Making New Music in Cold War Poland
Making New Music in Cold War Poland

Author: Lisa Jakelski

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2016-10-25

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 0520292545

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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 festivalÕs institutional organization, negotiations among its various actors, and its reception in Poland, while also considering the festivalÕs 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. Ê

The Symphony and Symphonic Thinking in Polish Music Since 1956
The Symphony and Symphonic Thinking in Polish Music Since 1956

Author: Beata Bolesławska

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-05-22

Total Pages: 243

ISBN-13: 1317014464

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1956 was a year of transition in Poland, and an important year for Polish music. This year saw the beginning of a political thaw – sometimes called the Polish October – in communist Poland. It was also the year of the establishment of the 'Warsaw Autumn' International Festival of Contemporary Music. This was a time of great artistic ferment in Polish music, which also deeply influenced symphonic thinking. The year 1956 is thus an appropriate starting point for Beata Bolesławska’s study of the contemporary Polish symphonic tradition. Bolesławska investigates the influential Polish avant-garde, illuminating the ways in which new musical means and ideas influenced symphonic music and the genre of the symphony in the music of such important composers as Witold Lutosławski (1913–1994), Henryk Mikołaj Górecki (1933–2010) and Krzysztof Penderecki (b. 1933). Referring to the main elements of the European tradition, as well as examining briefly the symphonic activity in Poland before 1956, the book concentrates on the symphonic writing in the context of avant-garde trends, represented by the so-called 'Polish school of composers', as well as on its later redefinitions proposed by Polish composers up to the present day.

Rethinking Modern Polish Identities
Rethinking Modern Polish Identities

Author: Agnieszka Pasieka

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2023-03-21

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 1648250580

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A critical examination of the category of "Polishness" - that is, the formation, redefinition, and performance of various kinds of Polish identities - from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives. Inspired by new research in the humanities and social sciences as well as recent scholarship on national identities, this volume offers a rigorous examination of the idea of Polishness. Offering a diversity of case studies and methodological-theoretical approaches, it demonstrates a profound connection between national and transnational processes and places the Polish case in a broader context. This broader context stretches from a larger Eastern European one, a usual frame of comparison, to the overseas immigrant communities. The authors, renowned scholars from Europe and the United States, thus demonstrate that an understanding of modern Polish identity means crossing not only historical but also geographical boundaries. Consequently, the narrative on Polish identity that unfolds in the volume is a personalized and multivocal one that presents the perspectives of a wide range of subjects: peasants, workers, migrants, ethnic and sexual minorities-that is, all those actors who have been absent in grand national narratives. As such, the examination of Polishness sheds light on the identity question more broadly, emphasizing the interplay of pluralizing and homogenizing tendencies, and fostering a reflection on national identity as encompassing both sameness and difference.

Awangarda
Awangarda

Author: Lisa Cooper Vest

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2020-12-01

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 0520975421

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In Awangarda, Lisa Cooper Vest explores how the Polish postwar musical avant-garde framed itself in contrast to its Western European counterparts. Rather than a rejection of the past, the Polish avant-garde movement emerged as a manifestation of national cultural traditions stretching back into the interwar years and even earlier into the nineteenth century. Polish composers, scholars, and political leaders wielded the promise of national progress to broker consensus across generational and ideological divides. Together, they established an avant-garde musical tradition that pushed against the limitations of strict chronological time and instrumentalized discourses of backwardness and forwardness to articulate a Polish road to modernity. This is a history that resists Cold War periodization, opening up new ways of thinking about nations and nationalism in the second half of the twentieth century.

Nadia Boulanger and Her World
Nadia Boulanger and Her World

Author: Jeanice Brooks

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2020-11-19

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 022675085X

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Nadia Boulanger (1887–1979) was arguably one of the most iconic figures in twentieth-century music, and certainly among the most prominent musicians of her time. For many composers— especially Americans from Aaron Copland to Philip Glass—studying with Boulanger in Paris or Fontainebleau was a formative moment in a creative career. Composer, performer, conductor, impresario, and charismatic and inspirational teacher, Boulanger engaged in a vast array of activities in a variety of media, from private composition lessons and lecture-recitals to radio broadcasts, recordings, and public performances. But how to define and account for Boulanger’s impact on the music world is still unclear. Nadia Boulanger and Her World takes us from a time in the late nineteenth century, when many careers in music were almost entirely closed to women, to the moment in the late twentieth century when those careers were becoming a reality. Contributors consider Boulanger’s work in the worlds of composition, musical analysis, and pedagogy and explore the geographies of transatlantic and international exchange and disruption within which her career unfolded. Ultimately, this volume takes its title as a topic for exploration—asking what worlds Boulanger belonged to, and in what sense we can consider any of them to be “hers.”

Cuban Music Counterpoints
Cuban Music Counterpoints

Author: Marysol Quevedo

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2023

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 0197552234

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"This book tells readers: tracing the classical music networks that Cuban composers cultivated between 1940 and 1991 through examining compositions, ensembles, and cultural institutions with a microhistorical approach. It sets the foundation for investigating how aesthetics and politics intersected in the case studies explored throughout the book: individual points of view largely determined the degree to which composers engaged in various local and international artistic networks; and these networks were constantly being nurtured and shaped by their actors, who also had to contend with national and global political and economic circumstances. This chapter provides readers with working definitions of key concepts: modernism, avant-garde, experimentalism, and vanguardia. Key figures Fernando Ortiz and Alejo Carpentier and their contributions to the intellectual milieu that Cuban composers inhabited -especially the concepts of transculturation and lo real maravilloso, respectively-are also discussed. It contextualizes the book within existing scholarship on 20th-century classical music of the Americas, Eastern Europe, and the Cold War, as well as those dealing with Cuban music and Cuban studies more broadly"--

Ask the Experts
Ask the Experts

Author: Michael Sy Uy

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-09-14

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 0197510450

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From the end of the Second World War through the U.S. Bicentennial, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Ford Foundation granted close to $300 million (approximately $2.3 billion in 2017 dollars) in the field of music alone. In deciding what to fund, these three grantmaking institutions decided to "ask the experts," adopting seemingly objective, scientific models of peer review and specialist evaluation. They recruited music composers at elite institutions, professors from prestigious universities, and leaders of performing arts organizations. Among the most influential expert-consultants were Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Lukas Foss, and Milton Babbitt. The significance was two-fold: not only were male, Western art composers put in charge of directing large and unprecedented channels of public and private funds, but in doing so they also determined and defined what was meant by artistic excellence. They decided the fate of their peers and shaped the direction of music-making in this country. By asking the experts, the grantmaking institutions produced a concentrated and interconnected field of artists and musicians. Officers and directors utilized ostensibly objective financial tools like matching grants and endowments in an attempt to diversify and stabilize applicants' sources of funding, as well as the number of applicants they funded. Such economics-based strategies, however, relied more on personal connections among the wealthy and elite, rather than local community citizens. Ultimately, this history demonstrates how "expertise" served as an exclusionary form of cultural and social capital that prevented racial minorities and non-dominant groups from fully participating.

Music behind the Iron Curtain
Music behind the Iron Curtain

Author: Daniel Elphick

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2019-10-03

Total Pages: 317

ISBN-13: 110849367X

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Complements the ongoing revival of Mieczyslaw Weinberg's music and explains its unique blend of Polish and Soviet Russian influences.

A History of Eastern Europe 1918 to the Present
A History of Eastern Europe 1918 to the Present

Author: Ian D. Armour

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2021-04-08

Total Pages: 481

ISBN-13: 1472508653

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Why is Eastern Europe still different from Western Europe, more than a quarter-century after the collapse of Communism? A History of Eastern Europe 1918 to the Present shows how the roots of this difference are based in Eastern Europe's tortured 20th century. Eastern Europe emerged in 1918 as the 'lands between', new states whose weakness vis-à-vis Germany and Soviet Russia soon became obvious. The region was the main killing-field of the Second World War, which visited unimaginable horrors on its inhabitants before their 'liberation' by the Soviets in 1945. The imposition of Communist dictatorships on the region, ironically, only deepened Eastern Europe's backwardness. Even in the post-Communist period, its problems continue to make it a fertile breeding-ground for nationalism and political extremism. A History of Eastern Europe 1918 to the Present explores the comparative backwardness of Eastern Europe and how this has driven strategies of modernisation; it looks at the ways in which the region has served as a giant test-tube for political experimentation and, in particular, at the enduring strength of nationalism, which since 1989 has re-emerged more virulent than ever. This book in the essential textbook for any student of 20th-century Eastern Europe.

Polish Cold War Neon
Polish Cold War Neon

Author: Ilona Karwińska

Publisher: Mark Batty Publisher

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781935613350

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This title tells the story of neon in Poland by preserving and celebrating the remnants of this rich and influential history. Comprising archival and contemporary photographs of these mesmerizing signs, the book reveals an untold story of Poland.