Making New Music in Cold War Poland: The Warsaw Autumn Festival, 1956-1968 - Couverture rigide

Jakelski, Lisa

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0520292545 ISBN 13 : 9780520292543

Editeur : University of California Press, 2016

Synopsis

Making New Music in Cold War Poland presents a social analysis of new music dissemination at the Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music, one of the most important venues for East-West cultural contact during the Cold War. In this incisive study, Lisa Jakelski examines the festival’s institutional organization, negotiations among its various actors, and its reception in Poland, while also considering the festival’s worldwide ramifications, particularly the ways that it contributed to the cross-border movement of ideas, objects, and people (including composers, performers, official festival guests, and tourists). This book explores social interactions within institutional frameworks and how these interactions shaped the practices, values, and concepts associated with new music.
 

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Lisa Jakelski is Associate Professor of Musicology at the Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester.

À propos de la quatrième de couverture

“Lisa Jakelski’s Making New Music in Cold War Poland offers a vibrant account of the postwar negotiations on what new music could and should mean, positioned on what Jakelski terms ‘the Cold War's cultural fault line,’ at a site of concrete, critical engagement between modernism and socialist realism. Jakelski’s narrative, though, does away with simplistic binaries, revealing the ways in which the everyday lives and interactions between composers, performers, administrators, and critics negotiated the space between the competing poles. In equal measure political and personal, this account expands both the geographical and the methodological territory of histories of new music in important, vital directions.”—Martin Iddon, author of New Music at Darmstadt: Nono, Stockhausen, Cage, and Boulez
 
“No mere institutional history here! Jakelski’s book crackles with insights into Cold War cultural politics, festival culture, and the practices and practitioners of new music in the long 1960s. Highly recommended for its grounding in extraordinary archival research and interviews, its conceptual verve, and its elegant prose.”—Joy H. Calico, author of Arnold Schoenberg’s “A Survivor from Warsaw in Postwar Europe”
 
“Jakelski's engaging, impeccably researched study captures a heady environment of musical upheaval, innovation, and controversy whose ramifications are still being felt today. This will be a crucial resource for anyone interested in postwar music making, the arts during the Cold War, and music’s many social meanings.”—Peter J. Schmelz, author of Such Freedom if Only Musical: Unofficial Soviet Music during the Thaw

"This outstanding book is a must-read for anyone who seeks to understand twentieth-century art music. Through painstaking primary source research, Lisa Jakelski shows us how Polish composers worked with, through, against and alongside the power of the state to achieve their desired ends. At the same time, this nuanced, clear-eyed history demonstrates definitively that Polish artists were not cut off from the world, but deeply engaged in musical activity across and through the Iron Curtain. By revealing the national and international networks in which new music was made, Jakelski transforms our understanding of Europe’s Cold War musical life."—Danielle Fosler-Lussier, author of Music in America’s Cold War Diplomacy
 
 
 

À propos de la deuxième de couverture

&;Lisa Jakelski&;s Making New Music in Cold War Poland offers a vibrant account of the postwar negotiations on what new music could and should mean, positioned on what Jakelski terms &;the Cold War's cultural fault line,&; at a site of concrete, critical engagement between modernism and socialist realism. Jakelski&;s narrative, though, does away with simplistic binaries, revealing the ways in which the everyday lives and interactions between composers, performers, administrators, and critics negotiated the space between the competing poles. In equal measure political and personal, this account expands both the geographical and the methodological territory of histories of new music in important, vital directions.&;&;Martin Iddon, author of New Music at Darmstadt: Nono, Stockhausen, Cage, and Boulez
 
&;No mere institutional history here! Jakelski&;s book crackles with insights into Cold War cultural politics, festival culture, and the practices and practitioners of new music in the long 1960s. Highly recommended for its grounding in extraordinary archival research and interviews, its conceptual verve, and its elegant prose.&;&;Joy H. Calico, author of Arnold Schoenberg&;s &;A Survivor from Warsaw in Postwar Europe&;
 
&;Jakelski's engaging, impeccably researched study captures a heady environment of musical upheaval, innovation, and controversy whose ramifications are still being felt today. This will be a crucial resource for anyone interested in postwar music making, the arts during the Cold War, and music&;s many social meanings.&;&;Peter J. Schmelz, author of Such Freedom if Only Musical: Unofficial Soviet Music during the Thaw

"This outstanding book is a must-read for anyone who seeks to understand twentieth-century art music. Through painstaking primary source research, Lisa Jakelski shows us how Polish composers worked with, through, against and alongside the power of the state to achieve their desired ends. At the same time, this nuanced, clear-eyed history demonstrates definitively that Polish artists were not cut off from the world, but deeply engaged in musical activity across and through the Iron Curtain. By revealing the national and international networks in which new music was made, Jakelski transforms our understanding of Europe&;s Cold War musical life."&;Danielle Fosler-Lussier, author of Music in America&;s Cold War Diplomacy
 
 
 

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Making New Music in Cold War Poland

The Warsaw Autumn Festival, 1956–1968

By Lisa Jakelski

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2017 Lisa Jakelski
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-520-29254-3

Contents

List of Illustrations and Tables, 
Acknowledgments, 
Abbreviations, 
Introduction, 
1. The Sounds of Revolution?, 
2. Building an Empty Frame, 
3. A Raucous Education, 
4. From Warsaw to the World, 
5. Mobilizing Performers, Scores, and Avant-Gardes, 
6. The Limits of Exchange, 
Epilogue, 
Appendix 1: Concert Program of the Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music, 10–21 October 1956, 
Appendix 2: Biographical Notes, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

The Sounds of Revolution?

The nineteenth of October, 1956, was a tense day in Warsaw. The PZPR's Eighth Plenum was scheduled to begin. Appointing a new politburo was the main item of business. In a significant political shift, PZPR members planned to install Wladyslaw Gomulka as first party secretary. His predecessor, Boleslaw Bierut, had been in power from 1948 until his sudden death in Moscow in March 1956; during that time, he had presided over Poland's Stalinization and its absorption into the Eastern Bloc. Gomulka, in contrast, had been jailed from 1951 to 1954 for having too overtly national an agenda. As of October 1956, he had only recently been readmitted to the PZPR.

The change in Gomulka's fortunes was part of a larger reassessment of Stalinism that had been taking place throughout the Eastern Bloc after Stalin's death on 5 March 1953. This reassessment had come to a head on 25 February 1956, when Nikita Khrushchev delivered his "secret speech" at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Although intended for an audience of party faithful, Khrushchev's condemnation of Stalinism circulated widely in Poland through the diligence of printers and others who fashioned private duplicates of the document. Its impact in Polish society was immediate and seismic, unleashing a period of open questioning and social turbulence that culminated in the Poznan riots of June 1956. Support for social and political change remained widespread throughout Poland even after the protests had been quelled. For many, appointing Gomulka represented a chance both to right the wrongs of the past and to take a more independent path toward the future.

Although Khrushchev had provided Poles with an opening to vent their frustrations with the failures of Stalinism, he was hardly sanguine about the turn of events in Poland. Backed by Soviet political and military muscle, he arrived in Warsaw, unannounced, on 19 October. Khrushchev was determined to safeguard Soviet interests: Poland, a vital link between the Soviet Union and German Democratic Republic, was too important geopolitically to be allowed to stray far from socialist doctrine. Just in case Gomulka and his associates did not get the message, Soviet troops had begun to move into strategic positions. A forward military unit reached the Warsaw suburbs on 20 October.

By that time, however, Khrushchev and his entourage were on their way home. Gomulka had convinced Khrushchev that he was a loyal communist who had no intention of abandoning state socialism or the Warsaw Pact. How, then, could his leadership destabilize friendly Polish–Soviet relations? Chinese opposition to armed intervention had augmented Gomulka's powers of persuasion. Revolution in Hungary soon drew Soviet attention elsewhere. Buoyed by an outpouring of popular support, Gomulka became PZPR first secretary on 21 October. Chief among his initiatives was a "Polish road to socialism" that promised a degree of internal national sovereignty, including an independent Catholic Church, de-collectivization of farms, limited re-privatization of property, and the ouster of Soviet representatives from the Polish military. Culturally, Gomulka's reforms enlarged the potential range of officially acceptable artistic practices, reduced censorship, and rendered borders between Poland and the West increasingly permeable.

The Polish October Revolution that brought Gomulka to power in 1956 coincided with changes in other fields: the day he became first secretary was also the last day of the first Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music. For nearly two weeks, the festival had featured performances by visiting orchestras from both sides of Europe. Large ensembles from all over Poland had also taken part. The concerts presented a variety of music, including works by Stravinsky and Schoenberg — composers who, in the deep freeze of the late 1940s, had been vilified in Poland as formalists of the worst kind. Many pieces on the program were heard in Poland for the first time. The Warsaw Autumn also showcased Polish composers who had been active during the first postwar decade.

One of these was twenty-eight-year-old Tadeusz Baird, whose Cassazione per orchestra was the 1956 Warsaw Autumn's only world premiere. Its performance took place during the festival's closing concert on 21 October, as part of an all-Polish program that culminated in Karol Szymanowski's Symphony no. 3, op. 27 ("Song of the Night"). If the Szymanowski served to remind audiences of Poland's interwar modernism, Baird's new work offered them a snapshot of a style in transition. From the late 1940s into the early 1950s, Baird had supported the creation of a socialist-realist aesthetic in Polish music, writing tuneful, accessible works with readily graspable formal trajectories. By 1954, his youthful idealism had soured into disillusionment: during the earliest phases of the Thaw, he began to search for a different compositional language, analyzing whatever scores he could find and reading manuals on twelve-tone technique by Hanns Jelinek and Hermann Pfrogner. Cassazione was Baird's first foray into dodecaphony. He later dismissed the three-movement work as an unsuccessful hybrid, in which he had attempted to shoehorn a twelve-tone theme into neoclassical forms. But regardless of what Baird may have come to think about Cassazione, in 1956 it was an embodiment of many Polish composers' most deeply felt aspirations: to engage with contemporary musical trends from Western Europe, and thereby make up the time they had lost to both World War II and postwar Stalinism.

The Warsaw Autumn's architects could not have known that the 1956 festival would coincide with a political revolution whose epicenter was the city in which the concerts were taking place. Yet the coincidence was not entirely due to chance. Both the political and musical domains had been in flux in Poland since Stalin's death, and, in their own ways, the October Revolution and the Warsaw Autumn each registered the extent of the changes that had been occurring as part of the Thaw. And while, strictly speaking, the Polish October Revolution did not cause the Warsaw Autumn, the political upheaval nevertheless colored festival participants' experiences in 1956. "We ran to the telephones for news during the intermissions," Polish music critic Jerzy Waldorff later recalled, "and then returned to our foreign guests in the concert hall, smiling and outwardly calm, as though nothing were happening." The political upheaval also affected subsequent assessments as to what the festival might mean. According to Seppo Nummi, a Finnish composer and editor who attended the Warsaw Autumn in 1958, "all of Poland" had heard the broadcasts of the 1956 festival while waiting by the radio for updates on the unfolding political situation, a convergence that had forged associations between the performance of modernist musical styles and the performance of national sovereignty. Thus, the close proximity of the first Warsaw Autumn to the Polish October cemented the idea that a musical revolution had unfolded alongside the political one. The 1956 festival continues to be described as a watershed moment in the history of Polish musical life.

But the first Warsaw Autumn was not just an instance of revolutionary change: the festival was also indebted to what had come before it. The cultural practices of the Stalinist era laid the groundwork for the premiere Warsaw Autumn. The festival also recalled a more distant past: the interwar years, when Polish composers had last felt themselves to be part of an international web of contemporary music making. Yet even if the first Warsaw Autumn was not entirely unprecedented, it marked an important shift in the art world of elite composers in postwar Poland. Understanding how the 1956 festival both built on and broke with the past will give us our first example of how institutional practices have shaped (and been shaped by) the values and ideas associated with new music.

CONSTRUCTING THE FOUNDATIONS

Polish musicians, state officials, and party authorities started to build the infrastructure for the Warsaw Autumn long before such a festival would have been possible. At a gathering in Kraków in late August 1945, composers transformed an interwar entity, the Association of Polish Composers (Stowarzyszenie Kompozytorów Polskich) into a new organization, the Polish Composers' Union (Zwiazek Kompozytorów Polskich, or ZKP). ZKP promoted its members' professional interests while enabling them to secure material resources in a reconstructing Poland. The political center likewise participated in cultural development as part of its project of postwar reconstruction and socialist transformation. State investment triggered a boom in the number of music ensembles that were active in Poland; orchestras, opera companies, and other groups were founded (or reestablished) all over the country. These musicians needed performance venues, so the state constructed concert halls and opera houses for them as well.

This development of personnel and facilities laid the groundwork for the Festivals of Polish Music that took place in 1951 and 1955. David Tompkins understands these events as forms of socialist "edutainment," in which the PZPR sought to use music performance to cement its authority, inculcate socialist-realist aesthetic values, and, ultimately, control Polish citizens. The 1951 festival lasted eight months; during that time, professional and amateur musicians played a staggering number of concerts in all corners of Poland. They presented music by Polish composers of the past, as well as new works that ZKP members had written especially for the occasion. Party and state actors, the 1951 festival's primary organizers, used incentives rather than punishments to bring ZKP on board with its agenda: developing and promoting socialist realism. Most composers were willing to create works that supported (or, at least, did not run counter to) a socialist-realist aesthetic. From the PZPR's perspective, the First Festival of Polish Music was a resounding success.

It was a success the party-state hoped to repeat. The political center scheduled a Second Festival of Polish Music for 1953; after various delays, it finally took place in 1955. Like its predecessor, the Second Festival was a gargantuan, multi-month affair that involved hundreds of performances all over Poland. Unlike its predecessor, however, the 1955 festival did little to further PZPR aims. Tompkins attributes this failure to a "crisis of party authority" that left the PZPR increasingly unable to affect an influential, independent contingent of Polish composers.

And it is true that these composers and party-state officials had fundamentally different views as to what the Second Festival of Polish Music should be. According to MKiS, the festival was to highlight ongoing developments in socialist realism. In contrast, authoritative ZKP members thought that the festival's goal should be stylistic catholicity, not the perpetuation of a narrowly defined socialist-realist aesthetic. Thus, in December 1953, at one of the earliest planning meetings, composer, critic, and former ZKP president Zygmunt Mycielski advocated as varied a program as possible — one that would include problematic works such as Witold Lutoslawski's Symphony no. 1 and Zbigniew Turski's Symphony no. 2 ("Olympic"), both condemned in the late 1940s for their formalism.

Needless to say, state cultural officials were hardly thrilled about this plan. But, in a sign that the Thaw was underway, they were unwilling to take a hard line and block stylistic diversity in the 1955 festival program. Deputy Minister of Culture Wlodzimierz Sokorski responded to Mycielski's suggestion by declaring that, even though "the festival cannot be a retreat backwards," a work such as Lutoslawski's Symphony no. 1 could nevertheless be performed — provided that it was situated as "representing a certain stage of development" and did not appear during the symbolically charged closing concerts. Ten months later, Jerzy Jasienski, director of the ministry's Department of Artistic Events and Celebrations (Departament Imprez Artystycznych i Obchodów), used precisely these terms to justify the 1955 festival's more eyebrow-raising repertoire. In a message to Tadeusz Ksiazek, deputy director of the PZPR Central Committee's Culture Department, Jasienski explained that these works had been programmed as points of comparison, to remind audiences of the poor state of Polish composition just after World War II. He assured Ksiazek that these pieces would be appropriately contained through their juxtaposition with music that more adequately fulfilled socialist-realist principles.

Whatever their reservations, party-state actors (and their fellow travelers among Polish musicians) ultimately recognized that there was little they could do about the 1955 festival program. Most of the logistics had been left to ZKP's executive board, which, during the most intense period of festival planning, was dominated by composers who were eager to find alternatives to Stalinistera policies. They included Tadeusz Baird and Kazimierz Serocki, young composers who had already started to set out in an avant-garde direction. Two of their slightly older colleagues, Andrzej Dobrowolski and Wlodzimierz Kotonski, would likewise become important advocates of modernist musical styles. Kazimierz Sikorski, ZKP's president as of April 1954, was Baird and Serocki's composition teacher. As a union administrator, he was an influential proponent of change. By the time the PZPR called a special meeting in late November 1954 to discuss ZKP's proposed festival program, there was — as one participant pointed out — hardly enough time to overhaul an event that was going to begin in January. And, Deputy Director Ksiazek lamented, even if there had been enough time to revamp the program, state administrators could not have done so, for they lacked the expert knowledge that was required to select the performers and repertoire. As the meeting ended, the PZPR official was admitting, self-critically, that ZKP had disentangled itself almost entirely from party control.

The Second Festival of Polish Music therefore achieved the recalibration of relationships between composers and party-state authorities. It is also significant that, in addition to wanting to perform music that had been censured during the Stalinist years, composers also sought ways to make the 1955 festival somehow international. These aims were in fact intertwined. When, in December 1953, Mycielski advocated a more inclusive approach to festival programming, he also told Deputy Minister of Culture Sokorski that the union wanted to invite international observers to the festival's closing concert series. Ideally, these guests would come "from all corners of the world," not just the Eastern European countries with which Poland had cultural exchange agreements. Mycielski justified this request by pointing to the difficulties Polish composers were having in disseminating their scores abroad.

It is important to remember that early-1950s Poland was, to use Dariusz Stola's words, "a country with no exit," ringed with barbed wire and governed by tight controls on the movement of its citizens. Polish musicians were among those whose mobility was restricted. Only the most institutionally powerful composers could travel abroad, and then only rarely. Typically, their journeys were part of cultural exchange missions with other socialist nations: Andrzej Panufnik, Poland's leading composer before his defection in 1954, was sent to Hungary and the Soviet Union in 1950 and to China in 1953.

Scores and recordings likewise had little opportunity to traverse the Polish border. This remained a sore point for composers well into 1954. At ZKP's General Assembly in April, Baird extolled the high quality of Polish symphonic composition, which, he claimed, was of sufficient quality to be competitive in an international market. Why, then, were these works not being disseminated abroad? To illustrate this problem, he cited a disheartening incident from a recent trip to Romania. In Bucharest, Baird had visited a music shop that was overflowing with publications from the Soviet Union, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia. But when he inquired about Polish music, the shopkeeper responded with a shrug: he had no Polish scores to offer. Baird interpreted Polish composers' inability to export their music as symptomatic of their more general isolation from the outside world.

(Continues...)

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Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: University of California Press
• Date d'édition: 2016
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0520292545
• ISBN 13: 9780520292543
• Reliure: Relié
• Numéro d'édition: 1
• Nombre de pages: 245
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible