and techniques (or, as in the case of both Penderecki and Górecki, they turned to older forms and musical styles), and they generated entirely new sound worlds. Just as the original definition of avant-gardism in Poland had shifted in 1960, the goalposts of modernity and contemporaneity would shift repeatedly in the following decades. Within this very process of change and evolution lay buried one unifying feature: progress. Progress was the motivation and the engine and the destination. Even if the definition of progress changed over time, this push toward forwardness (and the push away from its shadow-self, backwardness) continued to unite groups of people, who were able to identify shared goals and commitments and, therefore, to collaborate in generating new forms of cultural growth.

note s

I N T R O DU C T IO N

1.  Alex Ross, “Drowned Sounds: Paweł Szymański’s Opera Qudsja Zaher in Warsaw,” The New Yorker 90, no. 2 (3 March 2014): 76. The designation “Polish Renaissance” in relation to this period derives from Bernard Jacobson’s book A Polish Renaissance (London: Phaidon Press, 1996). 2. Ibid. 3.  For more information about Helm and his activities in postwar Germany, see Amy Beal, New Music, New Allies: American Experimental Music in West Germany from the Zero Hour to Reunification (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 32–34. 4.  Everett Helm, “Strenuous Listening but Rewarding,” The Christian Science Monitor (4 November 1961): 12. 5.  Lisa Jakelski, Making New Music in Cold War Poland: The Warsaw Autumn Festival, 1956–1968 (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017). Jakelski draws on Stephen Greenblatt’s notion of “cultural mobility” in tracing the transnational movement of music and cultural knowledge both in and out of Poland. 6.  Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin Press, 2005); Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010). 7.  For excellent musicological studies of transnational cultural movement after the war, see Lisa Jakelski, Making New Music in Cold War Poland (especially chapter 4); Danielle Fosler-Lussier, Music in America’s Cold War Diplomacy (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015); and Joy Calico, Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw in Postwar Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). 8.  Philip M. Gentry, What Will I Be? American Music and Cold War Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 12. 201

202     notes 9.  Andrea F. Bohlman, Musical Solidarities: Political Action and Music in Late TwentiethCentury Poland (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 9. 10.  Reinhart Koselleck, “ ‘Space of Experience’ and ‘Horizon of Expectation’: Two Historical Categories,” in Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 255–75. 11. Here, my work intersects with the work of Brian Porter-Szűcs in his Faith and Fatherland: Catholicism, Modernity, and Poland (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); see especially his introduction and chapter 3. There are also many musicologists asking important questions about the nature of modernity in postwar European culture; for example, see Seth Brodsky, From 1989, or European Music and the Modernist Unconscious (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017); Harriet Boyd-Bennett, Opera in Postwar Venice: Cultural Politics and the Avant-Garde (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); and Christopher Chowrimootoo, Middlebrow Modernism: Britten’s Operas and the Great Divide (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018). 12. Maria Todorova, “The Trap of Backwardness: Modernity, Temporality, and the Study of Eastern European Nationalism,” Slavic Review 64, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 140–64. 13. In the Hungarian and Albanian contexts, Danielle Fosler-Lussier and Nicholas Tochka both write about backwardness and the need to “catch up” to a (variously interpreted) modern point in time. See Fosler-Lussier, Music Divided: Bartók’s Legacy in Cold War Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 28, 75–78; and Tochka, Audible States: Socialist Politics and Popular Music in Albania (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), especially chapter 1 “Administering Music.” In relation to Poland, Nathaniel D. Wood writes about backwardness and urbanization in early twentieth-century Kraków. Wood, Becoming Metropolitan: Urban Selfhood and the Making of Modern Cracow (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010). There are some resonances between backwardness discourse and nationalism within nineteenth-century Russian Slavophilism, and again also in the early Soviet period, but it is not clear to me that either of those strains were particularly formative in the Polish context, except in the case of those individuals who spent World War II in the Soviet Union. For them, such as musicologist Zofia Lissa, notions of backwardness were certainly measured against a Soviet standard. See Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); and Susanna Rabow-Edling, Slavophile Thought and the Politics of Cultural Nationalism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006). 14.  Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in Its Origins and Background (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1944); Daniel Chirot, ed., The Origins of Backwardness in Eastern Europe: Economics and Politics from the Middle Ages until the Early Twentieth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); and Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), 37. 15.  Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). Fabian is writing here primarily about anthropologists’ work with non-Western cultures, but his analysis resonates with the work of Larry Wolff, who argues that Eastern Europe was invented in the Enlightenment period by travelers and scholars who imagined its difference and its displacement in time. Wolff, Inventing

notes    203 Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994). 16.  Todorova does discuss self-directed language of backwardness in the Balkans, but she characterizes this occurrence as an internalization of Western European discourse. She does not consider the ways that this discourse might create agency for its speakers. Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 17. Mark Rifkin, Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous SelfDetermination (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 28–29. On the question of anachronism, Rifkin points to Bliss Cua Lim, Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). 18.  Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 9–10. 19.  Peter Osborne argues that modernity is a signifier grounded in change rather than chronology, and that this change is quite often qualitative rather than quantitative or chronological. The “next” might not be the “new.” Rather, “newness” might alternately be figured in spatial terms, or in terms specific to particular identities (including gender). Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (New York: Verso, 1995), 14–20. 20.  Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968). 21.  Perry Anderson, “Modernity and Revolution,” New Left Review (1 March 1984): 109. 22.  There are a number of excellent studies about postwar musical avant-garde movements, each of which exists as a critique of Anderson’s generalized dismissal. Since 2000, musicologists have been working to challenge totalizing (Cold War–era) discourses about postwar avantgardism by contextualizing specific artists and movements within their historical, cultural, and political environments. Examples include Amy Beal, New Music, New Allies; Robert Adlington, Composing Dissent: Avant-garde Music in 1960s Amsterdam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Martin Iddon, New Music at Darmstadt: Nono, Stockhausen, Cage, and Boulez (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); and Peter J. Schmelz, Such Freedom, If Only Musical: Unofficial Soviet Music during the Thaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 23.  Emily Richmond Pollock critiques the temporal implications of the Stunde Null in Germany, where the discourse of new beginnings served to blur the lines of continuity that existed between the (Nazi) past and the postwar present. She also argues persuasively that this temporal framework privileged certain “modernist” artistic developments over “conservative” ones with their roots in past tradition. In Poland, as I will argue in this book, the situation was rather different: it was modernist music that celebrated connection between past and future, while the “traditional” forms (opera, ballet, etc.), with their tinge of aesthetic conservatism, suggested problematic connections with Soviet socialist realism (at least in the late 1950s and early 1960s). Pollock, Opera after the Zero Hour: The Problem of Tradition and the Possibility of Renewal in Postwar West Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 4–6. C HA P T E R 1

1.  Mieczysław Rytard, “Na przełomie muzyki polskiej: Rozmowa z Karolem Szymanowskim,” Świat (1 June 1929): 14. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

204     notes 2.  Alistair Wightman traces the many factors that led to Szymanowski resigning from his post, including his increasingly poor health, in the twelfth chapter of his Karol Szymanowski: His Life and Work (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1999). 3.  Rytard, “Na przełomie muzyki polskiej,” 14. 4.  Ibid., 15. Emphasis in original. 5.  In my thinking about the relationship between Polish modernity, modernization, and modernism, I have been influenced by Marshall Berman’s classic text, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982). 6. Timothy Snyder discusses the regional complexities of national aspirations and national identity in relation to shifting borders and shifting affiliations, particularly in the immediate post–World War I period. Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003). For more about Piłsudski’s leadership, see Eva Plach, The Clash of Moral Nations: Cultural Politics in Piłsudski’s Poland, 1926–1935 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006). 7.  Richard Taruskin, “Nationalism,” Grove Music Online. 2001, accessed 13 February 2020. www-oxfordmusiconline-com. Celia Applegate offers further historical context in “How German Is It? Nationalism and the Idea of Serious Music in the Early Nineteenth Century,” 19th-Century Music 21, no. 3 (1998): 274–96. 8.  The relationship between xenophobic politics, whiteness, and rigid interpretations of “tradition” in music conservatory education have been interrogated in the contemporary American context by Loren Kajikawa, “The Possessive Investment in Classical Music: Confronting Legacies of White Supremacy in U.S. Schools and Departments of Music,” in Seeing Race Again: Countering Colorblindness across the Disciplines, ed. Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Luke Charles Harris, Daniel Martinez HoSang, and George Lipsitz (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019), 155–74. While Kajikawa is discussing conservatory education in a very different historical and national space, there are elements of his discussion that are relevant here as well. 9. Wightman, Karol Szymanowski, 311. 10.  “A New Spirit at the Warsaw Conservatory: Director Karol Szymanowski on the Aims of the College and the Need to Support the Creativity of the Young,” Kurier Czerwony (24 February 1927), in Szymanowski on Music: Selected Writings of Karol Szymanowski, ed. and trans. Alistair Wightman (London: Toccata Press, 1999), 252. 11.  Karol Szymanowski and Mateusz Gliński, “A Footnote to Stabat Mater: Thoughts on Religious Music,” Muzyka nos. 11–12 (1926), in Szymanowski on Music: Selected Writings of Karol Szymanowski, 138. 12.  Ibid., 140. 13.  Richard Zielinski, “Sources and Materials of Szymanowski’s Stabat Mater,” in After Chopin: Essays in Polish Music, ed. Maja Trochimczyk, 143–76 (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2000). See also Wightman, Karol Szymanowski: His Life and Work, 295–302. 14.  Piotr Rytel, “Koncert symfoniczny,” Gazeta Warszawska (13 January 1929): 13. 15.  The article, appearing directly above Rytel’s review, was titled “Czy Żydzi mogą być kondukturami?” (“Can Jews Be [Train] Conductors?”). 16.  Piotr Rytel, “Upadek kultury muzycznej,” Gazeta Warszawska (22 February 1929): 4. 17.  Karol Szymanowski, “Wychowawcza rola kultury muzycznej,” Pamiętnik Warszawski (November 1930): 57–89.

notes    205 18.  Ibid., 88–89. Emphasis in original. 19.  Maja Trochimczyk, “Chopin and the ‘Polish Race’: On National Ideologies and the Chopin Reception,” in The Age of Chopin: Interdisciplinary Inquiries, ed. Halina Goldberg (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 278–313. 20.  Karol Szymanowski, “Wychowawcza rola kultury muzycznej,” 63, 89. 21.  For more information about the formative years that these Polish musicians spent in Paris, see the first chapter of J. Mackenzie Pierce, “Life and Death for Music: A Polish Generation’s Journey across War and Reconstruction, 1926–53” (PhD diss., Cornell University, 2019). 22. Musicologist Katarzyna Naliwajek-Mazurek has written extensively about Konstanty Régamey’s life, his music, and his aesthetic writings. See “Konstanty Regamey. Między mistyką a Czystą Formą,” in Konstanty Regamey: Wybór pism estetycznych, ed. Katarzyna Naliwajek-Mazurek (Kraków: Universitas, 2010), vii–liv; and also her article, “Konstanty Regamey jako kontynuator idei Karola Szymanowskiego,” in Karol Szymanowski w perspektywie kultury muzycznej przeszłości i współczesności, ed. Zbigniew Skowron (Kraków: Musica Iagellonica, 2007), 289–307. Another source for information about Régamey’s life and career, especially after his immigration to Switzerland in 1944, is Marek Andrzejewski, Polski Szwajcar Konstanty Régamey (Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego, 2016). 23.  The influence of Hans Mersmann’s work rippled outward in a number of ways in Polish aesthetic discourse after the war; I will explore those influences in chapters 5 and 6. 24. Witkacy and Régamey (together with literary figure Bolesław Miciński, whose thinking also influenced Régamey) all contributed to the Polish cultural journal Zet in the early 1930s, a journal known for publishing the work of “nonconformist” artists. 25.  Konstanty Régamey, Treść i forma w muzyce (Warsaw: Biblioteka “Zet,” 1933). 26.  Lech Sokół, “Muzyka jako Sztuka Czysta. Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz i Konstanty Regamey,” Przestrzenie Teorii, no. 14 (2010): 42–43. 27. Małgorzata Gąsiorowska, Kisielewski (Kraków: Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, 2011). See her chapter 1 for information about Kisielewski in the interwar period. 28.  Beata Bolesławska-Lewandowska’s introduction to her edited collection of letters between Zygmunt Mycielski and Andrzej Panufnik provides important context for both of these figures. Zygmunt Mycielski, Andrzej Panufnik: Korespondencja, Część 1: Lata 1949– 1969, ed. Beata Bolesławska-Lewandowska (Warsaw: Instytut Sztuki: Polska Akademia Nauk, 2016). 29. On Zofia Lissa’s interwar experiences in Lwów, see Pierce, “Life and Death for Music.” 30. Zygmunt Mycielski, “Szukam czytelników,” Kurier Poranny (1937), in Ucieczki z pięciolinii, 66–69 (Warsaw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1957). 31.  Zygmunt Mycielski, “Zasadnicze zagadnienia współczesnej kultury muzycznej w Polsce,” Muzyka Polska (1937), in Ucieczki z pięciolinii (Warsaw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1957), 50–51. 32.  Stefan Kisielewski, “Problematyka awangardowa w muzyce,” Pion, no. 21 (1938): 4. 33.  Kisielewski’s review of Régamey’s Content and Form in Music reveals his polemic tone: “Recenzje,” Muzyka Polska 4, no. 1 (1936): 54–56. 34.  Stefan Kisielewski, “Czy upadek muzyki?” Zet 4, nos. 15–16 (1–15 January 1936): 3.

206     notes 35.  For example, see Zofia Lissa, “O słuchaniu i rozumieniu utworów muzycznych,” Wiedza i Życie, no. 6 (1937): 383–95. For a thorough discussion of Lissa’s aesthetic philosophy, see Zbigniew Skowron, “Muzyka—jej struktura, przeżycie i przesłanie: W kręgu dociekań muzyczno-estetycznych Zofii Lissy,” in Zofia Lissa: Wybór pism estetycznych, ed. Zbigniew Skowron (Kraków: Universitas, 2008), vii–xxx. 36. Witold Lutosławski, “Tchnienie wielkości,” Muzyka Polska 5, no. 4 (1937): 170. Emphasis in original. 37.  Timothy Snyder’s provocative study, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010) captures the scope of the violence perpetrated by both the Nazis and the Soviets against the Poles during this campaign. For additional perspective on anti-Semitic violence in Poland during the war, see Jan T. Gross’s Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 38.  A great many prisoners were placed in POW camps after the September 1939 campaign. The Soviets also moved people east to labor camps, and others were deported as “special settlers,” making room for the westward movement of new Soviet leaders. Gross, Revolution from Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland’s Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), xiv, 194. 39.  Daniel Elphick’s book Music behind the Iron Curtain: Weinberg and His Polish Contemporaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019) chronicles Weinberg’s passage to Minsk and then on to Tashkent, and his decision to remain in the Soviet Union after the war. 40.  Jan T. Gross, Polish Society under German Occupation: The Generalgouvernement, 1939–1944 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 226. 41.  Katarzyna Naliwajek-Mazurek, “Music in Nazi-Occupied Poland between 1939 and 1945,” Musicology Today 13 (2016): 62. Naliwajek-Mazurek has collaborated with Elżbieta Markowska and Andrzej Spóz to produce a two-volume study of musical life during the occupation. See Okupacyjne losy muzyków: Warszawa 1939–1945, 2 vols. (Warsaw: Towarzyszto im. Witolda Lutosławskiego, 2014 and 2015). 42.  Pierce, “Life and Death for Music,” 145. 43.  Katarzyna Naliwajek-Mazurek points out that we may never know the real extent of musicians’ participation within the underground resistance movements during the war because postwar communist-era security forces (UB) actively sought to suppress and control the former participants within those movements. Speaking openly about resistance activities after the war became a difficult and dangerous act. Naliwajek-Mazurek, “Muzyka jako metoda przetwarzania i oporu w mieście dwóch powstań i Zagłady,” in Okupacyjne losy muzyków: Warszawa 1939–1945 (Warsaw: Towarzyszto im. Witolda Lutosławskiego, 2015), 2:10–11. 44.  Pierce, “Life and Death for Music,” 133–34. Pierce explains how Kazimierz Sikorski, proposed director of the school, worked with members of the underground resistance to strategize the prioritization of Polish cultural and political goals while still operating out in the open, under ostensible Nazi oversight. 45.  Twenty-five compositions by fifteen Polish composers received premieres during the war during these clandestine “Concerts of wartime compositions.” Pierce, “Life and Death for Music,” 159.

notes    207 46. “Ankieta i wypowiedzi: Bolesław Woytowicz i Konstanty Régamey,” Kwartalnik Muzyczny 24 (1948): 156–57. 47.  Adrian Thomas argues that the Quintet also drew heavily on nineteenth-century models, despite its use of dodecaphonic technique, and he points to Juliusz Zarębski’s Piano Quintet (1885) as a particular influence. Thomas, Polish Music since Szymanowski (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 21–22. Further analysis and discussion of the Quintet can be found in Pierce, “Life and Death for Music,” 159–69. 48.  Naliwajek-Mazurek and Spóz, Okupacyjne losy muzyków, 2:38. Lutosławski’s memories recorded here date from the late 1970s and 1980s. His recollection of the significance attached to Régamey’s dodecaphonic experiments might therefore be colored by his own feelings about dodecaphony, which I discuss further in chapter 4. 49. Snyder, Bloodlands, 406. 50.  There is a burgeoning scholarship available about trauma, wartime destruction, and the role of music in responding to those experiences. For example, see Martha Sprigge, “Dresden’s Musical Ruins,” Journal of the Royal Music Association 144, no. 1 (2019): 83–121; and also Barbara Milewski, “Hidden in Plain View: The Music of Holocaust Survival in Poland’s First Postwar Feature Film,” in Music, Collective Memory, Trauma, and Nostalgia in European Cinema after the Second World War, ed. Michael Baumgartner and Ewelina Bocz­ kowska (New York: Routledge, 2020). 51.  Krystyna Kersten, The Establishment of Communist Rule in Poland, 1943–1948, trans. John Micgiel and Michael H. Bernhard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). In particular, her fifth chapter, “Society,” catalogs the efforts of the nascent Polish Workers’ Party, the PPR, which was hardly a well-organized and ideologically monolithic entity in these early years. For a broader regional perspective, see also Jan T. Gross’s foundational article, “War as Revolution,” in The Establishment of Communist Regimes in Eastern Europe, 1944–1949, ed. Norman Naimark and Leonid Gibianskii (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), 17–40. 52. Pierce, “Life and Death for Music,” 250. Pierce’s discussion of the founding of PWM, and of Ochlewski’s complex motives, grounded in his own interwar experiences, is an essential contribution to understanding the reconstitution of postwar Polish musical culture. 53. Jerzy Waldorff, “Działalność Państwowej Filharmonii w Krakowie w sezonie 1945/46,” BN Dokumenty życie społecznego, Muzyka 1945 Programy. 54.  Mary Werden, “Building the Official Future: Modernization and Communist Power in Rural Poland, 1956–80,” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 2015), 9–13. 55.  Christopher Chowrimootoo, Middlebrow Modernism: Britten’s Operas and the Great Divide; Pauline Fairclough, Classics for the Masses: Shaping Soviet Musical Identity under Lenin and Stalin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016). 56.  Laurie Koloski, “Painting Kraków Red: Politics and Culture in Poland, 1945–1950” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 1998). 57. Quoted in Barbara Fijałkowska, Polityka i twórcy (1948–1959) (Warsaw: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1985), 52. Andrei Zhdanov delivered his infamous speech to the Soviet Composers’ Union in February of 1948, but the full implications of his rhetoric would not be felt in the Polish music community until 1949; I discuss this further in chapter 2.

208     notes 58.  For further explanation of these terms as they relate to socialist realism, see Leonid Heller, “A World of Prettiness: Socialist Realism and Its Aesthetic Categories,” trans. John Henriksen, in Socialist Realism without Shores, ed. Thomas Lahusen and Evgeny Dobrenko (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 51–75. 59. Pauline Fairclough, “Was Soviet Music Middlebrow? Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, Socialist Realism, and the Mass Listener in the 1930s,” The Journal of Musicology 35, no. 3 (2018): 336–67. 60.  See Lissa’s “Czy muzyka jest sztuka asemantyczna?” Mysł Współczesna 10 (1948): 276–289, in Zofia Lissa: Wybór pism estetycznych, ed. Zbigniew Skowron (Kraków: Universitas, 2008), 4–19. 61.  J. Mackenzie Pierce provides important contexts for Lissa’s political beliefs, and especially for her engagement with socialist realism, by linking her postwar statements to her traumatic interwar and wartime experiences of anti-Semitic discrimination and violence. See his “Zofia Lissa, Wartime Trauma, and the Evolution of the Polish ‘Mass Song,’ ” The Journal of Musicology 37, no. 2 (2020): 231–66. 62.  Editorial Note, Ruch Muzyczny 1, no. 1 (October 1945): 3. 63. Stefan Kisielewski, “Festival Polskiej Muzyki Współczesnej w Krakowie (1–4 IX 1945),” Ruch Muzyczny 1, no. 1 (October 1945): 24. 64. Stefan Kisielewski, “Czy muzyka jest niehumanistyczna?” Znak (April 1948), in Muzyka przez lata (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1957): 16. 65.  After Kisielewski’s “Czy muzyka jest niehumanistyczna?,” Józef Chomiński published “Zagadnienia formalizmu i tendencje ideologiczne w polskiej muzyce współczesnej na tle rozwoju muzyki światowej,” Ruch Muzyczny 4, no. 20 (October 1948), which also responded to Tikhon Khrennikov’s “O nowej drogi twórczości muzycznej,” Ruch Muzyczny 4, no. 18 (September 1948). Kisielewski’s “Czy w muzyce istnieje formalizm?” then appeared in Ruch Muzyczny 4, no. 22 (November 1948). Vice Minister Sokorski closed the debate with his “Formalizm i realizm w muzyce,” Ruch Muzyczny 4, nos. 23–24 (December 1948). 66.  Konstanty Régamey, “Próba analizy ewolucji w sztuce,” Kwartalnik Muzyczny 21–22 (1948): 75–103; “Źródła i tło kryzysu sztuki współczesnej,” Kwartalnik Muzyczny 23 (1948): 63–101. Katarzyna Naliwajek-Mazurek also points to the influence of philosopher Józef Maria Hoene-Wroński (1776–1853) on Régamey’s thought in these essays. NaliwajekMazurek, “Konstanty Regamey. Między mistyką a Czystą Formą,” viii. 67.  Régamey, “Próba analizy ewolucji w sztuce,” 80. Emphasis in original. 68.  Riegl’s theory of historical monuments is an interesting predecessor to Régamey’s aesthetic position; the Austrian thinker believed that monuments functioned by collapsing the past and present together, and that meaning arose through a powerful creative interaction between artist and viewer. See Michael Gubser, “Time and History in Alois Riegl’s Theory of Perception,” Journal of the History of Ideas 66, no. 3 (2005): 451-474. 69.  Zygmunt Mycielski, “Twórcy a masy,” Nowiny literackie, no. 4 (25 January 1948): 4. This article was a response to President Bierut’s 1947 speech about socialist realism. 70. Zofia Lissa, “Aspekt socjologiczny w polskiej muzyce współczesnej,” Kwartalnik Muzyczny 21–22 (1948): 104-43. 71.  Ibid., 131. 72.  Ibid., 141.

notes    209 73.  Ibid., 140. 74.  Ibid., 131–32. 75.  Kisielewski, “Czy muzyka jest niehumanistyczna?,” 15–17. 76.  Andrzej Walicki has argued that the broadly liberal, “European” vision for a heterogenous, multicultural Poland belonged to the early nineteenth century, but that the partitions and the twentieth-century wars denuded that tradition, leaving in its wake a more insular Polish nationalism. While I see Walicki’s point, there was also a functional liberal European intelligentsia in twentieth-century Poland, and they used their cultural capital to negotiate with the state for funding, support, and creative freedom. I develop this argument further in chapter 2. See Andrzej Walicki, “Intellectual Elites and the Vicissitudes of ‘Imagined Nation’ in Poland,” in Intellectuals and the Articulation of the Nation, ed. Ronald Grigor Suny and Michael D. Kennedy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 259–87. 77.  Kwartalnik Muzyczny was the official organ of the Musicology Section of the Polish Composers’ Union. In 1948, the editor-in-chief was Adolf Chybiński, and the editorial board included Zdzisław Jachimecki, Fr. Hieronim Feicht, Zofia Lissa, Stefania Łobaczewska, Kazimierz Sikorski, Zygmunt Mycielski, Józef Chomiński, and Marian Sobieski. 78. “Ankieta,” Kwartalnik Muzyczny 23 (1948): 226. 79. “Ankieta i wypowiedzi: Bolesław Woytowicz i Konstanty Régamey,” Kwartalnik Muzyczny 24 (1948): 140–65; “Odpowiedzi na ankietę: Zygmunt Mycielski,” Kwartalnik Muzyczny 25 (1949): 162–64. There were no further published responses to the survey, possibly because of the shift in public discourse that took place after the August 1949 Łagów conference, which I discuss in chapter 2. 80.  “Ankieta i wypowiedzi: Bolesław Woytowicz i Konstanty Régamey,” 165. 81.  “Odpowiedzi na ankietę: Zygmunt Mycielski,” 163. Emphasis in original. This statement was in response to the survey’s seventh question, which asked respondents about future possibilities in musical form. 82.  Ibid., 164. 83.  The state was eager to recognize Woytowicz as a good model for other Polish composers, awarding him with a National Prize (Nagroda Państwowa) for the Symphony no. 2 in 1948. 84.  “Ankieta i wypowiedzi: Bolesław Woytowicz i Konstanty Régamey,” 148–49. 85.  Ibid., 148. 86.  Ibid., 149. 87.  Zygmunt Mycielski, “Horyzont Szymanowskiego,” Nowiny Literackie (6 April 1947), in Ucieczki z pięciolinii, 196. 88.  David Tompkins, Composing the Party Line: Music and Politics in Early Cold War Poland and East Germany (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2013), 25–26. 89.  Tikhon Khrennikov, “O nowej drogi twórczości muzycznej,” Ruch Muzyczny 4, no. 18 (September 1948): 3. 90.  “Deklaracja kompozytorów polskich złożona na Walnym Zgromadzeniu Związku Kompozytorów Polskich,” Kwartalnik Muzyczny 25 (1949): 239. 91. Ibid. 92.  Ibid., 240.

210     notes C HA P T E R 2

1. Andrei Zhdanov, “Concluding Speech at a Conference of Soviet Music Workers, 1948,” ed. and trans. Eleanor Fox, Stella Jackson, and Harold C. Feldt, in On Literature, Music, and Philosophy (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1950), 52–75. For greater detail about this meeting of the Soviet Composers’ Union, see chapter 5 of Kiril Tomoff, Creative Union: The Professional Organization of Soviet Composers, 1939–1953 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006). Simon Morrison and Laurel Fay both discuss the meeting’s impact in the context of specific composers’ lives: Morrison, The People’s Artist: Prokofiev’s Soviet Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009) and Fay, Shostakovich: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). 2.  Andrzej Żdanow, “O zagadnieniach muzyki radzieckiej,” Odrodzenie, no. 26 (27 June 1948): 3–6. Among the few mentions of Zhdanov in the music press before 1949, Włodzimierz Sokorski had invoked Zhdanov’s name at the 1948 union congress, and Kwartalnik Muzy­ czny (1948, no. 23) had printed a translated speech from musicologist Boris Asafyev, who discussed Zhdanov’s ideas. Even after the Łagów congress, though, Zhdanov’s name did not appear frequently in Polish musical discourse. 3.  ZKP 12/91 Protokół z Konferencji Kompozytorów w Łagowie Lubuskim 5–8 VIII 1949r. 4. Ibid. 5.  Zygmunt Bauman, “Intellectuals in East-Central Europe: Continuity and Change,” Eastern European Politics and Societies 1, no. 2 (1987): 179. 6.  ZKP 12/91 Protokół z Konferencji Kompozytorów w Łagowie Lubuskim 5–8 VIII 1949r. 7.  J. Mackenzie Pierce explains that Lissa also often found herself in an oppositional relationship with Polish and Soviet authorities. She maintained a variety of official positions throughout the Stalinist era, but she was constantly balancing her commitments to political and cultural circles. Pierce, “Life and Death for Music,” 376–77. 8.  For example, literary figure Julian Przyboś had also been fighting for the continued dissemination of elite culture in the 1940s. See his “Upowszechnienie czego?” Odrodzenie, no. 26 (30 June 1946): 1–2. Historian Marci Shore points out that the increasing unpopularity of this sentiment during the Zhdanovshchina resulted in Przyboś being sent abroad as a diplomat. Shore, Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism, 1918–1968 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 277–78. 9.  ZKP 12/91 Protokół z Konferencji Kompozytorów w Łagowie Lubuskim 5-8 VIII 1949r. 10.  For more context about the significance of the symphony under socialism, Elaine Kelly writes about the significance of the German symphonic tradition in the GDR. Kelly, Composing the Canon in the German Democratic Republic: Narratives of Nineteenth-Century Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), especially chapter 1. 11.  Beata Bolesławska discusses both Turski’s and Woytowicz’s war-themed symphonies against a tradition of Polish symphonism. In general, her analyses of the Polish symphonies from the Stalinist era are helpful because she considers them on their own merits, within a longer Polish context, rather than merely as documents of socialist realism. Bolesławska, The Symphony and Symphonic Thinking in Polish Music since 1956 (London: Routledge, 2019).

notes    211 12.  ZKP 12/91 Protokół z Konferencji Kompozytorów w Łagowie Lubuskim 5-8 VIII 1949r. 13. Ibid. 14.  Archive of Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne 2334/45 Undated document, “Związek Kompozytorów Polskich: Dokument Informacyjny.” The document is undated, but it is held in a folder dedicated to materials from 1949. 15.  Adrian Thomas notes that Polish Radio also broadcast a recording of Turski’s symphony in 1954. “Turski, Zbigniew,” Grove Music Online, accessed 4 February 2019, www. oxfordmusiconline.com. 16.  There was an incident after the Symphony’s performance at the opening concert of the IV International Chopin Piano Competition in late 1949; apparently, the Soviet judges staged a walkout in protest of the piece’s formalist character. It is not entirely certain what happened next, but Lutosławski did note in a January 1950 letter to conductor (and Lutosławski’s close friend and champion) Grzegorz Fitelberg that authorities were not going to allow the composition to be published or recorded. Danuta Gwizdalanka and Krzysztof Meyer, Witold Lutosławski: Droga do dojrzałości (Kraków: Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzy­ czne, 2003), 183–87. 17.  Gwizdalanka and Meyer document the slow process of Ruch Muzyczny’s takeover and closure at the end of 1949. Witold Lutosławski: Droga do dojrzałości, 191–94. 18.  Cindy Bylander, “Clichés Revisited: Poland’s 1949 Łagów Composers’ Conference,” Polski Rocznik Muzykologiczny (2015): 15–34. Bylander responds in this article to a body of earlier scholarly work about the Łagów congress, including Krzysztof Baculewski, Polska twórczość kompozytorska 1945–1984 (Kraków: Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, 1987) and Adrian Thomas, Polish Music since Szymanowski. 19. Tompkins, Composing the Party Line. See also David Tompkins, “Composing for and with the Party: Andrzej Panufnik and Stalinist Poland,” The Polish Review 54, no. 3 (2009): 271–85. 20.  David Tompkins points out that, although Turski suffered one of the most brutal critiques at Łagów, he also continued to write compositions that fit into these categories; on the other hand, he also voiced his open disdain for the State’s influence over composers’ creative freedom in subsequent union meetings. The complexity of Turski’s case is a reflection, therefore, of the difficult choices facing composers in this period. Tompkins, Composing the Party Line, 29, 39, 141. 21.  This approach to generating progress—filling institutional and cultural gaps—might fruitfully be compared to similar discourses taking place at the same time in Germany and elsewhere in the postwar moment. Lack language was particularly powerful in conjunction with discourses about rebuilding and modernization that I have discussed in chapter 1. For the German context, see Beal, New Music, New Allies, and Iddon, New Music at Darmstadt. 22.  ZKP 12/5 V Walny Zjazd (16, 17, 18, 19 VI. 1950 Wwa). 23.  Ibid. Beata Bolesławska traces Panufnik’s encounter with the regime’s changeable opinions in relation to his Sinfonia Rustica, which first won a prestigious composition prize in 1949 and then, less than a year later, became a target of criticism for Sokorski and Tikhon Khrennikov. Bolesławska, The Life and Works of Andrzej Panufnik (1914–1991), trans. Richard. J. Reisner (London: Routledge, 2016), 98–100.

212     notes 24.  Polish cultural historian Barbara Fijałkowska has argued that, during the early stages of the political Thaw in Poland, it was leaders’ readiness to discuss weaknesses in cultural life that began to activate the creative unions. Fijałkowska, Polityka i twórcy, 256. 25.  John Connelly, Captive University: The Sovietization of East German, Czech, and Polish Higher Education 1945–1956 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), especially chapters 8 and 9. 26. Katherine Verdery, National Ideology under Socialism: Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceaușescu’s Romania (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), especially chapter 2. 27. Tompkins, Composing the Party Line, 124n9. 28.  ZKP 12/5 V Walny Zjazd (16, 17, 18, 19 VI. 1950 Wwa). 29.  Zygmunt Mycielski, Dziennik 1950–1959, edited by Zofia Mycielska-Golik (Warsaw: Iskry, 1999), 18. Emphasis in original. 30.  Ibid., 15–16, 48–49. 31.  Adrian Thomas, “File 750: Composers, Politics, and the Festival of Polish Music (1951),” Polish Music Journal 5, no. 1 (2002), accessed 13 February 2020, https://polishmusic .usc.edu/research/publications/polish-music-journal/vol5no1/composers-politics-polish -music-festival. 32.  Tompkins, “Composing for and with the Party.” Tompkins also discusses the Festival of Polish Music in Composing the Party Line, 136–42. 33.  ZKP 12/116 Protokóły przesłuchiwania utworów komponowanych przez członków ZKP 1950–56r. 34.  ZKP 12/6 VI Walny Zjazd (11, 12, 13 XII 1951 Wwa). 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid. 37.  Alfred Gradstein’s prize-winning A Word about Stalin (1951) became something of a flashpoint in this discussion, with several composers (including Zbigniew Turski) arguing that socialist realism was not capable of conveying Polishness or of serving as the foundation of a Polish national style. Andrzej Tuchowski speaks more about Gradstein’s cantata, providing important context about the creation of explicitly ideological music—a topic that I have not addressed here—in “ ‘State Music’ in Poland under the Stalinist Regime: Alfred Gradstein’s Cantata A Word about Stalin (1951),” in Composing for the State: Music in Twentieth-Century Dictatorships, ed. Esteban Buch, Igor Contreras Zubillaga, and Manuel Deniz Silva (London: Routledge, 2016): 121–42. 38. Emily Abrams Ansari, “Shaping the Policies of Cold War Musical Diplomacy: An Epistemic Community of American Composers,” Diplomatic History 36, no. 1 (2012): 41–52. 39. David Tompkins discusses the early history of the Commissions Committee at length in the third chapter of his Composing the Party Line. 40.  Marina Frolova-Walker makes a similar argument about composers and agency within Soviet cultural institutions in her important study Stalin’s Music Prize: Soviet Culture and Politics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016). 41. Tompkins, Composing the Party Line, 144–46. 42.  Leah Goldman also writes about internal review processes in the Soviet Composers’ Union as a form of peer review in the second chapter of her dissertation, “Art of Intransi-

notes    213 gence: Soviet Composers and Art Music Censorship, 1945–1957” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2015). 43.  ZKP 12/117 Recenzje utworów zamawianych przez ZKP 1951–1953r. 44.  Ibid. Żuławski’s review was submitted in June 1952. 45.  Adrian Thomas, Polish Music since Szymanowski, 72. 46.  Tomasz Tarnawczyk discusses these ideological training sessions, which were held in April and June of 1952. He does not identify the speaker of the above quotation, but does cite a newspaper review from Kazimierz Nowowiejski, “W muzykalnym Poznaniu,” Głos Wielkopolski no. 41 (1953): 4. For more information, see Tarnawczyk, “Symfonie Grażyny Bacewicz na tle sytuacji społeczno-politycznej w powojennej Polsce,” in Grażyna Bacewicz: Konteksty życia i twórczość, ed. Marta Szoka (Łódź: Akademia Muzyczna im. Grażyny i Kiejstuta Bacewiczów w Łodzi, 2016), 115–24. 47. Gąsiorowska, Kisielewski, 67–70, 98–101. 48.  ZKP 12/117 Recenzje skomponowanych utworów 1951–1953r. Ekier’s review was submitted in April 1952. 49.  Ibid. Lutosławski’s review was submitted in April 1952. 50.  ZKP 12/54 Protokoły z posiedzeń Komisji Zamówień i Zakupów 1948-1957. The decision not to pay Kisielewski was handed down at a July 1952 meeting (at which Lutosławski had been absent) and then Lutosławski raised his objections at the September 1952 meeting. 51. Stefan Kisielewski’s Fantasia for piano was finally published in 2018 by Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne. 52.  Zygmunt Mycielski, “Aktualne zagadnienie życia muzycznego,” Przegląd Kulturalny 2, no. 6 (1953): 5. 53. Ibid. 54.  Marta Fik, Kultura polska po Jałcie (London: Polonia, 1989), 194, 205–06. 55.  ZKP 12/7 VII Walny Zjazd (24, 25, 26 IV 1954 Wwa). 56.  In context, it is clear that Perkowski is “joking” in this statement, and that he is also mocking his colleagues for placing Lissa in the role of villain—but his tone (especially in repeated use of her first name) betrays more condescension than concern. ZKP 12/7 VII Walny Zjazd (24, 25, 26 IV 1954 Wwa). 57.  ZKP 12/8 VIII Walny Zjazd (4, 5, 6 VI 1955 Wwa). 58.  Stefan Jarociński takes Baird’s argument even further in his review of the festival, arguing that Polish composers needed access to “all of the foreign achievements in the field of art,” no less than a scientist needed to be acquainted with the most advanced contemporary achievements in science and technology. “Impresje sceptyczne: Na marginesie II Festiwalu Muzyki Polskiej,” Przegląd Kulturalny 4, no. 22 (1955): 1–3. Jarociński’s article was the subject of considerable debate at the 1955 congress. 59. Mycielski, Dziennik 1950–1959, 101. 60.  Zygmunt Mycielski, “O twórczości muzycznej dziesięciolecia,” ZKP 12/8 VIII Walny Zjazd (4, 5, 6 VI 1955 Wwa). 61. Ibid. 62.  Ibid. The mention of Frank Martin stands out here, because so much of his output postdates the war. Mycielski may have been aware of Martin’s music through his continued contact with Konstanty Régamey.

214     notes 63. Chowrimootoo, Middlebrow Modernism, 12. Danielle Fosler-Lussier’s discussion of middlebrow modernism in relation to Bartók is also relevant here. Fosler-Lussier, Music Divided. 64.  Adrian Thomas, “The Hidden Composer: Witold Lutosławski and Polish Radio, 1946–1963,” in Witold Lutosławski: Człowiek i dzieło w perspektywie kultury muzycznej XX wieku, eds. Jan Astriab, Maciej Jabłoński, and Jan Stęszewski (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskiego Towarzystwa Przyjaciół Nauk, 1999), 211–20. 65.  Adrian Thomas discusses Lutosławski’s use of folk material in the Concerto in his article, “MAT. LUDOWE: The Lutos File,” in Lutosławski’s Worlds, ed. Lisa Jakelski and Nicholas Reyland (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2018), 227–53. 66.  Zofia Lissa, “Koncert na orkiestrę W. Lutosławskiego,” Przegląd Kulturalny 4, no. 8 (1955): 4. 67.  Ibid. Lissa’s discussion of Lutosławski’s harmony also resonates with the language used by British critics in the same period. For instance, in his analysis of Sibelius’s harmony, Constant Lambert wrote that “the music of the future must inevitably be directed toward a new angle of vision rather than to the exploitation of a new vocabulary.” Lambert, Music Ho! A Study of Music in Decline (London: Penguin, 1948); quoted in Chowrimootoo, Middlebrow Modernism, 12. 68.  Lissa, “Koncert na orkiestrę.” 69.  Lissa compared the process of artistic evolution to the process of social evolution: both processes sometimes founder when social actors rely too heavily on comfortable past conventions. This argument resonates also with contemporary socialist discourse about new music in the GDR, discussed by Laura Silverberg in “The East German Sonderweg to Modern Music, 1956–1971” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2007). The difference in this case is that Lissa remained absolutely opposed to the exploration and development of dodecaphony or serialism, preferring to praise works like Lutosławski’s Concerto, which was still grounded in traditional harmony. 70.  Jarociński worked with Józef Chomiński at the formidable Art Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. 71.  Stefan Jarociński, “Wielka muzyka,” Przegląd Kulturalny 3, no. 49 (1954): 2. 72. Ibid. 73.  “Próba oceny sytuacji w kulturze po III Plenum,” Report from the Wydział Kultury (signed by Director Stefan Żółkiewski) sent to Józef Cyrankiewiecz, Jakub Berman, Edward Ochab, and Roman Zambrowski (26 January 1956), AAN 237/XVIII/108. 74. Ibid. 75.  AAN 237/XVIII/120. The undated report bears the inscription “Zofia Lissa,” written at the conclusion in pencil; this signature does not appear to be in Lissa’s own hand. Thus, while the report seems to have come from Lissa, its provenance is not certain. 76.  Ibid. Emphasis in original. This statement was physically appended to the original report, inserted at an unknown later point. 77.  A. Kemp-Welch, Poland under Communism: A Cold War History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 62–64; Andrzej Paczkowski, The Spring Will Be Ours: Poland and the Poles from Occupation to Freedom, trans. Jane Cave (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 267–69. 78. Kemp-Welch, Poland under Communism, 76.

notes    215 79.  “Co robić?” Po prostu (8 April 1956); reprinted in Na czołówce: prasa w październiku 1956 roku, ed. Wiesław Władyka (Warsaw: Pańtstwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1989), 187. The connection between atomic energy, futurity, and development may have been solidified in the previous year when the Soviet Union announced that they would offer support to Eastern Bloc nations to develop nuclear research programs “for peaceful reasons.” In conjunction with this move, Soviet authorities also entered into negotiations with other world powers to regulate and share information about (non-weaponized) atomic science; the result was the 1957 founding of the International Atomic Energy Agency. See David Holloway, “The Soviet Union and the Creation of the International Atomic Energy Agency,” Cold War History 16, no. 2 (2016): 177–93. Patryk Babiracki has argued that Polish scientists resisted the influence of Soviet science in the early 1950s, and that, by 1955, they were also using language of lack and stagnation to critique their own field (and to advocate for change). Their desire to increase their contacts with the international community would likely have led them to embrace participation in institutions such as the IAEA. Babiracki, Soviet Soft Power in Poland: Culture and the Making of Stalin’s New Empire, 1943–1957 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015). 80.  Both groups were named after the parts of the city in which they tended to meet. 81.  Paweł Machcewicz, “Intellectuals and Mass Movements. The Study of Political Dissent in Poland in 1956,” Contemporary European History 6, no. 3 (1997): 374. 82.  Quoted in Barabara Łopieńska and Ewa Szymańska, Stare numery (Warsaw: Alfa, 1990), 56. 83.  Leszek Kołakowski, “Intelektualiści a ruch komunistyczny,” Nowe Drogi no. 9 (1956); reprinted as “Intellectuals and the Communist Movement,” in Toward a Marxist Humanism, trans. Jane Zielonko Peel (New York: Grove Press, 1968), 159. Nowe Drogi (New Paths) was the Central Committee's journal of theory and politics. 84.  Andrzej Friszke, Opozycja polityczna w PRL 1945–1980 (London: Aneks, 1994), 129. 85. The events of the Polish October Revolution are recounted in A. Kemp-Welch, Poland under Communism, 76–104, and in Paczkowski, The Spring Will Be Ours, 262–78. A longer, more detailed study of the period—and not just of events taking place in the political center, but throughout the entire country—can be found in Paweł Machcewicz, Rebellious Satellite: Poland 1956, trans. Maya Latynski (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). 86.  For comparisons of the Polish and Hungarian cases in 1956, see the work of Johanna Granville, including her “Poland and Hungary, 1956: A Comparative Essay Based on New Archival Findings,” in Revolution and Resistance in Eastern Europe: Challenges to Communist Rule, eds. Kevin McDermott and Matthew Stibbe (New York: Berg, 2006), 57–77. 87.  ZKP 12/31 Protokoły z posiedzeń Prezydium ZG ZKP 1955–56 (Meeting from 27 October 1956); this statement was subsequently reprinted in the Composers’ Union’s Informational Bulletin no. 3 (1956): 7. 88.  The origins of the Festival and the lengthy process of preparations and negotiations (both domestic and international) that preceded its first installation in 1956 have been treated in Jakelski, Making New Music in Cold War Poland, and in Cynthia Bylander, “The Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music, 1956–1961: Its Goals, Structures, Programs, and People” (PhD diss., Ohio State University, 1989). 89. Jakelski, Making New Music in Cold War Poland, 18–27.

216     notes

157.

90.  Bylander, “The Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music,”

91.  From Stravinsky, the program included: Fireworks (1908), The Firebird suite (1909), Petrushka suite (1911), The Rite of Spring (1913), Jeu de cartes (1937), Ebony Concerto (1945); from Honegger: Sonatine for two violins (1920), Pacific 231 (1923), Symphony no. 2, “Symphonie pour cordes” (1941), Symphony no. 3, “Symphonie liturgique,” (1946); from Bartók: 44 Duets for two violins (1931), String Quartet no. 5 (1934), Concerto for Orchestra (1943). 92.  Lucjan Kydryński, “O dziwnych utworach i ciekawym festiwalu,” Przekrój, no. 599 (30 September 1956): 3, 14. 93.  Witold Lutosławski, “Zagajenie dyskusji na walnym zjeździe Związku Kompozytorów Polskich,” Ruch Muzyczny 1, no. 1 (1957): 3. 94.  Ibid., 2. 95. Ibid. C HA P T E R 3

1.  AAN/237/XVIII/109, 170, and 172. 2.  Ibid. The situation was temporary; as early as November 1958, there were already rumblings about re-reorganizing the Culture Commission to reclaim some of the policymaking function of the old Culture Department. Finally, in 1960, the old Culture Department was resurrected. See AAN/237/XVIII/188. 3.  David Tompkins notes that this institutional transformation, and especially the loss of centralized party control over culture after 1956, marked a major difference between Poland and its close neighbor, the GDR. Composing the Party Line, 76–77. For more details about the changes in Polish party-state cultural apparatus during this period, see Fijałkowska, Polityka i twórcy, 440–56. 4.  Meeting of the Komisja Kultury (31 October 1957), AAN 237/XVIII/167. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8.  One of the best historical considerations of the mała stabilizacja period is found in Andrzej Friszke’s 1994 study, Opozycja polityczna w PRL 1945–1980, especially 133–223. In English-language scholarship, see Kemp-Welch, Poland under Communism, 124–45 and Paczkowski, The Spring Will Be Ours, 292–94. 9.  Quote from the official statement of the party’s Central Committee in Marta Fik, Kultura polska po Jałcie, 289. See also Barbara Łopieńska and Ewa Szymańska, Stare numery (Warsaw: Alfa, 1990). 10.  The criticisms of Kuryluk were brought to a head by the highly publicized emigration of author and poet Marek Hłasko to Western Europe in early 1958. For more information about Hłasko and the subsequent fallout for Kuryluk, see Ewa Kuryluk, “Hłasko a Kurylukowie,” Zeszyty Historyczne, no. 164 (Paris: Instytut Literacki, 2008): 241–49. 11. AAN 237/XVIII/175. Stefan Żółkiewski, the pre-Gomułka era leader of the party’s defunct Culture Department, was one of the loudest voices here. The archival record reveals a great deal of in-fighting and controversy among the conference organizers and participants.

notes    217 12.  “Najpilniejsze zadania organizacyjne w zakresie pracy kulturalno-oświatowej: Referat J. Morawskiego na naradzie w Warszawie,” Życie Warszawy, no. 303 (19 December 1958): 5. In 1958, Morawski still served as the secretary of the party’s Central Committee. 13. Ibid. 14.  See, for example, Kydryński, “O dziwnych utworach i ciekawym festiwalu.” 15.  “Notatnik muzyczny: Muzyka ‘konkretna,’ ” Przegląd Kulturalny 2, no. 3 (1953): 7. The article also included lengthy translated passages from Pierre Henry’s article, “Musique concrète,” Musique Contemporaine 4–6 (1952): 217–18. 16.  ZKP 12/7 VII Walny Zjazd (24, 25, 26 IV 1954 Wwa). This last was a reference to Olivier Messiaen. 17. Ibid. 18. Mycielski, Dziennik 1950–1959, 159. 19.  ZKP 12/9 IX Walny Zjazd (9, 10, 11 III. 1957 Wwa). 20.  “Protokół z posiedzenia Prezydium w dniu 27.II.1957 r.,” Archive of Polish Radio and Television, Komitet do Spraw Radia i Telewizji 863/1, TOM 1, 57-1-2–57-5-25. 21.  The archival record demonstrates this caution. The first draft of a memorandum, dated 3 March 1957, included a brief outline of the Studio’s mission, which would include serving as “a workshop for the forging of new acoustic resources.” This initial draft was subsequently edited in pencil, and this phrase was crossed out; the final version, dated 7 March, no longer included any specific statement about the Studio’s function. Document dated 3 March 1957 (corrected in pencil to 7 March 1957), Archive of Polish Radio and Television, Komitet do Spraw Radia i Telewizji 1544/5, TOM 1, 1957.1.7–1957.6.21. 22.  “O studiu eksperymentalnym mówią: Józef Patkowski (muzykolog, redaktor muzyczny Teatru Polskiego Radia),” Antena, no. 4 (1957): 5. 23.  “O studiu eksperymentalnym mówią: Jerzy Pański (sekretarz generalny Polskiego Radia),” Antena, no. 4 (1957): 5. 24.  “O studiu eksperymentalnym mówią: Witold Lutosławski (kompozytor),” Antena, no. 5 (1957): 6. 25.  Włodzimierz Sokorski, “Nie stać w miejscu—oto jest zadanie,” Antena, no. 8 (August 1957): 1. 26.  Ibid., 2. Although the launch of Sputnik would not come until October of that year, it is interesting that Sokorski borrowed the language of the space race to infuse a sense of modernity and progress in his comparison here. 27.  “Protokół z posiedzenia Prezydium w dniu 2. X.1957,” Archive of Polish Radio and Television, Komitet do Spraw Radia i Telewizji 863/2, TOM 1, 57.9.4–57.12.7. 28.  Document dated 9 November 1957, Archive of Polish Radio and Television, Komitet do Spraw Radia i Telewizji 887/19, TOM 3, 1957-01-01–1957-12-31. 29.  The collaborative nature of work at the Experimental Studio recalls the environment at Westdeutscher Rundfunk described by Jennifer Iverson in her article “Invisible Collaboration: The Dawn and Evolution of elektronische Musik,” Music Theory Spectrum, 39 (2017): 200–222. 30.  Kotoński realized the first version of this piece in July of 1959, spending forty hours in the Studio; later, in December 1959 and January 1960 he realized a second version, spending just over one hundred hours in the Studio. “Protokół do Biura Budżetu i Księgowości, w

218     notes związku z przeprowadzoną kontrolą w Studio Eksperymentalnym przez st. Rewidenta ob. Zdzisława Rałła przedstawiam następujące wyjaśnienia (9.VII.1960),” Archive of Polish Radio and Television, Komitet do Spraw Radia i Telewizji 968/17. 31.  Sean Williams discusses the ontological relationship between the study/realization score and the recording of Stockhausen’s Studie II, which was the first electronic music composition published in this format. “Interpretation and Performance Practice in Realizing Stockhausen’s Studie II,” Journal of the Royal Music Association 141, no. 2 (2016): 445–81. 32.  “Projekt perspektywicznego rozwoju i działalności Studia Eksperymentalnego (12. VI.1969),” Archive of Polish Radio and Television, Komitet do Spraw Radia i Telewizji 1220/4, TOM 4, 1969.1.1–1969.12-31. 33.  Tadeusz Kaczyński, “Muzyka eksperymentalna,” Ruch Muzyczny 4, no. 21 (November 1960): 19. Kaczyński’s article was a review of a concert of electronic music at the 1960 Warsaw Autumn festival; Kotoński’s music had been programmed and heard alongside many prominent Western European and American composers, including John Cage. 34.  By 1968, twenty-two compositions had been realized at the Experimental Studio, including several by European composers, such as Franco Evangelisti and Arne Nordheim. “Protokół z posiedzenia Prezydium Komitetu w dniu 14.VIII.1968,” Archive of Polish Radio and Television, Komitet do Spraw Radia i Telewizji 1445/9 TOM 4: 1968-07-07, 1968.8.14. 35.  Proposal, sent from Józef Patkowski to Włodzimierz Sokorski, dated 9 April 1959, Personal Archive of Eugeniusz Rudnik. 36.  “Lista gości Polskiego Radia zakwaterowanych w Hotelu MDM,” Document dated 30 May 1959, Personal Archive of Eugeniusz Rudnik. 37. Leon Markiewicz, “Warszawskie Seminarium Muzyki Eksperymentalnej,” Ruch Muzyczny 3, no. 14 (July 1959): 10. 38.  Radio leadership audited the goals and activities of the Studio in both 1960 and 1968. Documents related to these audits are held at the Archive of Polish Radio and Television. 39.  Report dated 5 July 1960, signed by auditor Zdzisław Rałł and Experimental Studio Director Józef Patkowski, Archive of Polish Radio and Polish Television, Komitet do Spraw Radia i Telewizji 968/17. 40.  The September 1957 issue of Antena announced that Polish Radio 3 would begin broadcasting in January 1958. This station, which the author compared to the BBC’s Third Programme, would have an “elite character,” and it would be devoted exclusively to the broadcast of literary and music programming “on a very high level.” These programs would be offered from 9–11 p.m. “Program III,” Antena, no. 9 (1957): 37. 41.  After experimenting with a cymbal for the film’s score, he decided to write a composition based on this specific sound. Włodzimierz Kotoński, Muzyka elektroniczna (Kraków: Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, 2002), 36. 42.  For instance, in 1963, two of the most important cultural journals, Przegląd Kulturalny (Cultural Review) and Nowa Kultura (New Culture) were disbanded and “combined” into a new journal, simply entitled Kultura (Culture). The archival collections of the party’s Culture Department at Archiwum Akt Nowych clearly demonstrate that this was a retaliatory action against the editorial boards of both journals, which authorities believed to be too Western-facing, too focused on democracy and liberalism.

notes    219 43. Zygmunt Mycielski, “Czy muzyka europejska wychodzi z zamkniętego kręgu?” Europa; reproduced in Europa: Miesięcznik literacki, ed. Marciń Król, 63–66 (Warsaw: Instytut Dokumentacji i Studiów nad Literaturą Polską, 2007). 44. Danuta Gwizdalanka and Krzysztof Meyer’s biography of composer Witold Lutosławski documents the slow process of Ruch Muzyczny’s virtual takeover by the Marxist group in late 1948 and early 1949 and then its closure at the end of 1949. Gwizdalanka and Meyer, Witold Lutosławski: Droga do dojrzałości, 191–94. 45.  ZKP 12/8 VIII Walny Zjazd (4, 5, 6 VI 1955 Wwa). 46.  AAN 237/XVIII/142. 47.  ZKP 12/9 IX Walny Zjazd (9, 10, 11 III. 1957 Wwa). Near the end of the eighth issue of Ruch Muzyczny in 1957, there was a tiny notice from the editorship, informing readers that Bogusław Schäffer was (“of his own accord”—“na własne życzenie”) stepping away from his position on the editorial board. 48.  “Od redakcji,” Ruch Muzyczny 1, no. 1 (May 1957): 1. 49. Ibid. 50.  Bogusław Schäffer, “Nowe drogi muzyki współczesnej,” Ruch Muzyczny 1, no. 1 (May 1957): 7–18. See chapter 5 for a more thorough discussion of this article and its implications for Schäffer’s understanding of avant-gardism. 51.  Bogusław Schäffer, “Nowe drogi muzyki współczesnej (dokończenie),” Ruch Muzy­ czny 1, no. 2 (May 1957): 23. 52. Janusz Zathey, “Darmstadt—Mekka nowej muzyki,” Ruch Muzyczny 1, no. 13 (November 1957): 9. This article continues in the next issue of Ruch Muzyczny 1, no. 14 (November 1957): 25–28. 53. Ibid. 54.  Eberhard Rebling, “Ein offenes Wort an unsere polnischen Freunde,” Musik und Gesellschaft 8, no. 7 (1958): 8–11. Joy Calico has also discussed this article in its East German context in her monograph, Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw in Postwar Europe, 121. Rebling’s scathing words are a testimony to the fraught transnational relationships that existed between Eastern Bloc nations. Lisa Jakelski’s work traces the benefits and repercussions arising out of intra-Bloc cultural mobilities, highlighting the tensions that arose around Poland’s engagement with Western avant-garde developments. Jakelski, Making New Music in Cold War Poland, 121–36. 55.  Rebling, “Ein offenes Wort.” 56.  Victor Gorodinsky, “Po povodu nekotorykh vystuplenii pol’skikh kritikov,” Sovet­ skaya muzïka, no. 2 (1958): 127–31. Both Rebling and Gorodinsky zeroed in on Pilarski, focusing especially on his report from the 1957 Prague Spring festival. In that report, Pilarski criticized Shostakovich and other prominent Soviet composers, arguing that theirs was not the path of musical progress. It was very clear that, from Pilarski’s point of view, there was only one path forward, and that path pointed Westward. Bohdan Pilarski, “Fakty, wrażenia, refleksje,” Ruch Muzyczny 1, no. 6 (July 1957): 13–21. 57.  To the best of my knowledge, this document exists only as a draft manuscript held in the Archive of PWM. It is not clear whether this response was meant to appear as a published response, or merely as a letter sent privately to Rebling. Archive of Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne 2334/51.

220     notes 58.  In a letter to Soviet musicologist Igor Belza, PWM director Tadeusz Ochlewski complained that the article had been, “strictly speaking, a libelous attack, for it was pointless and demonstrated ill will.” Letter from Ochlewski to Belza (8 August 1958), Archive of Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne 2334/143. 59.  In May of 1958, the Soviet party’s Central Committee issued a statement, reconsidering the 1948 order that had, under Zhdanov’s leadership, initiated socialist realist controls in music. This 1958 statement was translated and published in Ruch Muzyczny 2, no. 14 (August 1958): 15. 60.  Archive of Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne 2334/51. 61.  Zygmunt Mycielski, “Ciężka artyleria,” Przegląd Kulturalny 7, no. 38 (1958): 6. This argument resonates in interesting ways with Milan Kundera’s famous invocation of the “Tragedy of Central Europe” (1983). The assertion that Poland has a particular kinship with the West that should not be displaced by its current status within the Eastern Bloc is an important one that will be developed further in the final chapters of this monograph. 62.  Mycielski referenced “Entartete Kunst” in his column, clearly intending to imply that Rebling’s arguments and accusations resonated with Nazi cultural policies. 63. Mycielski, Dziennik 1950–1959, 351–52. 64. Archive of Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne 2334/51. The document, dated 2 October 1958, describes a meeting from 30 September. On the Soviet side, Yuri Keldysh (editor of Sovetskaya muzïka), Boris Lyatoshynsky (composer from Kiev Conservatory), and Leonid Entelis (editor of Leningradskaya Pravda) were in attendance, and Ruch Muzyczny was represented by Bronisław Rutkowski, Zygmunt Mycielski, Bohdan Pilarski, and Mieczysław Tomaszewski. Stefan Jarociński and Witold Rudziński represented the Composers’ Union. 65. Ibid. 66.  Ibid. Letter from ZKP to PWM, undated. 67.  Ibid. Handwritten, undated document from Tadeusz Ochlewski, noting that the ministry had been meeting with ZKP representatives without his involvement as the director of PWM. “This is an affront!” he exclaimed. 68.  AAN 366/Gabinet Ministra 56. Ludwik Erhardt notes that there were, indeed, financial and practical problems facing Ruch Muzyczny; half of the editorial board lived in Warsaw and half lived in Kraków, which meant that communication was inefficient. Listy Zygmunta Mycielskiego do Ludwika Erhardta i redakcji ‘Ruchu Muzycznego’ 1957–1986, ed. Ludwik Erhardt (Warsaw: ME-KOMP, 2014), 10. 69.  Letter from Stefan Kisielewski to Zarząd Główny ZKP (10 December 1958). Four days later, union leaders issued a strongly worded statement of protest, arguing that the closure of Ruch Muzyczny would represent a “reckless return” to the restrictions of the Stalinist period. Copies of Kisielewski’s letter and the union’s subsequent statement are held in ZKP 2/96. 70. Mycielski, Dziennik 1950–1959, 414. 71.  Ibid. Emphasis in original. This diary entry also includes a letter that Mycielski sent to the current chief editor of Ruch, Bronisław Rutkowski, in which he assured the editor that this charge from the ministry represented a true ultimatum, and that it would not be advisable or effective to fight it.

notes    221 72.  Mycielski, letter from 6 July 1959, in Erhardt, Listy Zygmunta Mycielskiego, 11. 73.  Mycielski recorded in his diary that the board’s membership fell into two distinct groups: Ludwik Erhardt, Józef Kański, Zdzisław Sierpiński, and Lech Terpiłowski (whom he labeled the “magazine” group, because of their willingness to work toward a more popular format), and then Stefan Jarociński, Bohdan Pociej, and Bohdan Pilarski (whom he designated as the “avant-garde” group, based on their desire to produce a journal intended for musical specialists). In a later entry, Mycielski notes that Pilarski decided to step away from his position on the board. Mycielski, Dziennik 1950–1959, 426. 74.  Ibid., 432. 75.  “Od redakcji,” Ruch Muzyczny 4, no. 1 (February 1960): 1. C HA P T E R 4

1.  David Tompkins argues that the changes in the committee’s functioning during these years reflected the union’s solidification of its professional authority. Tompkins, Composing the Party Line, 144–48. Key union archival records related to points that I make about the committee here include ZKP 12/8 VIII Walny Zjazd (4, 5, 6 VI 1955 Wwa), ZKP 12/30-31 Protokoły z posiedzeń Prezydium Zarządu Głównego 1953–1954 and 1955–1956, ZKP 12/54 Komisja zamówień i zakupów 1948–1957, and ZKP 12/119–20 Recenzje utworów zamawianych przez ZKP 1954–1955 and 1956–1961. 2.  ZKP 12/8 VIII Walny Zjazd (4, 5, 6 VI 1955 Wwa). 3. Ibid. 4. ZKP 12/31 Protokoły z posiedzeń Prezydium Zarządu Głównego 1955–1956. On 7 December 1956, the union’s Governing Committee discussed the decentralization of funding. Tracing the institutional mechanisms of that decentralization is a task that lies outside the scope of the current chapter, but it is a promising question for future research. 5.  Ibid. This was discussed in a December 1955 meeting of the union’s Governing Committee, and the change went into effect in January 1956. Bundled together with this proposal was a list of prominent composers who should serve as reviewers. It was clear that, with this loss of anonymity, came also a presumption that the reviewer would exist in a position of authority in relation to the composer who was seeking a commission. 6. “Przesłuchanie” is the same word used in the earlier 1950s to describe the listening and discussion sessions that were so characteristic of the socialist realist period; the usage of the word here in the later 1950s underscores my point in chapter 2 about the complicated function of these listening sessions; they were not only tools of censorship or repression. 7.  Kazimierz Serocki, review of Sinfonia concertante (3 July 1956), ZKP 12/120 Recenzje utworów zamawianych przez ZKP 1956–1961. 8. Ibid. 9.  Zygmunt Mycielski, review of Suita Orawska (14 January 1956), ibid. 10.  For additional discussion of the Commissions Committee during this period, see my article “Educating Audiences, Educating Composers: The Polish Composers’ Union and Upowszechnienie.” Musicology Today 7 (2010): 226–42.

222     notes 11.  Halina Goldberg, “ ‘Remembering That Tale of Grief ’: The Prophetic Voice in Chopin’s Music,” in The Age of Chopin, ed. Halina Goldberg (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 55. 12.  Polish historian Andrzej Walicki provides the clearest explication of Polish political and national messianism, explaining the ways that Polish thinkers transformed contemporary inspirations, such as those of the French Saint-Simonians, into a unique and powerful national-religious philosophy. Walicki, Philosophy and Romantic Nationalism: The Case of Poland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 237–321. 13.  Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time; Peter Osborne provides a valuable overview and interpretation of Koselleck’s ideas in The Politics of Time, 9–13. 14.  Historian Timothy Snyder cautions that the post–World War II Polish nation traced its roots back to the early modern Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth of the sixteenth century; this was based in part on a creative (or calculating) misappropriation of romantic ideology and of Polish romantic bards. Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations. 15.  Karol Szymanowski, “On Contemporary Musical Opinion in Poland,” Nowy Przegląd Literatury i Sztuki (July 1920), in Szymanowski on Music: Selected Writings of Karol Szymanowski, ed. and trans. Alistair Wightman (London: Toccata Press, 1999), 84. 16.  Ibid., 93. 17.  Konstanty Régamey, “Próba analizy ewolucji w sztuce.” 18. Régamey, Treść i forma w muzyce. I discuss this work in greater detail in chapter 1. 19.  Zygmunt Mycielski notes in a diary entry from November 1955 that he had met with Régamey at the Composers’ Union with a number of leading Polish composers (Lutosławski, Tadeusz Baird, and Grażyna Bacewicz, among others). The meeting had been organized so that Régamey could speak to them about new developments in music in the West. Dziennik 1950–1959, 158–59. 20.  For example, see Zofia Lissa’s and Włodzimierz Sokorski’s statements at the 1948 Polish Composers’ Union Congress, published in Kwartalnik Muzyczny 25 (1949). 21.  Karol Szymanowski, “My Splendid Isolation,” Kurier Polski (26 November 1922), in Szymanowski on Music: Selected Writings of Karol Szymanowski, ed. and trans. Alistair Wightman, 95–101 (London: Toccata, 1999). The article’s title appeared in English in the original, and the phrase often reappeared in Polish musical discourse (usually with a negative connotation of elitism). 22.  Sokorski, “Formalizm i realizm w muzyce,” 3. 23.  This conundrum of how to handle the legacy of an obviously significant national composer who, equally obviously, did not fall in line with socialist realist aesthetic ideology recalls the case of Bartók’s Hungarian reception during the Zhdanovshchina period. Danielle Fosler-Lussier traces these debates about Bartók’s legacy in Music Divided, 1–27. 24.  Stefania Łobaczewska, Karol Szymanowski; życie i twórczość, 1882–1937 (Kraków: Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, 1950). 25.  Ibid., 137–38. 26.  Ibid., 52. 27.  Ibid., 320. 28.  Ibid., 351. Łobaczewska did not cite Régamey in her analysis, but she did cite the artist Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy), whose aesthetic theories exerted a major

notes    223 influence on both Szymanowski and Régamey. The younger composer-critic worked to articulate Witkacy’s ideas in musical terms. She also pointed toward the phenomenological work of Roman Ingarden. 29.  Ibid., 354–55; 400–401. She noted that the varied style (rozbieżność) of Szymanow­ ski’s music during this period is heightened even further if one looked beyond the works that have a clear program attached to them. In the “absolute” compositions, she argued, Szymanowski privileged form over content. 30.  Ibid., 493. Łobaczewska indicated that Szymanowski was particularly interested in the music of the sixteenth century, with which he became more familiar through the influence of musicologist Adolf Chybiński. Alistair Wightman points out, however, that none of the musical influences here are particularly literal; fifteenth- and sixteenth-century resonances combine freely with Polish folk music. Wightman, Karol Szymanowski: His Life and Work, 295–302. 31. Wightman, Karol Szymanowski: His Life and Work, 298. 32. Łobaczewska, Karol Szymanowski, 484–85, 497. 33.  Stefan Kisielewski, “O twórczości Karola Szymanowskiego,” Twórczość, no. 4 (1947), in Z muzyką przez lata, 50–62 (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1957). 34.  Ibid., 53. 35.  Ibid., 56. 36.  Stefan Kisielewski, “Karol Szymanowski,” in Gwiazdozbiór muzyczny (Kraków: Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, 1958), 221–36. 37.  Ibid., 229 and 223. 38.  Ibid., 234. 39.  Ibid., 235. 40.  Ibid., 236. 41.  Zygmunt Mycielski, “Dziedzictwo Szymanowskiego,” Ruch Muzyczny 1, no. 2 (May 1957): 4–5. 42.  Ibid., 5. 43. Tadeusz Marek, Program Book for the I Międzynarodowy Festiwal Muzyki Współczesnej 10-21 październik 1956, 94–95. 44.  Leszek Ludorowski, “Pierwszy koncert ‘Warszawskiej Jesieni’,” Sztandar Ludu (17 October 1956); clipping held in ZKP 11/1 I Warszawska Jesień 1956 r. 45.  Ludwik Erhardt, “Wątpliwości,” Express Wieczorny (20 October 1956); clipping held in ZKP 11/1 I Warszawska Jesień 1956 r. 46.  Jerzy Młodziejowski, “Festiwal się zakończył,” Express Poznański (31 October 1956); clipping held in ZKP 11/1 I Warszawska Jesień 1956 r. 47.  Stefan Kisielewski, “Igor Strawiński,” Ruch Muzyczny 1, no. 4 (June 1957): 2–14. 48.  The responses appeared in Ruch Muzyczny as follows: Tadeusz Baird, no. 4 (June 1957): 15; Henryk Schiller, no. 5 (July 1957): 22–24; Tadeusz Machl, no. 6 (July 1957): 11–12; Witold Lutosławski, no. 7 (August 1957): 6; Wojciech Kilar, no. 8 (August 1957): 8; Adam Walaciński, no. 8 (August 1957): 9–10; Michał Spisak, no. 12 (October 1957): 7–10. 49.  “Odpowiedzi Tadeusza Bairda,” Ruch Muzyczny 1, no. 4 (June 1957): 15. 50.  “Ankieta na temat twórczości Igora Strawińskiego,” Ruch Muzyczny 1, no. 4 (June 1957): 15. The tone of this question resonates with Kisielewski’s analysis of Stravinsky’s career, suggesting that he was the author of the survey questions. In his article, he described

224     notes Stravinsky’s turn to dodecaphony as a “surprising shift,” implying that these new dodecaphonic works—about which the critic admittedly had little firsthand knowledge—indicated that the older Russian composer had reached the limits of his relevance as a force in contemporary music development. 51.  “Konferencja kompozytorów w Łagowie Lubuskim w dniach od 5.VIII do 8.VIII 1949. Protokół,” Ruch Muzyczny 5, no. 14 (October 1949): 20–21. 52.  Laura Silverberg has demonstrated that dodecaphony also served a symbolic function in East Germany, where critics attempted to rehabilitate dodecaphony and serialism as socialist musical techniques. In Poland, by contrast, dodecaphony absolutely signified Western modernism. Silverberg, “Between Dissonance and Dissidence: Socialist Modernism in the German Democratic Republic,” The Journal of Musicology 26, no. 1 (2009): 44–84. 53.  Jan Boehm, “Impresje pofestiwalowe,” Warmia i Mazury (15 December 1956); clipping held in ZKP 11/1 I Warszawska Jesień 1956 r. 54. Mycielski, Dziennik 1950–1959, 236. Mycielski mentions that he was studying dodecaphony in a book by Eimert, which was probably the Lehrbuch der Zwölftontechnik (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1950). Iwona Lindstedt notes that Mycielski ultimately employed quasi-serial ideas for the first time in his Symphony no. 2 from 1961. Iwona Lindstedt, “Konstrukcje dwunastotonowe Witolda Lutosławskiego w kontekście recepcji dodekafonii w powojennej twórczości kompozytorów polskich,” in Witold Lutosławski i jego wkład do kultury muzycznej XX wieku, ed. Jadwiga Paja-Stach (Kraków: Musica Iagellonica, 2005), 68. 55.  Mycielski, “Dziedzictwo Szymanowskiego,” 3. 56. Konstanty Régamey, “Wypowiedzi: Bolesław Woytowicz i Konstanty Régamey,” 156–58. 57.  Wojciech Kilar, “Odpowiedzi Wojciecha Kilara,” Ruch Muzyczny 1, no. 8 (August 1957): 8. 58. Tadeusz Machł, “Odpowiedzi Tadeusza Machla,” Ruch Muzyczny 1, no. 6 (July 1957): 12. 59.  ZKP 12/9 IX Walny Zjazd (9, 10, 11 III. 1957 Wwa). Zbigniew Penherski spoke on behalf of the Youth Circle of the Composers’ Union. He noted that composer Tadeusz Szeligowski had sometimes invited young composers to his home, giving them access to scores and recordings, so that they could learn about dodecaphony. I discuss the situation facing the Youth Circle in greater detail in chapter 5. 60. Mycielski, Dziennik 1950–1959, 159. 61.  Bogusław Schäffer, “Od dodekafonii do muzyki elektronowej,” Ruch Muzyczny 2, no. 1 (January 1958): 10. Schäffer may have been referring here to Lutosławski’s Overture for Strings (1948). Although the Overture for Strings does make use of a “series” of a sort, as Steven Stucky has shown, the pitch content is actually generated through the interaction of several eight-note modes. Steven Stucky, Lutosławski and His Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 38. Schäffer’s comments here are particularly strange, given the number of Polish composers—including Schäffer himself—who had been experimenting with dodecaphony since the early 1950s. See Iwona Lindstedt, Dodekafonia i serializm w twórczości kompozytorów polskich XX wieku (Lublin: Polihymnia, 2001). 62.  Stefan Jarociński, “Wielka muzyka,” Przegląd Kulturalny 3, no. 49 (1954): 2. 63.  Nicholas Reyland has argued convincingly that the English-language translation Funeral Music does not capture the cultural implications of Muzyka żałobna, which might

notes    225 be better rendered as “Music of Mourning.” Here, I have used the English title in order to conform with naming conventions throughout the rest of this study. Reyland, “Personal Loss, Cultural Grief, and Lutosławski’s Music of Mourning,” in Lutosławski’s Worlds, ed. Lisa Jakelski and Nicholas Reyland (Woodbridge, UK: The Boydell Press, 2018), 39–70. 64.  Bohdan Pilarski, “Witold Lutosławski odpowiada na pytania,” Ruch Muzyczny 2, no. 7 (April 1958): 2–5. 65.  Bohdan Pilarski, “Praska Wiosna 1957: Wrażenia, fakty i refleksje,” Ruch Muzyczny 1, no. 6 (July 1957): 20. 66. Chowrimootoo, Middlebrow Modernism, 1–29. 67.  Pilarski, “Witold Lutosławski odpowiada na pytania,” 4. 68.  Ibid., 4–5. 69.  Ibid., 5. Emphasis mine. 70.  For discussion of the further development of Lutosławski’s musico-dramatic aesthetics, and especially of his concept of “akcja” in abstract instrumental music, see Nicholas Reyland, “Lutosławski, ‘Akcja’, and the Poetics of Musical Plot,” Music & Letters 88, no. 4 (2007): 604–30; Lisa Jakelski, “Witold Lutosławski and the Ethics of Abstraction,” Twentieth-Century Music 10, no. 2 (2013): 169–202; and Zbigniew Skowron, “Lutosławski’s Aesthetics: A Reconstruction of the Composer’s Outlook,” in Lutosławski Studies, ed. Zbigniew Skowron (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 3–15. 71.  For a detailed analysis of the entire composition, see Stucky, Lutosławski and His Music, 70–78. 72.  J. Peter Burkholder makes a similar argument about Alban Berg and the opening of the Violin Concerto in his “Berg and the Possibility of Popularity,” in Alban Berg: Historical and Analytical Perspectives, ed. David Gable and Robert P. Morgan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 25–53. Lutosławski later recalled an interwar Warsaw performance of Berg’s 1935 Violin concerto (the concert was in March 1938) as one of the main exposures that he and other Polish audiences had to dodecaphony before the war. Other than that remembrance, Lutosławski did not speak about Berg as an influence in his work; in fact (rather like his feeling about Szymanowski), he noted in an interview that he felt little affinity for Berg’s music, which was grounded in a late-romantic idiom. A clearer referent (for formal processes, especially) might be Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta (1936), which, in the same interview, Lutosławski proclaimed to be one of the best compositions of the twentieth century. See Bálint András Varga and Witold Lutosławski, Lutosławski Profile (London: Chester Music, 1976). 73. Martina Homma’s close examinations of Lutosławski’s sketches provide evidence that Lutosławski was interested in the properties of twelve-tone rows, and that he worked with them privately, throughout his career. Homma, “Lutosławski’s Studies in Twelve-Tone Rows,” in Lutosławski Studies, ed. Zbigniew Skowron (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 194–210. 74. Witold Lutosławski, Zapiski, ed. Zbigniew Skowron (Warsaw: Towarzystwo im. Witolda Lutosławskiego, 2008), 10. 75. Stefan Jarociński, “Nowa muzyka Lutosławskiego,” Przegląd Kulturalny 7, no. 22 (1958): 7. 76. Ibid. 77. Ibid.

226     notes 78.  Bogusław Schäffer, “Nowy kierunek twórczości Lutosławskiego,” Życie Literackie, no. 20 (18 May 1958): 10. 79.  Jarociński, “Nowa muzyka Lutosławskiego,” 7. 80.  Stefania Łobaczewska, “Warszawska Jesień 1958,” Ruch Muzyczny 2, no. 22 (November 1958): 4. Emphasis in original. The objects of her scorn in this passage are the representatives of the Western avant-garde, such as Karlheinz Stockhausen (whose Gesang der Jünglinge and Klavierstück XI appeared on the festival program). 81.  In her discussion of Łobaczewska’s interwar music criticism, Magdalena Dziadek points out that, while the musicologist had always been an opponent of “hard” dodecaphony, she had seen promise in the work of Alban Berg. She believed that Berg was able to use contemporary technique to create music that was expressive and meaningful. Dziadek, “Twórczość krytyczno-muzyczna Stefanii Łobaczewskiej,” Muzyka 49, no. 4 (2004): 97–98. 82.  Bohdan Pilarski, “Nowe święto muzyki polskiej: po prawykonaniu ‘Muzyki żałobnej’ Witolda Lutosławskiego,” Ruch Muzyczny 2, no. 9 (May 1958): 2. 83.  Reyland, “Personal Loss, Cultural Grief, and Lutosławski’s Music of Mourning,”. 84.  Bohdan Pociej, “Muzyka polska na II Warszawskiej Jesieni,” Ruch Muzyczny 2, no. 22 (November 1958): 13. 85.  Kisielewski, “Karol Szymanowski,” 234–35. 86.  ZKP 12/117 Recenzje skomponowanych utworów 1951–1953 r. 87.  Stefan Kisielewski, Grażyna Bacewicz i jej czasy (Kraków: Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, 1964). 88. Stefan Kisielewski, “Spotkanie języków, czyli Warszawska Jesień,” Tygodnik Powszechny, no. 40 (1962); reprinted in Warszawska Jesień w zwierciadle polskiej krytyki muzycznej: Antologia tekstów z lat 1956–2006, ed. Ewa Radziwon-Stefaniuk, 61–66 (Warsaw: Warszawska Jesień, 2007). C HA P T E R 5

1.  ZKP 12/9 IX Walny Zjazd (9, 10, 11 III. 1957 Wwa). 2.  Kazimierz Sikorski was a longtime educator; he began teaching in Polish conservatories in 1921 (in Lwów), and he taught continuously until 1966. That included the wartime years, during which period he was the director of the Staatliche Musikschule in Warsaw. After the war, he immediately began teaching again in Łódź, and then shifted to become the director of the newly built State Higher School of Music in Warsaw. Most of the generation that I have described as the “post-Szymanowski” generation were Sikorski’s students before they traveled abroad for additional study. Therefore, most of the people in the room at the 1957 Composers’ Union Congress were students of Sikorski’s, or students of his students. 3.  ZKP 12/9 IX Walny Zjazd (9, 10, 11 III. 1957 Wwa). 4.  Bogusław Schäffer, Almanach polskich kompozytorów współczesnych oraz rzut oka na ich twórczość (Kraków: Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, 1956). 5. Lindstedt, Dodekafonia i serializm, 87. 6.  I do not want to give the impression that Irzykowski was Schäffer’s only influence. A ravenous consumer of philosophy, Schäffer absorbed ideas from many thinkers, including Bergson, Heidegger, and, yes, also Witkacy.

notes    227 7.  Maria Gołębiewska, Irzykowski: rzeczywistość i przedstawienie. O tezach filozoficznych Karola Irzykowskiego (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo IFiS PAN, 2006), 152–53. 8.  Bogusław Schäffer, “Najnowsze dzieło Witolda Lutosławskiego,” Tygodnik Powszechny 11, no. 1 (1955): 10–11. 9. Schäffer, Almanach polskich kompozytorów, 98–102. 10.  Ibid., 118. Actually, Schäffer grouped Rudziński with several other lesser-known composers and applied this statement as a blanket assessment. This kind of summary characterization could not have pleased Rudziński. 11.  Ibid., 116. Schäffer’s comparison here might recall the implicit gender bias present in similar assessments from Kisielewski, which I discussed in chapter 4. Despite this slight, Schäffer clearly esteemed Bacewicz; he noted that her postwar output was “undoubtedly the best” Polish music composed during that period. 12.  Seth Brodsky, “Remembering, Repeating, Passacaglia: Weak Britten,” Acta Musicologica 88, no. 2 (2016): 179–80. 13. Schäffer, Almanach polskich kompozytorów współczesnych, 126–27. 14.  Archive of Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne 2334/99. 15.  Ibid. There are several versions of Schäffer’s response held in this archival file. The statements are not signed or dated, but there is a pencil mark at the top: “FROM THE AUTHOR.” 16. Ibid. 17.  Letter to Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz (18 April 1956), Archive of Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne 2334/141. The same archival file includes a note from Grażyna Bacewicz to Ochlewski, asking on behalf of the Composers’ Union to see the Almanac ahead of its publication. The union was concerned about an uproar. 18.  Minutes from the PWM Publishing Council (25 January 1958), Archive of Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne 2334/1. 19.  Bogusław Schäffer, “Sytuacja w polskiej muzyce współczesnej,” Życie Literackie 7, nos. 51–52 (22 December 1957): 13–14. 20.  Ibid., 14. 21.  Ibid., 13. 22. Ibid. 23. Zygmunt Mycielski, “Dlaczego nie piszę o naszej muzyce współczesnej?,” Ruch Muzyczny 2, no. 5 (March 1958): 2–8. 24. Zygmunt Mycielski, “Do Naczelnego Redaktora ‘Ruchu Muzycznego’ Prof. Bronisława Rutkowskiego,” Ruch Muzyczny 2, no. 8 (April 1958): 35. This article, cast as a letter to the editor, is a continuation of “Dlaczego nie piszę” from earlier in the year. 25.  Mycielski, “Dlaczego nie piszę o naszej muzyce współczesnej?,” 5. 26.  Letter (13 April 1957), Archive of Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne 2334/1. See also Krzysztof Droba, ed., Odczytywanie na nowo: Rozmowy z Mieczysławem Tomaszewskim (Kraków: Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, 2011), 192. 27.  Bogusław Schäffer, Nowa muzyka: Problemy współczesnej techniki kompozytorskiej (Kraków: Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, 1958), 18. 28.  Ibid., 414. Based on the composers and theorists cited in this book, it does seem that Schäffer was not yet extremely familiar with American postwar music when he was writing Nowa Muzyka, but that would soon change.

228     notes 29.  Bogusław Schäffer, “Od dodekafonii do muzyki elektronowej,” 9. 30. Schäffer, Nowa muzyka, 92. 31.  Ibid., 24–25, 31–34. 32.  Józef Chomiński, “Z zagadnień techniki kompozytorskiej XX wieku,” Muzyka 1, no. 3 (1956): 23–48. 33.  Bogusław Schäffer, “Polskie pracy o Chopinie w okresie 10-lecia Polski Ludowej,” Muzyka 1, no. 2 (1956): 127–51. Ostensibly, this is meant to be a review article of Chopin scholarship in the ten years since the end of World War II, but really the piece reads like a lengthy evaluation of Polish musicology during that period. In his discussion of Chomiński’s work, Schäffer never mentions Mersmann’s name, but his reference to musical energies and the interaction of primary and secondary musical elements makes the reference clear. For more background about theories of musical energetics, including Mersmann’s, see Lee Rothfarb, “Energetics,” in The Cambridge History of Music Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 927–55. 34.  Hans Mersmann, Angewandte Musikästhetik (Berlin: Max Hesses Verlag, 1926). In the 1930s, Chomiński applied Mersmann’s ideas in his analysis of Szymanowski’s work, including “Zagadnienia konstrukcyjne w sonatach fortepianowych” (1937), published in Kwartalnik Muzyczny nos. 21–22 (1948): 170–207. For more on the development of Chomiński’s ideas, see Maciej Gołąb, Józef Michał Chomiński: Biografia i rekonstrukcja metodologii (Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, 2008). 35. Letter from Józef Chomiński to Konstanty Régamey (5 July 1948), excerpted in Gołąb, Józef Michał Chomiński, 43. 36.  In his article, Schäffer focused especially on Chomiński, Preludia (Kraków: Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, 1950) and Chomiński, “Z zagadnień analizy formalnej,” in Księga pamiątkowa ku czci Prof. Adolfa Chybińskiego w 70-lecie urodzin: rozprawy i artykuły zakresu muzykologii (Kraków: Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, 1950). 37.  Chomiński, “Z zagadnień techniki kompozytorskiej XX wieku.” Chomiński analyzes works by Schoenberg, Webern, Messiaen, Boulez, and Stockhausen to support his argument. Musicologist Zbigniew Granat has written about this article, distilling from it the basic principles that would come to form Chomiński’s theory of sonoristics, which I will discuss further in chapter 6. See Granat, “The Concept of Transformation as a Sonoristic Paradigm,” Muzyka 53, no. 1 (2008): 31–44. 38. Schäffer, Nowa Muzyka, 32. 39.  In the interview cited in chapter 4, Bohdan Pilarski asked Lutosławski about his use of Mersmann’s “secondary elements” to structure his Muzyka żałobna. Pilarski, as a recent musicology student in Warsaw, studied with Chomiński. Bohdan Pilarski, “Witold Lutosławski odpowiada na pytania,” 5. 40. Schäffer, Nowa Muzyka, 31–34. 41.  Bogusław Schäffer, “XI Klavierstück Stockhausena,” Życie Literackie 8, no. 25 (22 June 1958), in W kręgu nowej muzyki, 170 (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1967). 42.  Bohdan Pociej, “O twórczości Bogusława Schäffera,” Muzyka 9, nos. 3–4 (1964): 46. J. Peter Burkholder argues that the principle of non-repetition also shaped the arc of Schoenberg’s development as a composer. See Burkholder, “Schoenberg the Reactionary,” in Schoenberg and His World, ed. Walter Frisch (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 162–91.

notes    229 43.  Krzysztof Szwajgier, “Muzyka możliwości,” in Bogusław Schäffer: Możliwości muzyki, ed. Marek Chołoniewski (Kraków: Akademia Muzyczna w Krakowie, 2016), 9–26. 44.  Tadeusz Wysocki, “Rozmowa z Bogusławem Schäfferem,” Ruch Muzyczny 3, nos. 17–18 (September 1959), 10. 45.  Schäffer writes at length about Blacher’s “variable meters” in New Music, especially chapter 7. 46.  Iwona Lindstedt performs a complete analysis of Quattro movimenti (including its dodecaphonic pitch organization) in Dodekafonia i serializm, 184–85. 47.  Wysocki, “Rozmowa z Bogusławem Schäfferem,” 9. 48.  Bogusław Schäffer, “Przyszłość muzyki,” Znak 11 (1959): 972–73. 49.  Tadeusz Wysocki, “Rozmowa z Bogusławem Schäfferem (I),” Ruch Muzyczny 4, no. 18 (September 1960): 4. 50.  While Joseph Straus refers to these as “unordered pitch-class intervals,” John Rahn, following Milton Babbitt, proposes the alternative “undirected,” to distinguish between directional and series order relationships. Joseph Straus, Introduction to Post-Tonal Theory, 4th edition (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016); John Rahn, Basic Atonal Theory (New York: Longman, 1980). I am grateful to J. Daniel Jenkins for drawing my attention to this terminological nuance. 51. Schäffer, Nowa Muzyka, 54–66. H. H. Stuckenschmidt would later note the uniqueness of this feature of Schäffer’s compositional approach in his article “Contemporary Techniques in Music,” The Musical Quarterly 49, no. 1 (1963): 9. 52. Lindstedt, Dodekafonia i serializm, 255–59. My analytical observations about Tertium datur draw heavily on Lindstedt’s excellent theoretical work; she places Schäffer’s composition within a larger context of Polish composers’ engagement with dodecaphonic and serial techniques. 53.  Sabine Feisst discusses the different languages used after World War II to describe improvisational practices; she explains that “aleatory” is a term that arose among European composers in the wake of John Cage’s work with both chance and indeterminacy. Aleatory was a more flexible “catchall” concept than either of the terms associated with Cage, and composers often employed various control mechanisms to restrict the possibilities available to performers. Feisst, “Negotiating Freedom and Control in Composition: Improvisation and Its Offshoots, 1950–1980” in The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, Volume 2, ed. George Lewis and Benjamin Piekut (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 208–11. 54.  Leonard B. Meyer, Emotion and Meaning in Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 92. 55.  The presence of interval-class 7 here is unusual for Schäffer, because typically he would not recognize the difference between a 7 and a 5. Here, though, the number 7 shows up later in metrical structures based on the series, so it seems that Schäffer did, in fact, want to signal a 7 here. In the 1990s, Schäffer reported that he had based the collection in Monosonata on his bank account number, just to see if he could do it. This anecdote may or may not be true, but the presence of some kind of external impetus might explain why Schäffer is working here with a set of eight notes (and seven interval classes), rather than a twelvenote row. Ludomira Stawowy, Bogusław Schäffer: Leben, Werk, Bedeutung (Innsbruck: Edition Helbling, 1991), 49–51.

230     notes 56. Schäffer’s Monosonata and Penderecki’s Threnody, both Fitelberg competition prize winners one year apart, share a number of characteristics: they are both written for string ensembles, both include characteristic wedge-shaped clusters, and both conclude with sound-mass cadences. These similarities likely reflect the two composers’ shared interest in Józef Chomiński’s ideas about the structural, energetic potential of sound. For a thorough discussion of the various means by which Penderecki used texture to generate or animate musical forms (both at the localized and deep structural levels), see Danuta Mirka, “Texture in Penderecki’s Sonoristic Style,” Music Theory Online 6, no. 1 (2000). Even more relevant, though, to my discussion of Schäffer’s Monosonata (which is not purely “sonoristic”), Mariusz Kozak considers the interaction between serial and sonoristic techniques in the B-section of Penderecki’s Threnody; he argues that motivic transformation and textural density allow Penderecki to use his trichords as “sonoristic construction materials in their own right” (215). Kozak, “Experiencing Structure in Penderecki’s Threnody: Analysis, Ear-Training, and Musical Understanding,” Music Theory Spectrum 38, no. 2 (2016): 200–217. 57. Zygmunt Wachowicz, “Muzyka Bogusława Schäffera,” Ruch Muzyczny 4, no. 19 (October 1960): 4. 58.  Wysocki, “Rozmowa z Bogusławem Schäfferem,” 9. In this piece, Schäffer attempts to create various aural “shapes” through selective activation of performers at different spatial points on the stage. Maja Trochimczyk discusses such forms of spatial organization in post–World War II avant-garde music; she argues that, while “many composers in the 1950s and 1960s attempted to create fixed, spatial shapes out of fluid spatiotemporal sounds,” most of these experiments were not particularly successful from a perceptual point of view. See Maria Anna Harley, “Spatiality of Sound and Stream Segregation in Twentieth-Century Instrumental Music,” Organised Sound 3, no. 2 (1998): 159. 59.  Ibid., 10. 60.  Ibid., 13. 61.  Ibid., 12. 62.  Schäffer’s biography in the score for Tertium datur (PWM 1962) describes him as an autodidact. 63.  Bogusław Schäffer, “Czarne i białe plamy,” Życie Literackie 8 (16 March 1958): 5. 64.  Bohdan Pociej, “Książka miesiąca: Bogusława Schäffera studia na temat współczesnej techniki kompozytorskiej,” Ruch Muzyczny 2, no. 15 (August 1958): 16–20. 65.  Kisiel (Stefan Kisielewski), “Vivat Muzyka!” Tygodnik Powszechny, no. 41 (12 October 1958): 4. 66.  Zygmunt Mycielski, “O czarnych i białych plamach Bogusława Schäffera,” Przegląd Kulturalny 7, no. 14 (1958): 10. 67. Stawowy, Bogusław Schäffer, 47. 68.  Wysocki, “Rozmowa z Bogusławem Schäfferem (I),” 3. 69.  Undated review held in the AKP, Witold Rudziński collection. While the review is undated and does not specify that it was written for the Composers’ Union, the context and contents suggest that Rudziński was writing an evaluation of Schäffer’s readiness to join the union as a composer. In early 1957, Schäffer became a union member as a musicologist, under the recommendation of Stefania Łobaczewska, but it makes sense that, after winning the Fitelberg competition, he would have sought different credentials.

notes    231 70.  Wysocki, “Rozmowa z Bogusławem Schäfferem (I),” 3. 71.  Leon Markiewicz, “Propozycje czy zagadki,” Ruch Muzyczny 5, no. 1 (January 1961): 13. Markiewicz here is writing about Schäffer’s collection Muzyka fortepianowa (Kraków: Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, 1960). 72. Bohdan Pociej, “Tertium datur Bogusława Schäffera,” Ruch Muzyczny 4, no. 21 (November 1960): 4. 73.  Schäffer, “Czarne i białe plamy.” 74. Mycielski, Dziennik 1950–1959, 413. 75.  Mycielski, “O czarnych i białych plamach Bogusława Schäffera.” 76.  Wysocki, “Rozmowa z Bogusławem Schäfferem,” 12. 77. Ibid. 78.  Bohdan Pociej, “Muzyka polska na II Warszawskiej Jesieni,” 12. 79.  Zygmunt Mycielski, “Etapy i osiągnięcia,” Przegląd Kulturalny 8, no. 11 (1959): 10. 80.  Zygmunt Mycielski, “Jesień Warszawska,” Przegląd Kulturalny 8, no. 33 (1959): 6. 81.  Tadeusz Wysocki, “Rozmowa z Bogusławem Schäfferem (II),” Ruch Muzyczny 4, no. 19 (October 1960): 4. C HA P T E R 6

1.  Bogusław Schäffer to Tadeusz Ochlewski (14 October 1962), ZKP 12/47 Sąd Koleżeński, Protokoły posiedzeń, sprawozdanie z działalności 1945–1948, 1960–1975. 2.  Regulamin Sądu Koleżeńskiego Związku Kompozytorów Polskich z dnia 18.1.1959, ZKP 12/47 Sąd Koleżeński, Protokoły posiedzeń, sprawozdanie z działalności 1945–1948, 1960–1975. 3.  The members of the Colleagues’ Tribunal were: Zygmunt Mycielski (chair), Jan Ekier, Witold Rudziński, Józef Patkowski, and Jerzy Sokorski. The tribunal was not called upon to settle disputes frequently; between 1961 and 1963, it only arbitrated two cases. 4.  The Colleagues’ Tribunal archival files also include materials related to a different dispute from earlier in 1962 between Schäffer and Stefan Kisielewski; it appears that the Composers’ Union referred this dispute to the tribunal, but it was never formally arbitrated. 5.  This shift seems to have taken place at the second meeting of the tribunal, in December 1962. 6.  ZKP 12/47 Sąd Koleżeński, Protokoły posiedzeń, sprawozdanie z działalności 1945– 1948, 1960–1975. 7.  Schäffer to the Governing Committee of the Composers’ Union (10 November 1962), ZKP 12/47 Sąd Koleżeński, Protokoły posiedzeń, sprawozdanie z działalności 1945–1948, 1960–1975. 8.  Tadeusz Ochlewski to the Governing Committee of the Composers’ Union (23 October 1962), ZKP 12/47 Sąd Koleżeński, Protokoły posiedzeń, sprawozdanie z działalności 1945–1948, 1960–1975. 9. Witold Lutosławski to Zygmunt Mycielski (9 December 1962), ZKP 12/47 Sąd Koleżeński, Protokoły posiedzeń, sprawozdanie z działalności 1945–1948, 1960–1975. 10.  Zygmunt Mycielski, Dziennik 1960–1969, ed. Zofia Mycielska-Golik (Warsaw: Iskry, 2001), 115.

232     notes 11.  Schäffer is perhaps purposefully vague about how Górecki could have plagiarized from his yet-unpublished Concerto per sei e tre. In his letters to PWM and to the union, Schäffer argues that Górecki had begun using his notation and techniques after Schäffer had distributed copies of his Concerto manuscript to the Symphony Orchestra of the Polish Radio (WOSPR), which had performed the work. He does not offer any specific accusations against the Orchestra or its leadership, but there is an implication that Górecki must somehow have become aware of Schäffer’s score through his contact with that institution. 12. Mycielski, Dziennik 1960–1969, 115. 13. Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde. 14.  Several important studies of such discourses in Western Europe include: Anne C. Shreffler, “Ideologies of Serialism: Stravinsky’s Threni and the Congress for Cultural Freedom,” in Music and the Aesthetics of Modernity, ed. Karol Berger and Anthony Newcomb (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 217–45; Beal, New Music, New Allies; Mark Carroll, Music and Ideology in Cold War Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 15. Schmelz, Such Freedom, If Only Musical. 16.  Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996), xi. 17. Iddon, New Music at Darmstadt. Particularly striking in the context of Schäffer’s relationship to the Polish school is Iddon’s discussion of Karel Goeyvaerts as a forwardreaching composer who, in early days, seemed like “a composer to watch” (61) but whose inclusion in the school became more tenuous as time moved on. 18.  In a 1959 interview, Schäffer indicated that he wanted no part of “snobbistic” musical modernism, either. Tadeusz Wysocki, “Rozmowa z Bogusławem Schäfferem,” 11. 19. Bogusław Schäffer, “Awangarda muzyczna (1958),” in W kręgu nowej muzyki (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1967), 197. 20.  Ibid., 200. 21.  Bogusław Schäffer, “XI Klavierstück Stockhausena.” 22. Ibid. 23. Bohdan Pociej and Bohdan Pilarski both completed master’s theses within the Instytut Muzykologiczny at the University of Warsaw in the late 1950s. 24.  Bohdan Pociej, “Świt awangardy,” Ruch Muzyczny 4, no. 1 (February 1960): 9–10. 25.  Ibid., 10. See Adrian Thomas, Górecki (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 18–24 for more detailed analysis of Górecki’s Symphony no. 1, “1959.” Górecki’s string-mass technique in the first movement was very similar to Schäffer’s use of masses in his Monosonata from the same year, but Pociej had no way of knowing that; in a footnote, he explained that he had not had a chance to hear Schäffer’s prize-winning composition. 26. Thomas, Polish Music since Szymanowski, 103. Orff ’s Carmina Burana received its Polish premiere in 1957. 27.  Bohdan Pociej, “Świt awangardy,” 10. Pociej compared Strophes to Régamey’s Five Etudes for soprano and orchestra (1956), which also appeared on the 1959 Warsaw Autumn program. 28.  Henryk Schiller, “Z warsztatu młodych,” Ruch Muzyczny 3, no. 13 (July 1959): 18. 29.  Strophes is not particularly similar to Stockhausen’s composition, but I believe that Schiller was interested here in the use of spoken text for its sonoristic, rather than semantic, qualities.

notes    233 30.  Pociej, “Świt awangardy,” 10. 31.  Ibid., 10, 24. 32.  Lisa Jakelski discusses the reception of the 1959 emerging avant-garde in the context of pluralism—an international pluralism of paths into modernity, operating outside the binarism of East vs. West. This argument is a powerful reminder that the implications of these aesthetic debates were not exclusively domestic and internal. Rather, Jakelski’s work demonstrates the transnational and geopolitical mobility of Polish avant-gardism. Making New Music in Cold War Poland, 45–47. 33.  Zygmunt Mycielski, “Etapy i osiągnięcie,” 10. 34.  Stefan Kisielewski, “Warszawska Jesień po raz trzeci,” Tygodnik Powszechny, no. 40 (1959), in Warszawska Jesień w zwierciadle polskiej krytyki muzycznej: Antologia tekstów z lat 1956–2006, ed. Krzysztof Droba and Ewa Radziwon-Stefaniuk (Warsaw: Warszawska Jesień, 2007), 37. 35. Ibid. 36.  Zygmunt Mycielski, “Warszawska Jesień,” Przegląd Kulturalny 8, no. 41 (1959): 10. 37.  Wysocki, “Rozmowa z Bogusławem Schäfferem,” 10. 38.  Ludwik Erhardt, “W szarej godzinie myśli,” Ruch Muzyczny 2, no. 22 (November 1958): 20. 39.  The inclusion of Szabelski (1896–1979) in discussions of Polish avant-gardism was so surprising, in part, because of Szabelski’s age. Even among the middle-generation group of composers, Szabelski was on the older side of the age range. And yet, it seemed that he had embraced the signifiers of post-Webernian pointillism in his most recent work. Pociej indicated that, in contemporary music circles, critics and artists could not stop talking about “The Szabelski Situation,” because the older composer’s embrace of contemporary techniques seemed to have far-reaching implications for the Polish avant-garde. Pociej, “Świt awangardy,” 10, 24. 40.  Bohdan Pociej, “Muzyka Polska 1960, czyli o potrzebie, kierunkach i granicach nowatorstwa,” Ruch Muzyczny 4, no. 21 (November 1960): 2–3. 41.  ZKP 12/8 VIII Walny Zjazd (4, 5, 6 VI 1955 Wwa). 42.  Zygmunt Mycielski, “Sukces naszych kompozytorów,” Przegląd Kulturalny 8, no. 24 (June 1959): 8. 43.  Ruth Seehaber has traced the appearance and meaning of the designation “Polish School” as it appeared in literature about Polish music of the late 1950s and early 1960s, with specific focus on the German use of the term in talking about Polish composers. Seehaber, Die “polnische Schule” in der Neuen Musik: Befragung eines musikhistorischen Topos (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2009). 44.  Tadeusz A. Zieliński, “Nowa sytuacja polskiej muzyki współczesnej,” Ruch Muzy­ czny 5, no. 2 (January 1961): 4. 45.  Pociej, “Muzyka polska 1960,” 2. 46. Ibid. 47.  Józef Chomiński, “Nauka harmonii a nowa technika dźwiękowa,” Muzyka 2, no. 2 (1957): 3–16. Chomiński began to codify his theory of sonoristics more fully in his article “Technika sonorystyczna jako przedmiot systematycznego szkolenia,” Muzyka 6, no. 3 (1961): 3–10. For more information about Chomiński’s theory as an analytical model, see Iwona Lindstedt’s book Sonorystyka w twórczości kompozytorów polskich XX wieku (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 2010); and Zbigniew Granat,

234     notes “Rediscovering Sonoristics: A Groundbreaking Theory from the Margins of Musicology,” in Music’s Intellectual History, ed. Zdravko Blažeković and Barbara Dobbs Mackenzie (New York: RILM, 2009), 821–33. 48.  Józef Chomiński, “Ze studiów nad impresjonizmem Szymanowskiego (1956),” in Studia nad twórczością Karola Szymanowskiego (Kraków: Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, 1969), 180–226. 49.  Antoni Prosnak, “Zagadnienie sonorystyki na przykładzie etiud Chopina,” Muzyka 3, nos. 1–2 (1958): 14–32; Władysław Malinowski, “Problem sonorystyki w ‘Mitach’ Karola Szymanowskiego,” Muzyka 2, no. 4 (1957): 31–44. 50.  Lisa Jakelski, “Górecki’s Scontri and Avant-Garde Music in Cold War Poland,” The Journal of Musicology 26, no. 2 (2009), see especially pages 212–24. 51.  Bohdan Pociej, “Zderzenia Henryka Góreckiego,” Ruch Muzyczny 4, no. 18 (September 1960): 7. 52. Ibid. 53.  Pociej’s observations line up with the composer’s own observations in his program note for the 1960 Warsaw Autumn Festival Program Book. For in-depth analysis of Górecki’s Scontri, see Adrian Thomas, Górecki, 29–38, and Iwona Lindstedt, Sonorystyka w twórczości kompozytorów polskich XX wieku, 243–68. 54.  Henryk Schiller, “Po prawykonaniu Wymiarów czasu i ciszy,” Ruch Muzyczny 4, no. 21 (November 1960): 5. 55. Mieczysław Tomaszewski points out that Penderecki probably took up this magic square after reading Webern’s Der Weg zur Komposition in zwölf Tönen (1932). The origins and meaning of the SATOR square, found in the ruins of Pompeii, remain unclear. Nevertheless, the mystical possibilities arising from its permutability have long attracted artists and scholars alike, allowing them to link their esoteric twentieth-century experiments with practices from the distant past. The year after the premiere of Dimensions of Time and Silence, Penderecki revised the composition heavily; the second version no longer contained this final choral statement based on the magic square, but only employed the choir in the articulation of percussive consonants, textless pitches, and pitch clusters. For more detailed analysis of Dimensions and the differences between its first and second versions, see Mieczysław Tomaszewski, Penderecki: Bunt i wyzwolenie. Tom I: Rozpętanie żywiołów (Kraków: Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, 2008): 137–41; and Thomas, Polish Music since Szymanowski, 164–80. 56.  Schiller mentions Cage’s piano concerto as an inspiration here, which is interesting given that Lutosławski also credited Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1957–58) as his inspiration in composing Venetian Games from 1961. Lutosławski said that he heard the concerto on the radio, so it is possible that Penderecki also heard the composition that way. According to Lisa Jakelski, the Warsaw Autumn Temporary Repertoire Committee had, as early as November 1959, considered programming Cage’s concerto for the 1960 Warsaw Autumn festival. Therefore, it seems probable that at least some members in the union had knowledge of the piece at that time. Lisa Jakelski, Making New Music in Cold War Poland, 54. 57.  Schiller, “Po prawykonaniu,” 5. 58.  Mariusz Kozak interrogates more closely the serial makeup of the B section, and proposes structural connections between the A and B sections. Kozak, “Experiencing Structure in Penderecki’s Threnody.”

notes    235 59.  Danuta Mirka has examined the formal-structural implications of timbre and texture within Penderecki’s sonorist works: “Texture in Penderecki’s Sonoristic Style,” Music Theory Online 6, no. 1 (2000) and “To Cut the Gordian Knot: The Timbre System of Krzysztof Penderecki,” Journal of Music Theory 45, no. 2 (2001): 435–56. In untangling the relationship between Chomiński’s theory of sonoristics and the compositions that theorists and critics have grouped together under the label of “sonorism,” Adrian Thomas has suggested that the former was intended as a broadly inclusive analytical tool, while the latter became a narrower label with which to articulate the emergence of a particular Polish avant-garde style in the early 1960s. Adrian Thomas, “Boundaries and Definitions: The Compositional Realities of Polish Sonorism,” Muzyka 53, no. 1 (2008): 7–14. 60.  Tadeusz A. Zieliński, “Nowe utwory Krzysztofa Pendereckiego,” Ruch Muzyczny 5, no. 12 (June 1961): 17. Zieliński briefly noted Penderecki’s decision to change the title of the piece from 8′37″ to Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima, but did not explore this question further. He also did not, as later critics would do, attempt to draw specific connection between the new title and the affect of the piece. For him, it seems that the work’s affective quality remained abstract. 61.  Ibid., 18. 62.  Tadeusz Zieliński, “XXXV Festiwal SIMC w Wiedniu,” Ruch Muzyczny 5, no. 15 (August 1961): 11. 63.  Zieliński, “Nowa sytuacja polskiej muzyki współczesnej,” 2. 64. Ibid. 65.  Zieliński, “Nowa sytuacja polskiej muzyki współczesnej,” 3. In his review of the 1960 Warsaw Autumn festival, Bohdan Pociej identified the younger group as the “avant-garde,” and the second, older group as the “supply base of the avant-garde” (zaplecze awangardy). This second group, which included Lutosławski, Szabelski, Baird, Serocki, and Bacewicz, exhibited a lesser degree of innovation because they were loaded down with the “whole complicated baggage of tradition” (“cały skomplikowany bagaż tradycji”). However, they also shared their younger colleagues’ desire to push Polish musical language in new directions. Pociej, “Muzyka polska 1960,” 2–3. 66.  Zieliński, "Nowa sytuacja polskiej muzyki współczesnej," 3. 67.  Lisa Jakelski has discussed the 1960 congress at length in her article “Górecki’s Scontri and Avant-Garde Music in Cold War Poland.” She contextualizes the debates within Cold War geopolitical tensions, offering a different perspective through which to consider these emergent discourses. 68.  ZKP 12/11 XI Walny Zjazd (10-11 XII. 1960 Wwa). 69.  Ibid. Szeligowski specifically called out Schäffer for his discriminatory attitudes, which, in Szeligowski’s estimation, were a result of Schäffer’s Western (German) aesthetic orientation. The invocation of Schäffer reveals that Szeligowski saw him as the most prominent representative of the Polish avant-garde. Thus, the older composer understood (and rejected) the movement according to Schäffer’s criteria. 70. Ibid. 71. Ibid. 72. Ibid. 73. Ibid.

236     notes 74. Ibid. 75.  Upon hearing accusations that he had criticized avant-garde composers to the Ministry, Perkowski left the congress in protest. Later, Dobrowolski clarified that Perkoswki had attempted to encourage the Ministry to withdraw their support from avant-garde composers and had questioned the value of their music in front of representatives of the party’s Culture Department. 76.  Leon Markiewicz, “Rozmowa z Henrykiem Góreckim,” Ruch Muzyczny 6, no. 17 (September 1962): 7. Emphasis in original. This interview has been translated into English by Anna Maslowiec and published as “Conversation with Henryk Górecki: Leon Markiewicz, July 1962,” Context: Journal of Music Research, no. 14 (Summer 1997–1998): 35–41. 77.  Ibid., 8. 78.  For a selection of primary sources that demonstrate Lutosławski’s general enthusiasm for the developments that were taking place in the early 1960s, see Gwizdalanka and Meyer, Lutosławski: Droga do mistrzostwa, especially pages 5–25. 79. Thomas, Polish Music since Szymanowski, 133–35. For a more detailed analysis drawing on Lutosławski’s extant manuscripts for Gry weneckie, see Adrian Thomas, “Jeux vénitiens: Working Methods at the Start of Lutosławski’s Mature Period,” in Lutosławski Studies, ed. Zbigniew Skowron (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 211–43. 80. Stefan Jarociński, “Indywidualność Lutosławskiego,” Ruch Muzyczny 5, no. 21 (November 1961): 5. 81. Ibid. 82. Ibid. 83. Ibid. 84.  Karol Irzykowski, “Plagiatowy charakter przełomów literackich w Polsce,” Kurier Lwowski, no. 25 (29 January 1922): 3. 85.  In his 1957 article “Sytuacja w polskiej muzyce współczesnej,” Schäffer offered advice to composers who were in the midst of the long process of developing their own language: they should keep their “freak compositions” to themselves. Only after the completion of such a period of learning and experiment should composers publicly and openly introduce their finished, fully original works to an audience. 86.  Tadeusz Zieliński, “O polskiej muzyce na festiwalu, dobrze i źle,” Ruch Muzyczny 6, no. 22 (November 1962): 4. 87.  Bogusław Schäffer, “Polski modernizm muzyczny, wczoraj i dziś,” Współczesność (31 October 1961), in W kręgu nowej muzyki (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1967), 250–51. 88.  Zygmunt Mycielski, “Jaką mierzyć miarą? W odpowiedzi Bogusławowi Schäfferowi,” Ruch Muzyczny 5, no. 22 (November 1961): 10. 89.  Baird, for example, argued that his Etude had been based entirely on material from his own incidental music composed for a 1961 production of Oedipus Rex, and, therefore, that his use of the notation could not have been “appropriated” from Schäffer’s Concerto per sei e tre. Handwritten, undated record of Colleagues’ Tribunal meeting (11 January 1963), ZKP 12/47 Sąd Koleżeński, Protokoły posiedzeń, sprawozdanie z działalności 1945–1948, 1960–1975. 90.  It is, of course, possible that Schäffer might have altered his composition for publication with PWM in 1963; I have not been able to consult a manuscript to test such a hypothesis.

notes    237 91.  The first of these comments was made by Jerzy Sokorski; the second by Józef Patkowski. Handwritten, undated record of Colleagues’ Tribunal meeting (11 January 1963), ZKP 12/47 Sąd Koleżeński, Protokoły posiedzeń, sprawozdanie z działalności 1945–1948, 1960–1975. 92. Witold Lutosławski to Zygmunt Mycielski (9 December 1962), ZKP 12/47 Sąd Koleżeński, Protokoły posiedzeń, sprawozdanie z działalności 1945–1948, 1960–1975. 93. Mycielski, Dziennik 1960–1969, 117–18. C HA P T E R 7

1.  The University of Buffalo’s Special Collections contains a handwritten, two-page document that explains (in English) how Schäffer wanted the symbols to be interpreted. I have not at this point been able to identify the source of the text, but it does seem to have been produced by a Polish (or European) hand. Whomever the author might be, the document certainly provides an interesting glimpse into the pre-performance decisions that performers needed to make before tackling nonstop. University of Buffalo Music Library Treasure Room, M11Sch14, Yvar Mikhashoff collection. 2.  Actually, it seems that the first performance of nonstop, with the same pianists, took place during Warsaw Autumn, but not as part of the official program. The success of that performance led to the official premiere as a multimedia “happening” in Kraków a few weeks later. See Józef Chrobak and Justyna Michalik, eds., Tadeusz Kantor i lata 1959–1964 (Kraków: Cricoteka, 2013), 178n54. 3. M. H., “Kronika muzyczna,” Życie Literackie (10 January 1965): 14, excerpted and reprinted in Chrobak and Michalik, Tadeusz Kantor i lata 1959–1964, 179. The Museum of Contemporary Art in Warsaw holds the Archive of Eustachy Kossakowski, in which there are several pictures of exhibits in the Galeria Krzysztofory. For instance, in images of Kantor’s 1963 exhibit “Anti-Exhibition,” we see prints and pictures hanging on all surfaces. This may provide a sense for how that original nonstop performance might have looked and sounded, surrounded by curved brick surfaces and blown-up images from Schäffer’s score. See https:// artmuseum.pl/en/archiwum/archiwum-eustachego-kossakowskiego/1025/16862. 4.  See, for instance, Jerzy Madeyski, “Czy nowa awangarda? Rozmowa z Tadeuszem Kantorem,” Życie Literackie (1 November 1959): 7. 5.  His consistency is clear in an interview with Janusz Cegiełła in Współczesność, no. 11 (1971): 3. 6. Lindstedt, Sonorystyka w twórczości kompozytorów polskich XX wieku, 22. 7. Composers of the Polish avant-garde were well known within Latin American avant-garde movements, and especially in Cuba. Marysol Quevedo, “Experimental Music and the Avant-garde in Post-1959 Cuba: Revolutionary Music for the Revolution,” in Experimentalisms in Practice: Music Perspectives from Latin America, ed. Ana R. AlonsoMinutti, Eduardo Herrera, and Alejandro L. Madrid (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 251–78. 8.  Ludwik Erhardt, “Recenzja o nadanie nagrody indywidualnej stopnia II (31 March 1966),” AAN 255/KP-14 Sekcja Sztuki 1966. 9. Ibid.

238     notes 10.  Ibid. In the following year, Stefan Śledziński employed very similar language to recommend Penderecki again for a prize. Nevertheless, Penderecki did not receive this prize until 1968. 11.  Ludwik Erhardt, “Dla wszystkich czy dla wybranych?” Ruch Muzyczny 4, no. 9 (May 1960): 4. 12.  Michał Bristiger, Tadeusz Kaczyński, Zygmunt Mycielski, Andrzej Schmidt, Stefan Kisielewski, Witold Lutosławski, and Jan Wierszyłowki, “Brahms czy Penderecki? Stan i potrzeby kultury w Polsce,” Nowa Kultura, nos. 51–52 (1962): 3. This article is presented as a transcript of a conversation among a group of scholars and composers about exposing the under-educated audience to contemporary music. In many ways, then, the article links again the major themes of this study and demonstrates how they continued to motivate discourse about avant-garde music into the 1960s. 13. Jakelski, Making New Music in Cold War Poland, 17. 14.  “Stenogram z posiedzenia Rady Kultury w dniu 25 marca 1961,” AAN 366/Gabinet Ministra 48. 15.  Ibid. While the Ministry of Culture did not wish to halt the progress being made by the avant-garde composers, Galiński threatened that, if the ministry did wish such a thing, it would only take one phone call to accomplish a catastrophic and total eradication of elite cultural activities). He therefore encouraged cultural institutions (he named the muchbeleaguered Ruch Muzyczny) to promote the more approachable music of the so-called middle ground. 16.  Report drawn up by Zespół d/s Radia, Telewizji, Filmu, Teatru i Muzyki Komisji Kultury KC PZPR for the Wydział Kultury, submitted 28 March 1963, AAN 237/XVIII/207. 17. Ibid. 18.  “Stenogram z posiedzenia Rady Kultury w dniu 25 marca 1961,” AAN 366/Gabinet Ministra 48. 19. Mycielski, Dziennik 1960–1969, 63–64. 20.  Writing about Brazil, K. E. Goldschmitt discusses the relationship between “branding” and national musical identity, especially when marketed for an international audience. They note that “stereotypes and the shorthand of branding proliferate when it comes to classifying music from a country as musically diverse as Brazil for Anglophone publics” (205). While the “brand” of the Polish musical avant-garde was not predicated on racial difference, it did depend on difference all the same. Even after most of the Polish composers discussed in this study had begun moving in new directions, the brand held fast—in some ways perpetuated by the popularity of Krzysztof Penderecki’s music in the American film industry (as I discussed in the introduction). K. E. Goldschmitt, Bossa Mundo: Brazilian Music in Transnational Media Industries (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).

biblio gra phy

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Archiwum Akt Nowych (AAN)—Central Archives of Modern Records; Warsaw, Poland •

Komitet Nagród Państwowych w Warszawie Ministerstwo Kultury i Sztuki • Wydział Kultury, KC PZPR •

Archiwum Kompozytorów Polskich XX w. (AKP)—Archive of Polish Composers at the University of Warsaw; Warsaw, Poland •

Józef Chomiński collection Zofia Lissa collection • Tadeusz Ochlewski collection • Witold Rudziński collection •

Archiwum Narodowe w Krakowie, Ekspozytura w Spytkowicach—The National Archive in Kraków; Spytkowice, Poland •

Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne collection

Archiwum Polskiego Radia (Telewizja Polska)—The Archive of Polish Radio, held at Polish Television; Warsaw, Poland •

Komitet do spraw Radia i Telewizji

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I nde x

Adler, Guido: and Chybiński, 18; and Jachimecki, 120 Adorno, Theodor: on “moderate modernists,” 122; Philosophy of New Music, 122, 128 affect, 3, 44, 166, 168, 182, 184: and the audience, 29, 103, 112, 166; and Lutosławski’s music, 111–13, 131; and Penderecki’s music, 1–2, 166, 175, 195–96, 235n60; for Schäffer, 131–32, 150, 170; and Szymanowski’s music, 98 Anderson, Benedict: Imagined Communities, 6 Anderson, Perry: on postwar avant-garde movements, 8 Ansari, Emily Abrams: on “epistemic communities” among composers, 47 anti-Semitism, 16, 52, 208n61 atomic: energy, 57, 215n79; music, 51, 68 audience: attending to the needs of the mass, 9, 26, 37, 51, 52, 62, 68; communication with, 3, 18, 26–29, 38, 66, 73–74, 93–94, 103, 109–13, 165–66, 176–79, 195–98; composers as an elite, 50–56, 64, 66; educating an elite, 63–87; ignorance and barbarism of the mass (for Szymanowski), 17; progress of the national, 29–38, 42–44, 50–51, 56, 61, 63, 67, 94

Baird, Tadeusz, 177, 196; on the demands of Polish composers, 52; and dodecaphony, 150; Etude for vocal orchestra, percussion, and piano, 156–57, 185–88, 236n89; Four Essays for Orchestra, 167; on Polish music and lack, 59; on Stravinsky, 102; and wartime music education, 21 bard (wieszcz). See genius Bartók, Béla, 12, 50, 53, 60, 106, 128, 159; Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, 225n72 Berg, Alban, 162, 226n81; as inspiration for Régamey, 21; Violin Concerto, 21, 103, 225n72 Bierut, Bolesław, 26, 35, 51, 58 Blacher, Boris, 128; “variable meter,” 133 Boehm, Jan: on dodecaphonic music, 103 Bohlman, Andrea F.: on local experiences and Solidarity, 4 Boulanger, Nadia, 17–18, 117, 121 Boulez, Pierre, 68, 128, 136, 153, 159, 162, 165; Le marteau sans maître, 164 Britten, Benjamin, 53, 148; framed as a modernist, 105, 122 Brodsky, Seth: on Adorno’s distaste for “moderate modernists,” 122 Bürger, Peter: on the avant-garde, 7–8; Theory of the Avant-Garde, 157

Bacewicz, Grażyna, 51, 54, 90, 122, 177, 196; and gender bias, 115–16, 227n11; Piano Quintet, no. 1, 49; Symphony no. 3, 48–49

255

256     index Bylander, Cindy: on composers of the postSzymanowski generation, 43 café concerts (under Nazi occupation), 21–22, 206n45 Cage, John, 159, 175, 229n53; Concert for Piano and Orchestra, 234n56 censorship, 77, 148; and the Composers’ Union peer review process, 48; relaxation of, 57–59, 65; unofficial, 181 Chicot, Daniel: The Origins of Backwardness in Eastern Europe, 6 Chomiński, Józef, 148, 160, 171: on dodecaphony, 103; on musical pedagogy, 169; “On the Problems of Compositional Technique in the Twentieth Century,” 130–31, 168–69; on a Polish national style, 47; and socialist realism, 27; “sonoristics,” 131, 138, 141, 168–70, 176, 181, 195, 230n56, 235n59; on Szymanowski, 169 Chopin, Fryderyk, 21, 99–101, 105, 114–15, 121, 152, 169, 176, 181; as bard, 93–94; as cultivating “Polishness” and “Europeanness,” 12, 27 Chowrimootoo, Christopher: on the duplicitous framing of Britten as modernist, 105; on middlebrow modernism, 53 Chybiński, Adolf, 209n77, 223n30; and Lissa, 18 Composers’ Union Commissions Committee, 47–49, 89–92, 104, 116 Connelly, John: on limitations of repression by Polish communists, 45 Darmstadt, 167; “school,” 158; summer courses, 79–80, 179–80 Dmowski, Roman: and the National Democrats, 14 Dobrowolski, Andrzej: on connecting with Polish audiences, 198; on the technical foundations of Polish composers, 47; on the Youth Circle of the Composers’ Union, 118 dodecaphony, 101–16, 223n50, 224n52; and Koffler, 104–5; and Lutosławski, 105–16, 225n73; and Mycielski, 103–4, 106; and Schäffer, 104–5, 115, 120, 128–30, 132, 150; and Stravinsky, 102, 104, 223n50; and Stockhausen, 102, 104. See also serialism Dukas, Paul: and Mycielski, 18 eclecticism, 36, 38; as indictment of socialist realism, 47; Szymanowski’s, 96–98, 100 Eimert, Herbert, 79, 128

Ekier, Jan: on Kisielewski’s Fantasia, 49; on Mycielski’s Symphony no. 1, 46; on Turski’s Symphony no. 2, 42 electronic music, 51, 68–75, 79–80, 167, 196, 218n31. See also musique concrète; Polish Radio Experimental Studio Erhardt, Ludwik: on the first Warsaw Autumn festival and Szymanowski, 101; on the future of the avant-garde, 165–66, 195–96; on Penderecki, 194–96; on Ruch Muzyczny, 220n68 Evangelisti, Franco: and the Polish Radio Experimental Studio, 73 Fabian, Johannes: Time and the Other, 6 Fairclough, Pauline: on socialist realist aesthetics in the Soviet Union, 26 film music: and Penderecki, 1–2, 238n20; at the Polish Radio Experimental Studio, 74–75; pseudo-, 49 Foster, Hal: on the post–World War II “neoavant-garde,” 158, 176 Friszke, Andrzej: on Polish intellectuals, 58 Galiński, Tadeusz, 67; on the Polish avant-garde, 196–97; on Ruch Muzyczny, 85 genius, 88–116, 118, 126, 148, 194–95 Gentry, Philip: on global cultural coherence vs. local particularities during the Cold War, 4 Glière, Reinhold: and Régamey, 17 Goeyvaerts, Karel, 232n17 Goldberg, Halina: on the figure of the Polish Romantic wieszcz, 93 Goldschmitt, K. E.: on national “branding” in Brazil, 238n20 Gomułka, Władysław, 23; and Polish nationalism / progress, 58–59, 64, 66, 87–88; on “revisionism,” 77 Górecki, Henryk Mikołaj, 152–53, 166, 181–82, 199; Elementi, 155–56, 181, 185–88, 232n11; Epitafium, 160, 171; and the Polish Radio Experimental Studio, 73; Scontri, 170–72, 175; Symphony no. 1, “1959,” 160–62; Symphony no. 3, 199 Gorodinsky, Victor: on Ruch Muzyczny, 80, 84 Gradstein, Alfred: A Word about Stalin, 212n37 Gross, Jan T.: on narratives about Polish national history during the war, 20; on postwar Poland, 22–23 Hauer, J. M., 129 Helm, Everett: on Lutosławski and Penderecki, 2–3

index    257 Henry, Pierre, 73 Hindemith, Paul, 30, 50, 128, 159 Hłasko, Marek, 216n10 Holocaust, the, 5, 22, 41 Honegger, Arthur, 30, 53, 60, 102, 159 Husserl, Edmund, 18 Iarustovskii, Boris, 44 Iddon, Martin: on the “Darmstadt School,” 158, 232n17 indeterminacy: vs. “aleatory,” 229n53; in Lutosławski, 182–83; and notation, 185–87; in Penderecki, 2, 174–75; in Schäffer, 137–38, 151, 191; in Stockhausen, 159, 191 Ingarden, Roman: and Lissa, 18 Irzykowski, Karol: as an influence for Schäffer, 120, 184 Jachimecki, Zdzisław: and Schäffer, 120 Jakelski, Lisa: on the cultural mobility of Polish music and musicians, 3; on Górecki’s Scontri, 170–71; on Soviet views of Polish artists, 164; on the Warsaw Autumn Festival, 59, 196, 234n56 Jankowski, Józef: and Szymanowski’s Stabat Mater, 15 Jarociński, Stefan: on Lutosławski’s Concerto, 55–56, 105; on Lutosławski’s “aleatorism,” 183; on Lutosławski’s Funeral Music, 112–13, 183 Jasieński, Jerzy: and Kisielewski’s Fantasia, 50 Judt, Tony, 4 Kaczyński, Tadeusz: on Kotoński’s Etude for a Single Cymbal Stroke, 73 Kantor, Tadeusz, 181–82, 191–93, 237n3 Kersten, Krystyna: on postwar Poland, 22–23 Khrennikov, Tikhon, 44; on realism vs. formalism, 33–34 Kilar, Wojciech: Sinfonia concertante, 91; on Stravinsky, 102, 104, 153 Kisielewski, Stefan, 124, 157; on affect in avant-garde music, 196; as “conventional” (according to Schäffer), 122; on craft, 120–21; Fantasia, 49–50; on the idea of musical progress, 18–19, 32, 165; “Is This the End of Music?,” 19, 195; on Mycielski’s Symphony no. 1, 46; on Régamey, 19; and Ruch Muzyczny, 84–85, 220n69; on Schäffer and New Music, 149; and socialist realism, 27–28, 31–32; on Stravinsky, 50, 102, 223n50; on Szymanowski, 98–100, 115; and the underground resistance movement, 21

Koffler, Józef: and dodecaphony, 104–5 Kohn, Hans: on “civic” vs. “organic” forms of nationalism, 6 Kołakowski, Leszek: on the intelligentsia and repression, 58 Koselleck, Reinhart: on the development of modernity in Western Europe, 93; on time in late-eighteenth-century Western Europe, 4–5 Kotoński, Włodzimierz, 118, 152–53; and Albo rybka (film), 75, 218n41; Etude for a Single Cymbal Stroke, 72–75, 217n30; on student composers, 118 Kozak, Mariusz: on Penderecki’s Threnody, 230n56 Krauze, Zygmunt, 193; and Schäffer’s nonstop, 191 Krenz, Jan: on Panufnik’s music, 44 Kurth, Ernst, 18 Kuryluk, Karol, 65–67, 216n10 Kydryński, Lucjan: on the 1956 Warsaw Autumn program, 60 Liebermann, Rolf, 128 Lindstedt, Iwona, 193; on Schäffer’s education, 120; on Schäffer’s Tertium datur, 136–37 Lissa, Zofia, 22, 45, 160, 169, 208n61; and the audience, 30–31, 35, 37, 42–44, 51–52, 56, 61; on dodecaphony, 103; on electronic music, 68–69; on the idea of musical progress, 18–19, 30–31, 34–35, 37, 56, 196–97, 214n69; on Lutosławski’s Concerto, 54–55; on Mycielski’s Silesian Overture, 42; and socialist realism, 26–31, 34–35, 37, 42–44, 52; and the Soviet Union, 20; on Turski’s Symphony no. 2, 42 “little stabilization,” 66–67, 86–88, 157 Łobaczewska, Stefania: on Schäffer’s Almanac, 123; and socialist realism, 27; on Szymanowski and his music, 96–100, 113 Love, Heather: on the “backwards turns” of queer modernist literary figures, 7 Ludorowski, Leszek: on the first Warsaw Autumn festival, 101 Lutosławski, Witold, 27, 60–63, 122, 128, 166, 177; and accessibility, 106–13, 138, 150; “accommodation of the ear,” 106–9, 182; and Berg, 225n72; and café performances, 21–22; Concerto for Orchestra, 53–56, 105, 120–21, 130, 178; on Darmstadt, 179; and dodecaphony, 105–16, 225n73; Funeral Music (Muzyka żałobna), 9, 105–17, 131, 138, 144, 150, 152, 167, 182–83, 224n63; on imitation vs. plagiarism, 188; on Kisielewski’s Fantasia, 49–50; as national genius, 9, 111, 114, 150, 194; Overture

258     index Lutosławski (continued) for Strings, 224n61; Paganini Variations, 22; and the Polish Radio Experimental Studio, 70, 73; and Schäffer, 9, 120, 125, 148, 156, 185–88; and Ruch Muzyczny, 79; on Stravinsky, 102; Songs of the Underground Resistance, 22; Symphony no. 1, 22, 42–43, 53, 211n16; on Szymanowski’s legacy, 19; Venetian Games, 2–3, 182–83, 234n56; on young Polish composers, 180–81 Machl, Tadeusz: on Stravinsky, 102, 104 Malawski, Artur, 27, 122; and Schäffer, 120, 148 Mann, Thomas: Doktor Faustus, 80 Marek, Tadeusz: on the “Polish School,” 180–81; on Szymanowski’s Stabat Mater and the Symphony no. 3, 101 Markiewicz, Leon: on Górecki’s nationalism (via interior design), 181; on the Polish Radio Experimental Studio seminar, 73; on Schäffer’s graphic notation, 150–51 Markowski, Andrzej: A Stroll through Old Town, 74–76 Martin, Frank, 53, 103–4, 213n62 memory: and meaning, 93; and national identity, 93 Mersmann, Hans, 171; as an influence for Chomiński, 130–31, 228n34 as an influence for Régamey, 18 Messiaen, Olivier, 68, 128; Les offrandes oubliées, 101 Mickiewicz, Adam, 93 middlebrow: culture, 24; modernism, 53, 105 Mirka, Danuta: on “sonorism” in composition, 175, 235n59 Młodzianowski, Adam: The Trio, 80, 82 Młodziejowski, Jerzy: on Szymanowski, 101 Morawski, Jerzy: on Polish progress and social responsibility, 67; on press censorship, 57–58 Motyka, Lucjan: on mitigating the party’s newly decentralized relationship to artists, 65 Munk, Andrzej: A Stroll through Old Town, 74–76 musique concrète, 60, 68–71, 196. See also electronic music; Polish Radio Experimental Studio Mycielski, Zygmunt, 22, 77, 124; on the Commissions Committee, 90–92, 104; on craftmanship vs. ideology, 45; on dodecaphony, 103–4, 106, 224n54; on issues facing Polish composers, 50, 52–54, 126–27; Lamento di Tristano, 40; on musical progress, 18–19, 29,

31–33, 36–38, 43, 51–54, 60, 62, 126–27, 165, 185, 188–89; on musique concrète, 69; on Penderecki’s music, 198; on Polish national identity, 83, 164–65; on the “Polish School,” 167–68, 198; (flexible) political affiliations of, 14; and Ruch Muzyczny, 83–85, 220n71, 221n73; on Schäffer, 149, 151–53, 156–57, 185; Silesian Overture, 37–42, 46, 48; Symphony no. 1, “Polish,” 46; on Szymanowski, 100; as an unsuccessful talent (according to Schäffer), 122 Naliwajek-Mazurek, Katarzyna: on UB suppression of records about underground resistance, 206n43; on the use of music in the Generalgouvernement, 20 national identity, 4, 83, 93, 121, 164–66, 170, 199, 209n76, 222n12, 238n20; and Polishness in music, 3, 9, 11–16, 27, 34, 43, 48, 98, 100, 164, 168, 212n37 new, the, 117–54, 157, 159–60, 175–76; vs. the “next,” 203n19; but not too new, 54–55; and progress, 9, 28–29, 32, 94 Nilsson, Bo, 159 Nono, Luigi, 159, 162 Ochlewski, Tadeusz, 23, 83–84; on Ruch Muzyczny, 83–84, 220n58, 220n67; on Schäffer’s accusations of plagiarism, 155–56; on Schäffer’s Almanac, 123–24, 127–28 October Revolution of 1956, 9, 36, 51, 57–63, 89 optimism: of Bacewicz’s Symphony no. 3, 48; enforced, 52; in socialist-realist music, 41 Osborne, Peter: on modernity and “newness,” 203n19 Palester, Roman, 27; and dodecaphony, 104–5 Pański, Józef: on the Polish Radio Experimental Studio, 70 Panufnik, Andrzej, 51; and café performances, 21–22; and commissions, 46; as omitted from Schäffer’s Almanac, 123; Sinfonia Rustica, 44, 211n23 Patkowski, Józef, 127–28, 179; on the Polish Radio Experimental Studio, 69–70, 73, 74–75; on the score to Kotoński’s Etude for a Single Cymbal Stroke, 72–73 Penderecki, Krzysztof, 160, 166, 198–99; Anaklasis, 167; Dimensions of Time and Silence, 173–76, 234n55; Emanations, 162; and film music, 1–2, 238n20; influence of, 194–96; notation of, 186; and the Polish Radio

index    259 Experimental Studio, 73; Psalms of David, 162; and serialism, 2; Strophes, 162–63, 167, 173; Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima, 1–2, 139, 175–76, 196, 230n56, 235n60 Penherski, Zbigniew: as spokesperson for the Youth Circle’s complaints about the Composers’ Union, 117–19, 224n59 Perkowski, Piotr, 179–81, 236n75; on Kisielewski’s critique of Mycielski’s Symphony no. 1, 46; on Lissa, 52, 213n56 Picasso, Pablo: Man with a Guitar, 80–81 Pierce, J. Mackenzie: on high vs. low culture under the Nazis, 21; on Lissa and trauma, 208n61; on postwar cultural institutional infrastructure in Poland, 23 Pilarski, Bohdan, 160, 169–70; critiqued by Rebling, 80, 219n56; on Lutosławski’s dodecaphony, 105–6, 111, 150; on Lutosławski’s Funeral Music, 114 Piłsudski, Marshal Józef, 13 plagiarism, 153, 155–58, 183–89, 232n11, 236n89 Pociej, Bohdan: “The Dawn of the Avant-Garde,” 160, 162, 164, 166; on Górecki, 160–62, 171; on Lutosławski’s Funeral Music, 114–15, 152; on Penderecki, 162; on the postwar avant-garde, 152–53, 164, 166–70, 235n65; on Schäffer and dodecaphony, 132; on Schäffer’s New Music, 148; on Schäffer’s Tertium datur, 151, 153 Poggioli, Renato: on avant-gardism, 7–8 Polish Radio Experimental Studio, 63, 68–75, 80, 87–88, 124, 127. See also electronic music; musique concrète Polish School, the, 1, 153, 158, 167–68, 170, 180, 182, 193, 198–99, 232n17; and “sonoristic characteristics,” 73, 162, 168–69, 175–76, 178, 182 Pollock, Emily Richmond: on the Stunde Null in Germany, 203n23 Pousseur, Henri, 159 Późniak, Włodzimierz: Suita Orawska, 91 Prokofiev, Sergei, 21, 40, 50, 53, 159 Przerwa-Tetmajer, Kazimierz, 181 Przyboś, Julian: on dodecaphony, 104; on elite cultural dissemination, 210n8 Radio Free Europe, 57 Rebling, Eberhard: critique of Ruch Muzyczny, 80–85 Régamey, Konstanty, 17–22, 42, 132, 162, 208n68, 222n19; Content and Form in Music, 18, 28; on cultural progress, 28–32, 38; on dodecaphonic technique, 103; “nodes,” 94–95, 97, 107, 131; Persian Songs, 21; Quintet for

clarinet, bassoon, violin, cello, and piano, 21–22, 130–31, 207n47; “Toward an Analysis of Evolution in Art,” 94–95; and the underground resistance movement, 21 Reyland, Nicholas: on the effects of considering Lutosławski as a genius, 114; on the title of Lutosławski’s Funeral Music, 224n63 Riegl, Aloïs: and Kunstwollen as an influence for Régamey, 18, 29, 208n68 Rifkin, Mark: on decolonized time, 7 Ross, Alex: on the Polish avant-garde, 1, 3 Roussel, Albert, 48 Różycki, Ludomir: as omitted from Schäffer’s Almanac, 123 Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám: and Penderecki’s Strophes, 162; and Régamey’s Persian Songs, 21 Ruch Muzyczny (journal), 43, 49, 63, 75–88, 119, 124–25, 219n44, 219n47, 220n68 Rudnik, Eugeniusz. See Kotoński, Włodzimierz: Etude for a Single Cymbal Stroke Rudziński, Witold, 199; on the Composers’ Union’s Youth Circle, 119; as “not very modern” (according to Schäffer), 122; on Schäffer’s Monosonata, 150; on Schäffer’s role at Ruch Muzyczny, 77, 119; on Turski’s Symphony no. 2, 42 Rufer, Josef, 128 Russolo, Luigi: nontraditional notation of, 186 Rutkowski, Bronisław: and Ruch Muzyczny, 79, 220n71 Rytel, Piotr, 11–12, 14, 30, 38, 95; on Bacewicz, 116; on the “Decline of Musical Culture” in Poland, 16; on Szymanowski’s Stabat Mater, 15–16 Schaeffer, Pierre, 68, 79. See also musique concrète Schäffer, Bogusław, 9, 116–54, 165; accusations of (others’) plagiarism, 153, 155–58, 183–89, 232n11, 236n89; Almanac of Polish Contemporary Composers (And an Overview of Their Work), 121–25, 127–28, 148–49; and Chomiński, 130–31, 228n33, 230n56; Concerto per sei e tre, 155–56, 185–86, 232n11, 236n89; on “craftsmanship,” 126, 148; and dodecaphony, 104–5, 115, 120, 128–30, 132, 150; Hommage à Irzykowski, 120; on Lutosławski as a dodecaphonist, 106, 224n61; on Lutosławski’s Concerto for Orchestra, 121; on Lutosławski’s Funeral Music, 112; Monosonata, 133, 136, 138– 47, 149–50, 170, 175, 229n55, 230n56, 230n58;

260     index Schäffer (continued) Musica ipsa, 184; New Music: Problems in Contemporary Compositional Technique, 128–32, 148–49, 151; nonstop, 191–93, 237n2; on the Polish avant-garde movement, 158–60, 176; Quattro movimenti, 133–36, 144, 149; and Ruch Muzyczny, 78–80, 119, 125, 219n47; and serialism, 136; and solitude, 152; on sonoristics, 193; on Stockhausen’s Klavierstück XI, 132, 159, 191; Tertium datur, 133, 136–38, 144, 149, 151, 153; third style/path, 122–23, 144–51; TIS MW2, 120 Schiller, Henryk: on Penderecki’s Dimensions of Time and Silence, 173–75; on Penderecki’s Strophes, 162–64, 173; on Stravinsky, 102 Schmelz, Peter J.: on the unofficial Soviet avantgarde, 158 Schoenberg, Arnold, 128–29, 159; and Jachimecki, 120; Piano Concerto, op. 42, 103 serialism, 80, 104, 153, 182, 214n69, 224n52; in Kotoński, 73; in Penderecki, 2; in Schäffer, 136. See also dodecaphony Serocki, Kazimierz, 152–53, 166, 177; on Kilar, 91; and wartime music education, 21 Shining, The: and Penderecki, 1–2 Shostakovich, Dmitri, 40, 48, 53, 122, 148, 219n56; Symphony no. 10, 101 Sikorski, Kazimierz: as educator, 206n44, 226n2; Overture, 37–38; on Schäffer’s Almanac, 124–25; on the Youth Circle’s complaints about the Composers’ Union, 118 Skrowaczewski, Stanisław: on the need for an electronic studio-laboratory, 69 Śledziński, Stefan: on generation gaps in Polish composers, 119 Snyder, Timothy, 4; on Polish deaths in the war, 22 socialist realism, 2, 26–37, 41–55, 77, 80, 98, 103, 105, 126, 157, 178, 196, 212n37, 220n59 Sokół, Lech: on Witkacy’s philosophy, 18 Sokorski, Włodzimierz, 34–35, 37, 42–44, 51–52, 61, 66; “Formalism and Realism in Music,” 28; on Panufnik’s Sinfonia Rustica, 44; and Polish Radio, 64, 70–71, 73; on Szymanowski, 95–96; on Turski’s Symphony no. 2 (as formalistic and nightmarish), 42, 44 sonorism, 170, 175. See also Chomiński: “sonoristics”; Polish School: and “sonoristic characteristics” soul: Polish, 17 spatiality, 168, 230n58; in Górecki, 171; and newness, 203n19; in Schäffer’s Monosonata, 140–44, 230n58

Spisak, Michał: on Stravinsky, 102 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 128, 136, 150, 153, 159; dodecaphonic technique of, 102, 104; Gesang der Jünglinge, 164; Klavierstück XI, 132, 159, 191; notation practices of, 186; Studie II, 72, 218n31 Stravinsky, Igor, 53, 60, 79, 128, 159, 216n91; and dodecaphony, 102, 104, 223n50; and elite audiences, 30; as an influence for Kisielewski, 50; as an influence for Szymanowski, 12, 21; Les noces, 162; Petrushka, 42; as a signifier of all things modern, 102 Stunde Null (Zero Hour), 8, 62, 203n23 Światło, Józef: defection of, 57 symphony: as form, 32, 40–41, 46, 178, 210n11 Szabelski, Bolesław, 122, 166, 177, 233n39; and the Polish Radio Experimental Studio, 73; on Schäffer’s Quattro movimenti and Monosonata, 149 Szalonek, Witold, 160, 166 Szeligowski, Tadeusz: on Mycielski’s Symphony no. 1, 46; on the Polish avant-garde, 179, 181; on Schäffer’s Almanac, 124; on Schäffer’s attitude, 235n69 Szwajgier, Krzysztof: on Schäffer’s use of the word “possibility,” 132 Szymanowski, Karol, 11–19, 21, 27, 31, 33, 38, 94, 116, 181; on Chopin, 93; The Educational Role of Musical Culture, 16–18, 36; Harnasie, 100; legacy of, 19, 95–103, 111, 121, 148, 177; and the music conservatory in Warsaw, 14–16; nationalism of, 11–13; politics of, 14; sexuality of, 115; Stabat Mater, op. 53, 15–16, 21, 97–98, 100–101; Symphony no. 3, op. 27, “Song of the Night,” 97–98, 101; and synthesis, 132–33 Taruskin, Richard: on the German canon as a universal tradition, 14 Tchórzewski, Jerzy, 182 Thomas, Adrian: on Bacewicz’s influences, 48; on Lutosławski’s Venetian Games, 182; on the Festival of Polish Music, 46; on Penderecki’s Psalms of David, 162; on “sonorism,” 235n59 Tilbury, John: and Schäffer’s nonstop, 191 Todorova, Maria: on backwardness discourse, 5–6 Tomaszewski, Mieczysław: and Ochlewski, 127–28; on Penderecki and the “magic square,” 234n55 Tompkins, David: on composers’ navigation of institutional demands, 46; on the realization

index    261 of socialist realism in musical form, 43; on Turski, 211n20 tradition: avant-garde as, 9–10, 158, 165, 170, 185, 191, 193–95; as “complicated baggage,” 235n65; and imitation, 188; as inhabited (to push back against settler culture), 7; as rejected/ resisted, 8, 121, 159; as synthesized with innovation, 9, 30, 54–55, 60, 94, 180; “universal” (the German canon), 14 Trochimczyk, Maja: on spatial organization in post–World War II avant-garde music, 230n58; on the trope of the “Polish soul,” 17 Turski, Zbigniew, 211n20; and commissions, 46; on Lissa, 51–52; Symphony no. 2, “Olympic,” 37–42, 44, 49, 68, 211n15 Twin Peaks: and Penderecki’s Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima, 2 Verdery, Katherine: on the production of cultural capital under socialism, 45 Walaciński, Adam: on Stravinsky, 102 Waldorff, Jerzy: on Polish cultural reconstruction and the Kraków Philharmonic, 23–24 Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music, 80, 196; in 1956, 59–60, 63, 68, 101, 103; in 1957, 160; in 1958, 83–84, 111, 113, 117, 152–53, 171; in 1959, 160, 162, 164–65; in 1960, 149, 168, 170–71, 234n56; in 1961, 2–3; in 1962, 184 Webern, Anton, 128–30, 162, 194; Das Augenlicht, op. 26, 160; and the “magic square,” 173, 234n55 Weinberg, Mieczysław: and the Soviet Union, 20 Werden, Mary: on discourses of development, 24 Wightman, Alistair: on conservative reaction to Szymanowski’s appointment at the music conservatory in Warsaw, 14 Wilczek, Jan: interference with Mycielski’s keynote address, 52

Wildberger, Jacques, 159 Wiłkomirski, Kazimierz: on cultural progress and “creative genius,” 90; on the need for a broader musical press outlet in Poland, 77 Witkacy. See Witkiewicz, Stanisław (“Witkacy”) Ignacy Witkiewicz, Stanisław (“Witkacy”) Ignacy, 181; as an influence for Régamey, 18, 120, 222n28 Wölfflin, Heinrich: as an influence for Régamey, 18 Woytowicz, Bolesław: and café performances, 21; Cantata in Praise of Work, 32; on musical progress, 31–33, 36; on Mycielski’s Silesian Overture (as accessible), 42; on Sikorski’s Overture (as boring), 38; Symphony no. 2, 32–33, 41 Wysocki, Tadeusz: on Schäffer’s compositional output, 149–50; on Schäffer’s position on the Polish avant-garde, 152–53 Xenakis, Iannis, 159 Yalta Conference, 5 Zathey, Janusz: critiqued by Rebling, 80; on the Darmstadt summer courses, 79–80 Zhdanov, Andrei, 33–36, 41; Zhdanovshchina, 35–44 Zielinski, Richard: on Szymanowski’s Stabat Mater, 15 Zieliński, Tadeusz, 176–78 on the affective impact of Penderecki’s Threnody, 175–76; on Schäffer, 184; on the “sonic arabesque” of Polish composers, 168–70; on Szymanowski, 177 Żółkiewski, Stefan: on Polish composers, 56, 64 Żuławski, Wawrzyniec: on Bacewicz’s Symphony no. 3, 48

CALIFORNIA STUDIES IN 20TH-CENTURY MUSIC Richard Taruskin, General Editor 1. Revealing Masks: Exotic Influences and Ritualized Performance in Modernist Music Theater, by W. Anthony Sheppard 2. Russian Opera and the Symbolist Movement, by Simon Morrison 3. German Modernism: Music and the Arts, by Walter Frisch 4. New Music, New Allies: American Experimental Music in West Germany from the Zero Hour to Reunification, by Amy Beal 5. Bartók, Hungary, and the Renewal of Tradition: Case Studies in the Intersection of Modernity and Nationality, by David E. Schneider 6. Classic Chic: Music, Fashion, and Modernism, by Mary E. Davis 7. Music Divided: Bartók’s Legacy in Cold War Culture, by Danielle Fosler-Lussier 8. Jewish Identities: Nationalism, Racism, and Utopianism in Twentieth-Century Art Music, by Klára Móricz 9. Brecht at the Opera, by Joy H. Calico 10. Beautiful Monsters: Imagining the Classic in Musical Media, by Michael Long 11. Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits, by Benjamin Piekut 12. Music and the Elusive Revolution: Cultural Politics and Political Culture in France, 1968–1981, by Eric Drott 13. Music and Politics in San Francisco: From the 1906 Quake to the Second World War, by Leta E. Miller 14. Frontier Figures: American Music and the Mythology of the American West, by Beth E. Levy 15. In Search of a Concrete Music, by Pierre Schaeffer, translated by Christine North and John Dack 16. The Musical Legacy of Wartime France, by Leslie A. Sprout 17. Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw in Postwar Europe, by Joy H. Calico 18. Music in America’s Cold War Diplomacy, by Danielle Fosler-Lussier 19. Making New Music in Cold War Poland: The Warsaw Autumn Festival, 1956–1968, by Lisa Jakelski 20. Treatise on Musical Objects: An Essay across Disciplines, by Pierre Schaeffer, translated by Christine North and John Dack 21. Nostalgia for the Future: Luigi Nono’s Selected Writings and Interviews, edited by Angela Ida De Benedictis and Veniero Rizzardi 22. The Doctor Faustus Dossier: Arnold Schoenberg, Thomas Mann, and Their Contemporaries, 1930–1951, edited by E. Randol Schoenberg, with an introduction by Adrian Daub 23. Stravinsky in the Americas: Transatlantic Tours and Domestic Excursions from Wartime Los Angeles (1925–1945), by H. Colin Slim, with a foreword by Richard Taruskin

24. Middlebrow Modernism: Britten’s Operas and the Great Divide, by Christopher Chowrimootoo 25. A Wayfaring Stranger: Ernst von Dohnányi’s American Years, 1949–1960, by Veronika Kusz, translated by Viktória Kusz and Brian McLean 26. In Stravinsky’s Orbit: Responses to Modernism in Russian Paris, by Klára Móricz 27. Zoltan Kodaly’s World of Music, by Anna Dalos 28. Awangarda: Tradition and Modernity in Postwar Polish Music, by Lisa Cooper Vest

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