Making New Music in Cold War Poland: The Warsaw Autumn Festival, 1956-1968 9780520966031

Table of contents :
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

Citation preview

Making New Music in Cold War Poland

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Making New Music in Cold War Poland The Warsaw Autumn Festival, 1956–1968

Lisa Jakelski

UNIVERSIT Y OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Oakland, California © 2017 by Lisa Jakelski Parts of chapters 4 and 5 appeared previously as “Pushing Boundaries: Mobility at the Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music,” East European Politics and Societies 29/1 (2015): 189–211; copyright © 2014 SAGE Publications, DOI 10.1177/0888325414540935.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Jakelski, Lisa, author. Title: Making new music in Cold War Poland : the Warsaw Autumn Festival, 1956–1968 / Lisa Jakelski. Other titles: California studies in 20th-century music. Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2017] | Series: California studies in 20th-century music | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2016020665 (print) | lccn 2016024282 (ebook) | isbn 9780520292543 (book/cloth : alk. paper) | isbn 9780520966031 (ebook) Subjects: lcsh: International Festival of Contemporary Music. | Music festivals—Poland—Warsaw. | Music—Poland—20th century—History and criticism. Classification: lcc ml36 .w374 2017 (print) | lcc ml36 (ebook) | ddc 780.78/43841—dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016020665

Manufactured in the United States of America 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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To Steven

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contents

List of Illustrations and Tables Acknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction

ix xi xv 1

1. The Sounds of Revolution?

11

2. Building an Empty Frame

34

3. A Raucous Education

63

4. From Warsaw to the World

86

5. Mobilizing Performers, Scores, and Avant-Gardes

110

6. The Limits of Exchange

139

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

165

173 179 183 215 231

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illustrations and tables

F IG U R E S

1. Jerzy Jasieński, Grażyna Bacewicz, Kazimierz Serocki, and Zygmunt Mycielski greeting Nadia Boulanger in Warsaw, 1956 23 2. Festival audience at the National Philharmonic Chamber Hall, 1961 71 3. Penderecki, Canon, mm. 13–15 81 4. Włodzimierz Kotoński and Stanisław Wisłocki after the Warsaw Autumn performance of Kotoński’s Musique en relief, 25 September 1960 95 5. A group of the Warsaw Autumn’s international visitors en route to Żelazowa Wola, 1968 103 6. John Cage, Stefan Śledziński, and Bolesław Szabelski at a festival banquet, 1964 116 7. Members of the selection jury for the 1964 ISCM festival in Copenhagen 144 8. Josephine Nendick performing Milton Babbitt’s Philomel at the 1968 Warsaw Autumn 156 9. John Tilbury performing John Cage’s Water Music in Warsaw, 1964 157 TA B L E S

1. Compositions and Composers Selected by the Temporary Repertoire Commission (23 November 1959) 52 2. Proposed Repertoire for the 1962 Warsaw Autumn 58 3. Audience Turnout at the Warsaw Autumn, 1956–69 69

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acknowled gments

This book could not have been written without the generous assistance of several individuals and institutions. I am grateful to director Mieczysław Kominek, Izabela Zymer, Beata Dźwigaj, and the librarians of the Polish Music Information Centre in Warsaw for their unfailing support and for granting me access to the files of the Polish Composers’ Union. At the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, Jolanta Szopa found documents that I didn’t know to ask for but that were exactly the ones I needed. Director Piotr Maculewicz and archivist-librarians Magdalena Borowiec, Elżbieta Jasińska-Jędrosz, and Barbara Kalinowska facilitated my work at the University of Warsaw Library’s Archive of TwentiethCentury Polish Composers. I benefited from the assistance of the archivists at Warsaw’s Central Archives of Modern Records and the expertise of the librarians at the National Library of Poland. Zbigniew Skowron was unfailingly patient during our meetings and always willing to share his encyclopedic knowledge of Polish music with me. I owe a special debt of gratitude to interviewees Krzysztof Knittel, Włodzimierz Kotoński, Zygmunt Krauze, and Tadeusz Wielecki. Their firsthand knowledge of the Warsaw Autumn greatly enriched my understanding of the festival and the times in which it has taken place. I am fortunate to have a strong support network of friends and colleagues who offered insights, advice, and practical assistance as this project developed. I could not ask for better colleagues than the ones I have in the musicology department at the Eastman School of Music. My thoughts on postwar Polish music have been honed in conversations with Andrea Bohlman, Cindy Bylander, David Tompkins, and Lisa Cooper Vest. Danielle Fosler-Lussier shared State Department materials as well as her deep knowledge of the Cold War’s cultural dynamics. Rachel Vandagriff xi

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generously gave me access to some of Elliott Carter’s correspondence with Paul Fromm. Seth Monahan expertly—and cheerfully—prepared my music examples. Krysta Close gave me access to materials housed at the University of Southern California’s Polish Music Center. Joy Calico enabled me to conduct additional research in Warsaw in 2008 and at Harvard University’s Widener Library in 2010. She has offered sage guidance at every stage of this project, and I treasure her friendship. The opportunity to share my work publicly was invaluable as I conceptualized the book and brought it to completion, and I thank Michael Markham of SUNY Fredonia, the Musicology/Ethnomusicology Student Association of the University of Georgia, and Ewelina Boczkowska of Youngstown State University for inviting me to present portions of this project at their institutions. For their feedback I am also grateful to the participants of the interdisciplinary “Crossing the Borders of Friendship” panels at the 2012 convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. This book has been shaped by the comments of several readers. Gregory Bloch, David Frick, Andy Fry, and Mary Ann Smart offered insightful criticism when the material was at the dissertation stage. Andrea Bohlman, Melina Esse, Emily Richmond Pollock, Martha Sprigge, and William Quillen read portions of the book manuscript as it developed, and the questions they asked encouraged me to sharpen both my thinking and my prose. My conversations with Melina Esse helped me focus my ideas at a critical stage, and I thank her for encouraging me to let this book develop in some unexpected directions. Martin Iddon and Peter Schmelz deserve special thanks for reading the manuscript in full. Their generous and incisive comments have substantially improved the book’s clarity and nuance. I am indebted to Mary Francis for her advocacy of this project when it was at the proposal and manuscript submission stages, and to Raina Polivka, and Zuha Khan at the University of California Press for enthusiastically shepherding the book through publication. Richard Taruskin has supported this project for many years—from its beginnings as my doctoral dissertation to the form it has taken now. This project has benefited tremendously from his ear for prose and keen critical eye, and I owe him more than I can adequately express here for encouraging me to trust my own voice. For financial support I thank the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities and the Department of Music at the University of California, Berkeley. I also thank the Schott Music Corporation for granting permission to reprint the excerpt from Krzysztof Penderecki’s Canon that appears in Chapter 3. A significant portion of the manuscript was written at Maynooth University, where Antonio Cascelli, Alison Hood, John Keating, Margaret Kelleher, Jennifer Kelly, and Victor Lazzarini extended a warm welcome when I was a Visiting Fellow in the Humanities during the 2012–13 academic year.

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The love and encouragement of friends and family have been crucial to the completion of this project. Joshua Johnson, Steve Masover, Jennifer Sheppard, and Jeffrey Tucker were steadfast sources of inspiration, support, and perspective. I am grateful to my parents, Richard and Mary, and to my siblings, Sarah and Richard, for encouraging me to follow my interests wherever they might lead. I am especially indebted to my husband, Steven, who cheered my successes and patiently weathered this project’s more intense phases, all while making great strides in work of his own. I dedicate this book to him.

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abbreviations

AAN AKP BWKZ ISCM MKiDN MKiS MSW MSZ PAGART PSO PTMW PWM PZPR SPAM ZKP

Archiwum Akt Nowych (Polish Central Archives of Modern Records) Archiwum Kompozytorów Polskich (Archive of Polish Composers) Biuro Współpracy Kulturalnej z Zagranicą (International Cultural Relations Bureau) International Society for Contemporary Music Ministerstwo Kultury i Dziedzictwa Narodowego (Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage) Ministerstwo Kultury i Sztuki (Polish Ministry of Culture and Art) Ministerstwo Spraw Wewnętrznych (Polish Ministry of the Interior) Ministerstwo Spraw Zagranicznych (Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs) Polska Agencja Artystyczna (Polish Artistic Agency) Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra Polskie Towarzystwo Muzyki Współczesnej (Polish Society for Contemporary Music) Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne (Polish Music Publishers) Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza (Polish United Workers’ Party) Stowarzyszenie Polskich Artystów Muzyków (Society of Polish Musical Artists) Związek Kompozytorów Polskich (Polish Composers’ Union)

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Introduction

The Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music was one of the most significant zones of cross-border cultural contact during the Cold War. Launched in Poland in 1956, the state-sponsored Warsaw Autumn staged symbolic encounters between the era’s opposing aesthetic viewpoints. Just as importantly, it brought together people—performers, composers, critics, arts administrators, government functionaries, and general audiences—from both sides of the Cold War. This book tells the festival’s story. More broadly, this book is about the performance of social interactions in particular institutional frameworks, and how these interactions have shaped the practices, values, and concepts associated with “new” (or “contemporary”) music. My account of cultural production adopts sociologist Howard Becker’s model of the “art world,” which he defines as “the network of people whose cooperative activity, organized via their joint knowledge of conventional means of doing things, produces the kind of art works that [the] art world is noted for.”1 Festivals have been among the most powerful instruments through which new-music practitioners have organized their activities. As planned and purposively coordinated series of events, festivals are invested with symbolic meaning. They are dense sites of relationships among people, objects, and ideas. Through festivals, musicians mobilize resources and distribute their works. Festivals have, moreover, played a vital role in defining “new music” and enabling ideas about it to circulate from place to place. One reason for their efficacy is that festivals entail practical decisions—what music to program, which performers to invite—that result in acts of grouping and exclusion that imply judgments of relative value. Such acts, Eric Drott emphasizes, give rise to what is called a musical genre, which, as he puts it, “is not so much a 1

2

Introduction

group as a grouping, the gerund ending calling attention to the fact that it is something that must be continually produced and reproduced.”2 One of my primary objectives in this study is to chart and to understand these groupings as they were made at the Warsaw Autumn. Specific occasions dedicated to composing, performing, and listening have long been part of the making of new music. Modernism developed in tandem with a host of organizations and performance venues designed to promote it. Among the earliest of these was the Society for Private Musical Performances, which Arnold Schoenberg launched in 1918. The Donaueschingen Festival, the first of its kind to be dedicated exclusively to contemporary music, began operations three years later. The International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) inaugurated its peripatetic festival in 1923. Originally a forum for the visual arts, the Venice Biennale added a contemporary music festival in 1930. An array of professional organizations, advocacy groups, and specialized performance venues boosted modernist composers in New York City throughout the 1920s.3 In most cases, these institutional arrangements were predicated on the belief that contemporary music—especially in its spikier, modernist guises—required special advocacy as well as safe havens to insulate it from the hostilities of “standard” concert culture. New-music institutions resumed their proliferation after 1945. Music making at educational centers, festivals, radio stations, and competitions involved inclusion as well as exclusion; it was mediated by political, social, economic, technological, and other factors that simultaneously enabled and constrained.4 Through the practices, discourses, and aesthetic outlooks they supported, postwar institutions continued to define and redefine notions of contemporary music. At the music research institute IRCAM in 1980s Paris, the practice of new music entailed taking a position vis-à-vis modernism or postmodernism; while these stances may have carved divisions within the larger category of contemporary art music, they shared common ground in that each affirmed a basic separation between “art” and “popular” genres.5 The London-based Music Now concert series, which ran from 1967 to 1976, blurred generic divisions between contemporary art music and jazz by showcasing practices that evinced a common preoccupation with improvisation and indeterminacy.6 In the 1950s, new music at the Darmstadt International Summer Courses became synonymous with the critical discourse and compositional practices of serialism.7 In 1960s Buenos Aires, the composers affiliated with the CLAEM (Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales) did not adhere to any one style or technique; here, the practice of contemporary music was mediated by the centrifugal pull of transnational connections and the centripetal tug of Latin American identity.8 I mention these examples to demonstrate that the Warsaw Autumn was not the only site where groups of people have actively negotiated what contemporary music ought to be. Indeed, there were significant points of contact and overlap

Introduction

3

between the Warsaw Autumn and other postwar new-music institutions. Since 1957, musicians from Poland have consistently participated in the Darmstadt Summer Courses. During the years when he was involved with Music Now, British experimental pianist John Tilbury was also a Warsaw Autumn regular. But the Warsaw Autumn was unique in that its negotiations were taking place on the Cold War’s cultural fault line. The festival was born into an environment in which cultural display was a means of asserting sociocultural superiority. These contests were meaningful not because East and West were incomprehensible to one another but, on the contrary, because stylistic progress and the proper role of artists in society were live issues on both sides. The difference lay in how these issues were resolved. Aesthetically, the terms of engagement pitted Sovietsponsored socialist realism, which privileged traditional forms and audience accessibility, against Western modernism, an orientation based on continual, selfconscious technical advance.9 Each side had its symbol: Dmitry Shostakovich, the Soviet Union’s leading composer; and Anton Webern, whose hermetic, intricately structured music was an inspiration to Western Europe’s postwar avant-garde. Each side had its prestige machine, the apparatus that dispensed commissions for new works, awarded prizes and critical approbation, assigned posts in universities and other institutions, and controlled opportunities for publication, public performance, and media distribution.10 And neither side could be fully understood except in relation to the other. In the West, socialist realism was viewed as the product of coercion; Soviet cultural officials saw modernist music as empty formalism. Within their own domains, socialist realism was a key component in building a new and better society, and modernism was a preserver and defender of creative autonomy.11 If the dichotomy between modernism and socialist realism seems simplistic, that’s because it is: applied to musical aesthetics, Cold War rhetoric lent itself far more readily to reductive binary sloganeering than to sophisticated analysis. It remains all too easy to conceptualize each side as a monolith that expressed its position in hackneyed ways. And, as a result, it remains all too easy to write Cold War Eastern Europe out of the history of twentieth-century modernism.12 In his reflections on modernism and Cold War cultural politics, Alistair Williams presents the East solely as the West’s enabling other, an undifferentiated socialistrealist sideshow that he acknowledges in passing before proceeding to the main event: music, politics, and meaning in modernist compositions from (Western) Europe.13 While Martin Iddon does not deny Eastern Europeans’ presence in the institutional configurations that played vital roles in articulating and promulgating modernist aesthetics during the mid-twentieth century, he does view their contributions as peripheral and hence excisable—he admits that his investigation of serialism at Darmstadt excludes the “composers from Eastern Europe, South America, and Asia” who participated in the summer courses.14

4

Introduction

Yet musicians in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were engaging with modernist compositional strategies, such as serialism—albeit at a temporal and geographical remove that put them at a disadvantage, both at the time and in subsequent historiography. Modernism took a variety of forms and accrued various connotations throughout the Eastern Bloc. The Cold War’s binary divisions could be useful as resistance: Peter Schmelz demonstrates that the apparent reluctance of serialism to disclose its meanings was a source of its appeal to the Soviet Union’s “unofficial” group of young composers.15 In showing how dedicated socialists and party members advocated serialism in East Germany during the mid-1960s, Laura Silverberg counters Cold War stylistic stereotypes that would view these compositional preoccupations and political commitments as incompatible.16 These stories are no less significant for taking place outside Western Europe and North America. They remind us that individuals and groups have conceived and practiced modernism in diverse ways at various places and times, and thereby encourage us to resist the tendency to view Darmstadt as a metonym for the whole of new-music making after 1945. Even though it represented a similar mobilization of resources in support of music that was often abstract, esoteric, and complex, the Warsaw Autumn has received far less scholarly attention than the iconic Summer Courses. In Poland, the festival has typically been subject to brief, essayistic overviews or recalled episodically in memoirs.17 Significant anniversaries have prompted more sustained chronicles of festival history that are indispensable sources of information, but these are more limited when it comes to understanding the actions, negotiations, and motivations behind the events they document.18 Cynthia Bylander’s painstaking study was the first scholarly work in English to examine the Warsaw Autumn’s early history in depth.19 In this book, I will revisit the documents Bylander consulted in the 1980s, putting them in conversation with a wider array of archival and published materials, investigating the Warsaw Autumn over a longer span of time, and viewing the festival as part of a larger world of new-music performance. The Cold War’s end means that it is now possible to offer a more distanced perspective on the festival and its significance, and to think more critically about the ways it was affected by—and the ways it influenced—the era’s aesthetic and geopolitical categories. While the Warsaw Autumn was implicated in the international dynamics of Cold War musical politics, it was also part of a socialist ecosystem that was specific to Poland. This ecosystem reflected the dynamics of a decades-long reconstruction: Poland suffered devastating losses in World War II, especially in its capital city, which occupying German forces systematically destroyed in response to the 1944 Warsaw Uprising. It additionally reflected the dynamics of Poland’s postwar transition to state socialism, in which the government, economy, society, and culture were recalibrated along Stalinist lines. The dominance of the Polish United Workers’ Party (Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza, or PZPR) was secure by

Introduction

5

the end of 1948. When the two camps of the Cold War began to crystallize, Poland oriented its trade flows toward the Soviet Union and the member nations of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, established in 1949. Poland withdrew from the International Monetary Fund and refused Marshall Plan aid in response to Soviet pressure.20 It was one of the signatories to the Warsaw Pact of 14 May 1955. Poland’s postwar Stalinization had palpable musical consequences in addition to the political, military, and economic ones. The most overt of these took place in 1949, when the Polish Ministry of Culture and Art (Ministerstwo Kultury i Sztuki, or MKiS) staged a conference of composers and musicologists that cemented socialist realism as official aesthetic policy.21 As numerous scholars have pointed out, Stalinism in the emerging Eastern Bloc did not simply mimic Soviet models; rather, it morphed in response to national and local conditions, and this was true of musical life as well.22 After Stalin’s death in 1953, the Thaw further amplified divergences within Eastern Europe by opening up new possibilities for political, social, economic, and cultural change. In postwar Poland, in other words, politics, economics, and society were not fixed contexts. Rather, these realms were fluid, changeable, and capable of interacting with the musical realm in ways both direct and indirect, planned and unpredictable.23 And, just as politics was in flux, the boundaries between politics and culture were permeable. We are still learning the details of how culture worked in the socialist societies of the Eastern Bloc.24 Through its emphasis on collective activity, the concept of the art world provides an alternative to totalitarian models that insist on unidirectional, top-down influence while also assuming a split between state and society. In totalitarian models of cultural production, the political center appears as a stable locus of control, either to be colluded with or resisted. The Warsaw Autumn suggests something else: a history of mutual entanglement among political and cultural agents. No less than the musical domain, the party and the state were composed of people who operated as individuals as well as in groups. They were among the components of the art world that created and sustained contemporary music in socialist Poland. Coordination and interaction, it should be stressed, do not necessarily imply agreement. Composers, musicologists, party members, and state bureaucrats could have differing goals for the Warsaw Autumn, and their views on contemporary music did not always align. But the party-state offered incentives in addition to imposing restraints. Composers and musicologists had room to maneuver, acting in response to—but also shaping—a shifting terrain of possibilities and limits. The Warsaw Autumn provides a lens through which we can see how a network of people, involved with the composition, performance, dissemination, and reception of contemporary art music, mobilized resources and achieved organizational victories during a period of cultural, social, institutional, and political transformation. In the first half of the book, I focus on the festival’s negotiations in Poland,

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Introduction

and the ways in which these negotiations contributed to defining new music at this particular institution. Chapter 1 makes a case study of the Warsaw Autumn’s founding and first season. The 1956 concerts took place in counterpoint with political upheaval and change at the top of the Polish communist party. They offered a first answer to the question of what it would mean for a music festival in socialist Poland to be “contemporary” as well as “international” during the post-Stalin Thaw. As they crafted the 1956 Warsaw Autumn, festival participants were constructing an institutional paradigm that still depended on interwar patterns of cultural contact and Stalinist-era practices of state investment in the arts, but also transformed the art world in which elite Polish composers worked. Warsaw Autumn participants refined this paradigm in subsequent years. Chapter 2 examines how a self-consciously pluralistic view of contemporary music enabled festival advocates to negotiate a secure institutional position during a period of cultural retrenchment that began in Poland in the late 1950s. These moves took place behind the scenes, during planning meetings in which Warsaw Autumn organizers selected repertoire, grouped works and composers into stylistic and geopolitical categories, and generally determined what the festival would be. Equally important were the maneuvers that took place in printed discourse, wherein critics and other commentators positioned the Warsaw Autumn as an empty frame—that is, a neutral zone in an otherwise polarized world of new-music performance. Chapter 3 turns to the concert hall to consider the effects that festival performances had on Warsaw Autumn audiences, as well as the work these audiences performed through their listening practices. Public response was what demonstrated the Warsaw Autumn’s legitimacy as a socialist education project: in their annual reports to MKiS, festival organizers interpreted large, reactive audiences as proof that elite art music was socially necessary. The public also contributed to the genre making that took place via festival events, for their concert-hall behavior suggested that, in addition to various compositional styles and techniques, “contemporary music” entailed certain modes of audience response. Becker’s art worlds are not bounded—they overlap with and connect to other art worlds, bleed into other parts of society, and are capable of potentially infinite expansion.25 The Warsaw Autumn sheds light on this expandability, for the collective activity that went into making it not only involved actors located in a specific local and national framework, but also encompassed agents who were moving and operating across the borders of nation-states. To put it another way, the festival was a site of cultural mobility, where meanings were actively created through the movement of people, artworks, and ideas. Stephen Greenblatt describes cultural mobility as “the restless process through which texts, images, artifacts, and ideas are moved, disguised, translated, transformed, adapted, and reimagined in the ceaseless, resourceful work of culture.”26 He further contends that “even in places

Introduction

7

that at first glance are characterized more by homogeneity and stasis than by pluralism and change, cultural circuits facilitating motion are at work.”27 And so they were at the Warsaw Autumn, where there was a constant interplay between the festival as located and the festival as networked—between the festival as a site for the development of a national new-music culture and as an institution that, true to its name, was avowedly “international.” The performance of cross-border relations at the Warsaw Autumn therefore counters the conventional view of Cold War Eastern Europe as isolated, shrouded by an iron curtain that blocked any meaningful interaction with the outside world. György Péteri maintains that the “iron curtain” metaphor Churchill invoked in his famous speech has always obscured more than it has revealed, especially when it comes to the domain of culture. Instead, he claims, “the curtain was made of Nylon, not Iron. It was not only transparent but it also yielded to strong osmotic tendencies that were globalizing knowledge across the systemic divide about culture, goods, and services.”28 This was especially true during the post-Stalin Thaw, a period marked by greater openness and expanding opportunities for international contact. Travel, while still laden with restrictions, was increasingly an option for the Eastern Bloc’s citizens, especially for elite composers and performers of art music. People could circulate objects that transported information, values, and ideas even when they could not circulate themselves. As Danielle Fosler-Lussier puts it, “the division was real, but each side listened to what the other was saying.”29 As one of the first venues to bring music and ideas from East and West together on a regular basis, the Warsaw Autumn was one of the places where this exchange of messages could be heard most clearly. In the book’s second half, I examine the Warsaw Autumn as a site for cultural mobility. At the festival, to be contemporary was to be international, and vice versa: cross-border movement was essential to the practice of new music at this particular institution. From the outset, one of the festival’s most vital functions was to serve as an arena for Cold War cultural diplomacy—for the exercise of soft power across East–West geopolitical boundaries, as well as across state borders within the Eastern Bloc.30 The Warsaw Autumn also supported other kinds of mobility and encouraged the formation of other kinds of cross-border ties; my aim in these chapters is thus to present as complex a picture as possible of the various mobilizations and connections the festival engendered. Chapter 4 details the structural arrangements that facilitated foreign travel to the Warsaw Autumn. I focus on the people who went to Poland to hear the festival concerts, either as invited special guests or as tourists. Their journeys contributed to the circulation of information, ideas, values, financial assets, and objects that took place via the Warsaw Autumn; consequently, their journeys enabled the festival’s effects to extend far beyond Poland. Moreover, the festival’s foreign travelers served an economic function, in that they allowed composers and other players to

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Introduction

mobilize resources, accumulate prestige, gain access to new distribution channels, and expand their personal and professional networks. Chapter 5 takes a closer look at the types of cross-border relationships that were forged via the Warsaw Autumn by examining the mobility of performers and musical works. Drawing on Steven Vertovec’s distinction between international and transnational forms of contact, I suggest that the festival’s mobilization of postwar avant-gardes promoted the formation of cross-border cultural ties that were based on shared aesthetic values of sonic exploration and ongoing technical innovation. These ties obscured nation-state boundaries, destabilized presumptive hierarchies of value within the Eastern Bloc, and mitigated Cold War divisions. At the same time, the festival’s organizational procedures reinforced nation-state and geopolitical borders by attaching musicians and musical works to singular, specific points of origin. Transnational bonds were put to the test in 1968, when the Warsaw Autumn cohosted the ISCM Festival in the wake of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. On one hand, the cohosting arrangement was a sign of the Warsaw Autumn’s successful integration into border-spanning new-music networks. However, this integration only went so far: a significant number of the festival’s Western performers boycotted to protest Poland’s military involvement in the Prague Spring’s suppression. By way of a case study of the 1968 Warsaw Autumn/ISCM Festival, Chapter 6 revisits the question of what it meant for a music institution in socialist Poland to be international as well as contemporary. My discussion focuses on the period spanning 1956 to 1968; this is, in other words, a book about the long 1960s, viewed from a very particular spot within the socialist sphere.31 The year 1956 is an obvious starting place. The date of the first Warsaw Autumn, 1956 was also a political turning point in the Eastern Bloc: revolutionaries in Poland and Hungary agitated for alternatives to Stalinism and tested the limits of Soviet influence in the region. The Hungarian Revolution ended in a bloody dénouement; by contrast, Polish political leaders negotiated a limited degree of internal, national difference in exchange for ongoing loyalty to the Warsaw Pact. The year 1968, of course, was a watershed in twentieth-century history more generally. In the Eastern Bloc, it marked the five-power invasion of Czechoslovakia and the implementation of the Brezhnev Doctrine; in Poland, 1968 saw civil unrest—to which the PZPR responded with an anti-Semitic campaign. And 1968 is a logical endpoint for an investigation of the Warsaw Autumn: although the festival still occurs annually, its personnel began to change in 1969. The departure of the festival’s architects and first planners catalyzed a new phase in the institution’s history. If the book views the 1960s from a specific location, it also adopts a particular vantage point with respect to music. My analysis concentrates on what James English calls “the strictly functional middle space between acts of inspired artistic

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9

creation on the one hand and acts of brilliantly discerning consumption on the other.”32 This is the zone of social interactions, day-to-day encounters, administrative decisions, and organizational procedures that constitute the work of making music in an art world. Becoming attuned to this “middle space” furnishes a more expansive conception of the creative activities in which composers engage. Composers appear in this study as the creators of compositions. But they also appear as mediators: administrators, critics, fundraisers, and self-interested advocates who interact with a host of other figures in the making of new music. An awareness of the “middle space” also suggests an alternative to patent-office views of modernism that privilege precedence above all else. I present new music in this study not so much in terms of landmark scores and first performances (although those are certainly important too), but instead as a form of cultural activity that entailed ongoing interactions, reinforcement through repetition, and experiences that accumulated year on year. In adopting this perspective, I hope to contribute to a more variegated portrait of cultural life in Cold War Eastern Europe, while also pointing the way to an enhanced understanding of the social interactions and other factors that have shaped contemporary music wherever it has been made.

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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.1 Appointing a new politburo was the main item of business. In a significant political shift, PZPR members planned to install Władysław Gomułka as first party secretary. His predecessor, Bolesław 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. Gomułka, 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 Gomułka’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 Poznań riots of June 1956. Support for social and political change remained widespread throughout Poland even after the protests had been quelled. For many, appointing Gomułka 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 11

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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 Gomułka 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. Gomułka 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 Gomułka’s powers of persuasion. Revolution in Hungary soon drew Soviet attention elsewhere.2 Buoyed by an outpouring of popular support, Gomułka 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, Gomułka’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 Gomułka 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 allPolish 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

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a different compositional language, analyzing whatever scores he could find and reading manuals on twelve-tone technique by Hanns Jelinek and Hermann Pfrogner.3 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.4 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.”5 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.6 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.7 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.

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C O N S T RU C T I N G T H E F O U N DAT IO N S

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 (Związek Kompozytorów Polskich, or ZKP).8 ZKP promoted its members’ professional interests while enabling them to secure material resources in a reconstructing Poland.9 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.10 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.11 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.12 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.13 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.14 In contrast, authoritative ZKP members thought that the festival’s goal should be stylistic catholicity, not the perpetuation of a narrowly defined socialistrealist aesthetic. Thus, in December 1953, at one of the earliest planning meetings,

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composer, critic, and former ZKP president Zygmunt Mycielski advocated as varied a program as possible—one that would include problematic works such as Witold Lutosławski’s Symphony no. 1 and Zbigniew Turski’s Symphony no. 2 (“Olympic”), both condemned in the late 1940s for their formalism.15 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 Włodzimierz Sokorski responded to Mycielski’s suggestion by declaring that, even though “the festival cannot be a retreat backwards,” a work such as Lutosławski’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.16 Ten months later, Jerzy Jasieński, 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 Książek, deputy director of the PZPR Central Committee’s Culture Department, Jasieński 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 Książek that these pieces would be appropriately contained through their juxtaposition with music that more adequately fulfilled socialist-realist principles.17 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 Stalinist-era 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 Włodzimierz Kotoński, 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.18 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 Książek 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.19 The Second Festival of Polish Music therefore achieved the recalibration of relationships between composers and party-state authorities. It is also significant that,

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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.20 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.21 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 1953.22 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.23 Baird interpreted Polish composers’ inability to export their music as symptomatic of their more general isolation from the outside world. Speaking during the earliest trickles of the Thaw, neither Mycielski nor Baird was yet calling for music from elsewhere to be brought into Poland. They sought only to increase the international dissemination of contemporary Polish composition. And if scores were having trouble going out, then people from elsewhere could be brought in. High-profile events such as the closing concerts of the Second Festival of Polish Music were opportunities for this kind of exchange. In a nod to the international music festival that took place in Prague, these closing concerts were dubbed the “Warsaw Spring.” Although the gala, scheduled for May 1955, would feature only Polish music, its audiences were to include delegations of international observers who would thus be encouraged to promote these works in their own countries. ZKP’s proposed guest list sheds light on the union’s ambitions and its members’ points of cultural orientation circa 1955.24 Listed were over one hundred potential

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visitors from nearly every country in Europe as well as India, North Korea, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, and the United States. Because the goal was to facilitate the export of contemporary Polish music, ZKP strove to invite guests with established institutional authority. Their choices indicate what was thought aesthetically and politically possible in Poland as the post-Stalin Thaw was just getting underway. The potential invitees tended to work in more moderate styles; Aaron Copland and Benjamin Britten were among them. Some candidates, such as composers Alan Bush and Mario Zafred, had ongoing communist affiliations; others, such as Copland and Britten, had once expressed communist sympathies. Members of the postwar Western avant-garde were entirely absent. The potential contingent from France was especially large: fifteen candidates, nearly every one of them listed by name, with renowned composition teacher Nadia Boulanger at the helm. This emphasis shows especially clearly the attempted revival of pre–World War II cultural contacts with Western Europe, for France had been an important destination for Polish composers during the interwar years, when several of them had traveled to Paris to become Boulanger’s pupils.25 Inviting a large delegation from France to the Warsaw Spring in 1955 would enable these composers, which included Mycielski, to pick up the threads of their own pasts and restore ties that the war and the Stalinist years had unraveled. Realizing the Warsaw Spring initiative required party-state approval and the timely distribution of invitations. MKiS had reservations about inviting so many visitors from so many places.26 So did Zofia Lissa, a Marxist musicologist who wielded great influence in Polish musical circles during the Stalinist years. Her political commitments dated to the 1920s, when she was a student in Lwów writing a dissertation on Scriabin’s harmonic language. She weathered World War II in the Soviet Union; after her return to Poland in 1947, she occupied important administrative positions in MKiS, ZKP, and Warsaw University, from which base she advocated socialist-realist orthodoxy. Although Lissa’s power in ZKP was waning in the mid-1950s, the PZPR Central Committee continued to value her input. She warned the Central Committee that, if the Second Festival of Polish Music were to involve international observers, then the repertoire needed to be chosen very carefully: there would be no place on the concert programs for amateur performers, and “dubious, controversial” works were not to be included “under any circumstances.”27 In the end, ZKP received permission to invite only thirteen guests from a modest twelve countries.28 Because the invitations went out only weeks before the closing gala took place, the number of international guests who actually attended the Second Festival of Polish Music was even smaller.29 And this was just one disappointment among many: ultimately, the 1955 festival satisfied no one. The failure, though, was an important one. Since 1945, Polish party members, cultural officials, musicians, and other players had collaborated in the creation of institutions, prizes, competitions, and festivals that promoted the composition and

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performance of new music. Initially, this apparatus contributed to Poland’s Stalinization by encouraging composers to write music in a socialist-realist idiom and by expanding access to elite culture throughout Polish society. The Second Festival of Polish Music did not fundamentally alter this infrastructure. Rather, its organizers had sought to use existing institutional structures to accomplish different ends. ZKP’s tactics with the Warsaw Autumn would be similar. The institution’s basic format—the large-scale, showpiece festival—drew on firmly established precedents from the Stalinist years while assuming that state investment in culture would continue to take similar forms during the Thaw. The venues in which the Warsaw Autumn would take place—as well as many of the Polish performing institutions on which the festival would rely—had been erected in the first decade of postwar reconstruction. The 1956 Warsaw Autumn also had more specific points of contact with the Second Festival of Polish Music. The events shared personnel, including many of the planners. The events were also linked by common themes: the calibration of power dynamics between musicians and party-state actors, the negotiation of Poland’s relationship to the outside world, and the rehabilitation of stylistic diversity. Yet the Warsaw Autumn would be a considerably more substantial reimagining of the ends to which Poland’s existing cultural infrastructure could be put. F R OM WA R S AW SP R I N G T O WA R S AW AU T UM N

ZKP launched the Warsaw Autumn project while plans for the Second Festival of Polish Music were still ongoing. Soon after gaining office in April 1954, the union’s executive board began seeking support for a different kind of festival: one that would involve an international array of performers playing recently composed music from all over the world. Their proposal initially failed to generate much enthusiasm in MKiS.30 The project gained momentum only after an encounter that allegedly took place in the autumn of 1954, when Kazimierz Sikorski, ZKP’s recently elected president, happened to speak with PZPR First Secretary Bierut during a state function at Warsaw’s Belvedere Palace.31 Reminiscing in 1986, Sikorski recalled the conversation as decisive, not just in obtaining party-state approval to launch the event, but also in determining what the festival’s character would be: I didn’t know him [Bierut], and I didn’t know how he would respond. I thought that he might say, “listen, you know, wait a couple of years, we still have time.” But he said, “that’s interesting,” and, as he put it, “make it a confrontation between East and West. Let them show what they have, and we’ll show them what we have.” Then he says: “Call me in two or three days and I’ll give you an answer.” But not even two days passed before I received a phone call from the Ministry of Culture and Art, saying that the Ministry approved the project and that it was going to be the “Warsaw Autumn.”32

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Sikorski’s account is revealing because it suggests that, from the PZPR’s perspective, the Warsaw Autumn’s primary value was as a site for cultural diplomacy—an arena in which international relations could be played out through musical performance. The episode also demonstrates that, even as ZKP was seeking a greater degree of independence from party-state oversight, the aims of political and musical actors in Poland were not necessarily opposed. Whatever their differences, party-state officials and the ZKP leadership agreed that increased international contact was desirable. The Warsaw Autumn project thus enabled them to coordinate their efforts in pursuit of a common goal. Although ZKP’s rank and file would not vote on the Warsaw Autumn proposal until their General Assembly in June 1955, the project nevertheless appeared on the union’s work plan for that year.33 The membership’s approval, then, was apparently a foregone conclusion. But it is still worth taking a moment to think about this meeting, for the insight it will furnish into how the Warsaw Autumn related to other, ongoing issues in Polish musical life. It will also give us a better idea of how elite composers were conceptualizing the festival project in mid-1955, and what they hoped it might accomplish. Mycielski opened the meeting with a paper that evaluated recent achievements in Polish musical life. He granted that there had been some notable successes during the past decade, such as the emergence of a national compositional school. But Poland’s deepening cultural isolation remained a major problem. Departing from the circumspection he exhibited in 1953, Mycielski complained that Polish musical life was becoming a “backwater,” out of touch with international performance standards and the twentieth century’s most vital compositional trends. Polish musicians, Mycielski claimed, had no clue as to what Honegger, Stravinsky, Britten, Messiaen, or Martin had recently been composing. The situation was no better when it came to Eastern Europe: according to Mycielski, the newest works by Shostakovich and Prokofiev (not to mention supposedly canonical pieces by Janáček and Bartók) were just as unknown in mid-1950s Poland as contemporary music from the West. And the issue was not simply that Poles were ignorant about what was happening elsewhere: Mycielski argued that the situation was also causing Poles to lose knowledge about themselves, because, in the absence of external criteria, they had no standard against which to gauge their own musical progress.34 Mycielski’s comments played into ongoing Polish preoccupations with the nation’s relative isolation and backwardness vis-à-vis Western Europe. Since the eighteenth century, Western Europeans have defined themselves against Eastern Europe’s presumed lack of economic, cultural, social, and political development.35 Poles internalized these judgments. But, as Lisa Cooper Vest demonstrates, selfperceptions of backwardness were not a deterrent. Far from limiting their agency, claims of backwardness (and the need to overcome it) enabled Polish musicians to

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claim resources and legitimacy, whether during the interwar period, the Stalinist 1950s, or the modernizing, progress-oriented years of the Thaw.36 The notion of “backwardness” has particular associations in the Polish national context, and in Eastern Europe generally. Yet fears of belatedness were by no means limited to Poland in the postwar period. Although Mycielski (and many of his compatriots) may have felt isolated, their anxieties put them in good company. The urge to make up for lost time was an important driver of institutional change throughout the European continent, where even Westerners in territories governed or occupied by Nazi regimes fretted that they had fallen behind the standards of Western modernity.37 The Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music are a prime example of this tendency, for they were established in a reconstructing West Germany specifically to give young musicians the chance to engage with compositions and techniques that had been banned under the Nazis. As in de-Stalinizing (and still reconstructing) Poland, backwardness at the early summer courses was conceptualized in terms of knowledge gaps. In 1946, one of Darmstadt’s founders, Wolfgang Steinecke, justified the new endeavor by saying that “For twelve years, names like Hindemith and Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Krenek, Milhaud and Honegger, Shostakovich and Prokofiev, Bartók, Weill, and many others were proscribed. For twelve years a criminal cultural politics robbed German musical life of its leading figures and its continuity.”38 Steinecke’s litany of postwar German lack bears striking similarities to Mycielski’s 1955 complaints about Polish isolation. Not only does Steinecke name some of the same composers, but his underlying assumptions also align with Mycielski’s thinking. For both of these figures, modernity was a moving target, one that could only be reached by becoming conversant with a defined, yet ever expanding, body of knowledge. The points of contact between Steinecke’s and Mycielski’s comments show that, despite the Cold War’s divides, modernity was already being conceived in similar ways on both sides of Europe even before the first Warsaw Autumn took place. Like the Darmstadt Summer Courses, the Warsaw Autumn was to be an institutional solution to an isolation problem. Tadeusz Baird cited a different model, however, when he presented the festival idea on the first day of the 1955 ZKP assembly. The Warsaw Autumn, he explained, would be akin to the Prague Spring, the international music festival that had been taking place in Czechoslovakia since 1946. It would solve the problems of the 1951 and 1955 festivals of Polish music by facilitating comparison between Poland and other countries. The repertoire would feature “the most outstanding works of contemporary European music that were composed in the preceding year.” High-powered international performers would of course take part. And, he stressed, the project was completely feasible, since the requisite authorities had already approved it.39 Together with his colleague, composer Kazimierz Serocki, Baird presented a formal proposal for discussion and a union vote. The Warsaw Autumn project was

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part of ZKP’s larger platform of institutional reform. At the 1955 General Assembly, the union also passed resolutions that called for the reactivation of international contacts; the allotment of funds to support research on contemporary Polish music; the launch of a biweekly music magazine; and the establishment of a library stocked with a wide variety of materials, including scores, books, and recordings of new music from abroad.40 Baird and Serocki’s festival proposal generated very little discussion. When pressed on his definition of “international,” Baird granted that it could apply to locations other than Europe. In response to a question about the feasibility of planning such an event for autumn 1956, Baird emphasized that state cultural officials were enthusiastic about the Warsaw Autumn idea “for reasons that are both purely musical and (in a certain sense) propagandistic.” Thus, the time frame was not unworkable. But they would have to act quickly.41 The voting took place, and the Warsaw Autumn proposal passed almost unanimously.42 With the clock ticking, a newly elected ZKP executive board got to work. They had just over a year to plan a new, international festival. SE T T I N G PA R A M E T E R S

Baird’s recollections of planning the first Warsaw Autumn suggest the enormity of the task that lay before them. The festival had to be built from the ground up, because, he later explained, “We did not have (and no one in Poland had) any experience in organizing this kind of event.”43 Initially there was no dedicated festival office; scores and recordings were difficult to obtain. Information about foreign performers was in similarly short supply. In other words, Warsaw Autumn planners were in the paradoxical situation of organizing an event that was meant to fill the gaps in Polish musical life while they were themselves handicapped by a knowledge gap of their own. Collective action enabled resources and know-how to be pooled in what was generally a climate of scarcity. Records from the organizational meetings demonstrate that planning the 1956 festival was a joint endeavor undertaken by individuals with a complex array of motivations, allegiances, aesthetic preferences, and personal histories. All of the central players in ZKP participated in one way or another, from up-and-coming composers such as Baird, Serocki, and Kotoński to those who had already established their authority, such as Witold Lutosławski and Grażyna Bacewicz. Conductors Jan Krenz, Witold Rowicki, Stanisław Skrowaczewski, Karol Stryja, Stanisław Wisłocki, and Bohdan Wodiczko represented each of the Polish orchestras that would perform during the festival concerts. Jerzy Jasieński and Wiktor Weinbaum spoke for MKiS. Representatives from Polish Radio contributed to festival planning, as did members of other state agencies, most prominently MKiS’s International Cultural Relations Committee (Komitet Współpracy Kulturalnej z Zagranicą).

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In selecting performers and sorting through repertoire, festival organizers were addressing the larger question of what types of music would be suitable for Warsaw Autumn performance. Genre was a fundamental issue: would the Warsaw Autumn feature composed art music exclusively, or would it also present more popular forms of music making? ZKP’s executive board initially planned to include “one or two amateur song and dance ensembles” on the festival program, but they soon dropped this idea, opting instead to channel their resources solely to professional musicians.44 Professional performers made up the whole of the festival lineup in 1956; the music they performed fell squarely within the category of elite composition. In this way, the Warsaw Autumn perpetuated the practices of the Second Festival of Polish Music, which had also privileged professionalized forms of music making to the exclusion of amateurs. International guests were another point of similarity between the Second Festival of Polish Music and the first Warsaw Autumn. The proposed guest lists for the two events were nearly identical.45 And once again, the invitations were sent out so late that many invitees could not attend. But the 1956 Warsaw Autumn was significantly more successful in bringing international visitors to Poland than the Second Festival of Polish Music had been. Delegates from France, Italy, and West Germany accepted invitations, as did representatives of the United States, Switzerland, and Great Britain. China and Korea sent observers to the 1956 festival, as did the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia. ZKP arranged formal meet-and-greets so that its members could get to know their guests from abroad. These events revived moribund relationships, strengthened existing ties, and allowed new cross-border connections to form. The sign-up sheets reflect the relative prestige and importance that ZKP members attached to the various delegations. Although ZKP’s top brass and several other union members pledged to meet the Soviet delegation, the numbers suggest that encounters with Western Europeans were a higher priority. This was especially true when it came to musicians from France. ZKP scheduled three separate gatherings with representatives of French music: one with the Parrenin String Quartet, another with the French delegation as a whole, and a third with Nadia Boulanger, the 1956 festival’s guest of honor (Figure 1). The sign-up sheet for Boulanger’s reception was nearly twice as long as the one for the meeting with the Soviet delegates.46 The Warsaw Autumn did more than perpetuate the practice of inviting international guests to observe performances of Polish music. In a departure from the 1955 festival, it expanded the concept of “international” contact to include the importing of performers and musical works. The Polish orchestras performed compositions from many different countries, a move that advertised Poland’s status as an internationally oriented, European nation. The state allocated resources to invite several visiting orchestras to the 1956 Warsaw Autumn. ZKP originally anticipated that the Leningrad Philharmonic, Prague Philharmonic, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and

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figure 1. Jerzy Jasieński, Grażyna Bacewicz, Kazimierz Serocki, and Zygmunt Mycielski greeting Nadia Boulanger in Warsaw, 1956. Courtesy of Polska Agencja Prasowa.

Vienna Symphony would take part.47 They also sought to engage the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra.48 Most of these groups were unable to participate, probably because ZKP made these decisions in early December 1955—less than a year before the Warsaw Autumn was scheduled to begin. The visiting orchestras that actually participated in 1956 were the USSR State Symphony Orchestra, the Brno State Philharmonic, George Enescu Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra, the French Radio and Television National Orchestra, and the Vienna Symphony.49 The roughly equal number of visiting orchestras from Eastern and Western Europe reflected Cold War concerns for geopolitical parity. Inviting groups from France and Austria spoke to the Warsaw Autumn’s project of restoring severed connections with Western Europe; Paris and Vienna had long been important points of orientation in Polish culture. The participation of these particular ensembles also spoke to ongoing contact between Polish musicians in the mid-1950s and their counterparts elsewhere. Émigré Polish composer Michał Spisak was based in Paris, where he helped festival organizers make arrangements with French musicians. ZKP president Sikorski used his personal connections in the (ultimately unsuccessful) attempt to engage the London-based Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Conductor Stanisław Wisłocki used his contacts in Romania to bring the Enescu Philharmonic to Poland.50

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The number of orchestras at the 1956 Warsaw Autumn—nine in all, including five groups from abroad—remains unmatched in the festival’s history. The presence of these orchestras suggested that the first festival was a symbolic meeting of nations, for, as Jessica Gienow-Hecht has observed, governments have used orchestras more than any other type of ensemble as vehicles for national selfrepresentation in the practice of cultural diplomacy.51 The orchestras’ repertoire heightened the effect of international encounters. Festival organizers asked the visiting ensembles to play representative works from their home countries, a request that turned festival concerts into sites for a kind of virtual tourism, in which audience members could imagine that they were listening in on the contemporary music scenes of different places. But festival organizers had not abandoned the export model of internationalism: they viewed the Warsaw Autumn as a conduit that would disseminate Polish composition in the wider world. Organizers decided that each of the visiting orchestras should be required to present a minimum of thirty minutes of Polish music during their festival appearances. They thought that this stipulation would facilitate the international dissemination of new music from Poland. They also hoped that hearing music from Poland in renditions by “world-renowned orchestras” would raise the status of this music at home.52 Assuming that the Soviet, Czechoslovak, Romanian, Austrian, and French conductors would have little or no knowledge of recent Polish composition, ZKP’s executive board drew up a list of works that the visiting groups might play. They acted diplomatically as they did so, dividing the repertoire into broad categories of East and West. Some of their choices suggest that they were operating according to assumptions as to what types of music might be suitable for each geopolitical region.53 The works by Lutosławski are a case in point. The Eastern category included his Silesian Triptych, a set of three songs for soprano and orchestra that had won top honors at the 1951 Festival of Polish Music. For the West, festival organizers chose Lutosławski’s Concerto for Orchestra, an ambitious, three-movement symphonic work that subjects Polish folk melodies to extensive motivic and contrapuntal elaboration; the piece had premiered in 1955 to instant acclaim. The takeaway point could be that the tuneful, colorful, and straightforward Silesian Triptych was more appropriate for an Eastern European ensemble, whereas the more harmonically and texturally complex Concerto for Orchestra was better suited to Western abilities and tastes. Yet despite their surface differences, these two works have much in common; in her analysis of the 1956 festival repertoire, Cynthia Bylander groups both pieces under the heading of “folk-inspired music.”54 Whatever the subtle distinctions they made between individual works, festival organizers ultimately privileged completeness as they divided music between East and West, seeking in each list to display the full range of Polish composers’ approaches during the postwar decade. Even at the time, Warsaw Autumn plan-

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ners thought that the East–West categories were somewhat arbitrary; Baird faulted the lists as insufficiently differentiated.55 The way festival organizers actually used these lists further blurred East–West distinctions. The suggestions for the Brno State Philharmonic included Lutosławski’s Symphony no. 1, Artur Malawski’s Symphonic Variations, and several other works that planners had originally put in the Western category. The French Radio and Television National Orchestra, on the other hand, reviewed scores that had first appeared on organizers’ list for the East. Only one of the visiting ensembles—the USSR State Symphony Orchestra—received repertoire suggestions that conformed solely to its geopolitical area.56 In their programming choices, then, festival organizers were articulating what it could mean for a music festival in mid-1950s Poland to be international. Their decisions suggest that they were conceptualizing internationalism in terms of multidirectional flows of people, music, and ideas. Internationalism at the 1956 Warsaw Autumn also entailed East–West difference and confrontation, even though, where the dissemination of Polish composition was concerned, it was not yet entirely clear how these differences should affect practical programming decisions. The ways in which organizers began to define internationalism at the 1956 Warsaw Autumn influenced how Polish musicians, via festival events, would interact with the outside world. Consequently, the evolving notions of the international that were enacted at the 1956 Warsaw Autumn were one way that the isolation of Polish musicians—and, by extension, their relative backwardness—might be overcome. Presenting music that was “contemporary” was another way in which Warsaw Autumn organizers meant to redress the deficiencies in Polish musical life and thereby bring the nation into the modern age. Thus, it is striking how hazy their definition of contemporary was. When they met in June 1955 to begin the festival preparations, ZKP’s executive board said only that they understood the word as referring to “the most outstanding musical works of the recent era.”57 They consequently privileged compositions and composers who, in a sense, had already become timeless—canonical representatives of modernist stylistic trends from the first half of the twentieth century.58 Stravinsky dominated the 1956 Warsaw Autumn program: audiences heard Fireworks, Petrushka suite, Firebird suite, Rite of Spring, Jeu de cartes, and the Ebony Concerto. Bartók appeared in both his populist and formalist guises: the Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra played the Concerto for Orchestra, and the Tátrai Quartet, visiting from Budapest, played the String Quartet no. 5.59 The pattern at the 1956 Warsaw Autumn was similar to the concert programs of the first Darmstadt Summer Courses, which had also presented music by Stravinsky and Bartók that had received little or no promotion in Nazi Germany.60 In both Darmstadt and Warsaw, catching up with the past was a way to rejoin an international community and to step back into the stream of modernist musical development. And, in both places, institutional actors oriented themselves in relation to

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particular, nationally inflected versions of twentieth-century music history. The early Darmstadt courses highlighted Austro-German composition, but this tradition received comparatively short shrift at the first Warsaw Autumn, where audiences heard only Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto, op. 42, and Berg’s Lyric Suite. The festival instead confirmed France as the more vital point of cultural reference by featuring compositions by Auric, Honegger, Messiaen, Milhaud, and Ravel, as well as more recent works by Dutilleux, Jolivet, and serialist Jean-Louis Martinet, who studied dodecaphony in 1945 with René Leibowitz. The retrospective of Polish music at the 1956 Warsaw Autumn was another opportunity to present a model of contemporary music making that was evolutionary rather than revolutionary, based on overcoming lacks, establishing a canon, filling in knowledge gaps, and progressing step-by-step toward the future. Works by Szymanowski framed the festival proceedings, thereby suggesting a link between the interwar period and the present. The more recent Polish compositions also had ties to the past, in this case the Stalinist years. The 1956 Warsaw Autumn program drew heavily on the repertoire of the 1951 and 1955 Festivals of Polish Music.61 While the repetition surely resulted in part from practical concerns, the effects were potentially far-reaching: international audiences heard Polish works that had already been road tested, and the promotion of these composers, rather than others, reinforced their authority in Polish musical life. As important as getting in tune with a modernist canon may have been, however, programming “contemporary” composition was just one of the festival organizers’ objectives. Another was to modernize Polish orchestral ensembles by exposing them to international performance standards.62 At times, this objective took precedence over the presentation of music that fulfilled modernist criteria. Such was the case with George Georgescu, conductor of the Enescu Philharmonic. After a trip to Romania, conductor Stanisław Wisłocki reported that the elderly, ailing Georgescu would not be able to learn new works by Polish composers in time for the 1956 Warsaw Autumn. This put organizers in a bind. Their own rules dictated that each of the visiting ensembles was required to present recently composed Polish music. At the same time, they strongly desired an appearance by “one of the greatest living conductors.” They proposed a compromise: that Georgescu perform only one concert with the Enescu Philharmonic; he was free to set the program, which ideally would feature music that was “as contemporary as possible.” A different conductor would lead the ensemble in a second performance that would feature contemporary works exclusively, including the required thirty minutes of Polish composition.63 As this episode demonstrates, from the standpoint of raising performance standards, Georgescu’s decision to perform Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche was no deal-breaker, despite its date of composition, 1894–95. For Warsaw Autumn organizers, the more important thing was that Georgescu would be performing this piece in Poland. The desire to let visiting

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orchestras show off their skills was also a factor in the presentation of two other nineteenth-century warhorses at the 1956 Warsaw Autumn: the Vienna Symphony performed Brahms’s Symphony no. 4, and the USSR State Symphony Orchestra performed Tchaikovsky’s Symphony no. 5.64 Even if planning the 1956 Warsaw Autumn evinced randomness and chaos, and even if festival organizers sometimes had the suspicion that they did not entirely know what they were doing, their work nevertheless entailed decisions that affected the art world in which elite Polish musicians would work from the mid1950s onward. Acting in collaboration with MKiS officials, state agencies, and performing organizations, ZKP members built the foundations for an institution that funneled resources to professional musicians. Their work for the 1956 festival began to set the terms for international contacts. And even if, by allowing the performers considerable latitude in deciding what they would play, festival organizers felt they were leaving significant portions of the program up to chance, the 1956 concert program already began articulating boundaries as to which kinds of music were considered contemporary—and which kinds were not. T H E F E ST I VA L A S Z E R O SUM G A M E

Had organizers made the right choices? Did it make sense to launch a new-music festival in mid-1950s Warsaw? These issues animated critics and other commentators before and after the 1956 festival concerts took place. Lucjan Kydryński answered both of these questions affirmatively in a column that appeared a few weeks in advance of the festival. The critic lauded the Warsaw Autumn initiative as an important first step in overcoming Poland’s cultural backwardness. But, he cautioned the readers of Przekrój (Cross-Section), a popular biweekly magazine based in Kraków, they should not expect to get caught up all at once. Polish ignorance of contemporary music was too great for that. Kydryński reminded his readers that their isolation since 1939 had kept Poles from learning about recent trends such as musique concrète, and had even caused them to forget about dodecaphony, one of the modern compositional strategies they once had known. Thus, he was not alarmed by the gaps he perceived in the 1956 festival program, which, he noted, would include no Hindemith, no Malipiero, no Dallapiccola, and no Nono. Instead, he emphasized that there were “real reasons to be optimistic about the future.” The new festival was one of them.65 Kydryński’s tone—enthusiastic yet defensive—suggests that the Warsaw Autumn stood in need of some justification. Other contributors to the festival’s advance publicity similarly sought to rationalize the shift in Polish musical life that the new initiative represented. Jerzy Jasieński was in full damage-control mode two days before the festival began. His article represented the political center’s views on the upcoming Warsaw Autumn. Jasieński, who directed the MKiS department that

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planned festivals and other large-scale artistic events, published his piece in Trybuna Ludu (People’s Tribune), the PZPR’s primary organ. He connected the Warsaw Autumn to an emerging official narrative of the Thaw that affirmed the basic rightness of socialism while acknowledging that there had been some flaws in the details of its realization. The Warsaw Autumn, he explained, was a “logical outgrowth” of the cultural policies of postwar Poland, the rational next step in a continual process of planned development that had included the previous festivals of Polish music. At the same time, the new festival represented a course correction in response to the failures of postwar cultural policy, most notably the missteps state agencies had made in promoting Polish music internationally.66 Political explanations aside, Jasieński’s objective was to dispel rumors that the Warsaw Autumn was wasting resources at a time when Poland could ill afford to spare them. It was ridiculous, he claimed, to believe that the festival would cost 20 million złoty—or even 100 million—as the Warsaw gossip was predicting. Cultural exchange agreements were financing the Eastern European orchestras’ visits; the Polish musicians were going to be in Warsaw anyway; the French and Austrian orchestras would not be in Poland for that long, and thus the cost of their performances would not be extravagant. In sum, the approximate cost of the entire festival would be 2 million złoty. And besides, Jasieński continued, the potential gains from the festival would far outweigh the financial outlay. Some of these profits might be monetary; he noted that the recent Chopin competition had brought in a fair amount of hard-currency proceeds through the sale of recordings, and he anticipated that the Warsaw Autumn would provide the same benefit. The more important gains, though, would be intangible: Jasieński anticipated that the festival would spur artistic development, and that it would raise Warsaw’s prestige by crowning “the city of Chopin” with “the laurel of modernity.”67 Kydryński and Jasieński sought to situate the Warsaw Autumn favorably in a Polish context. Tadeusz Marek, on the other hand, addressed both foreign and domestic readers in the essay he wrote for the festival program book. Working with state oversight, Marek defended the rise of a new-music festival in what was perhaps an unlikely location by arguing for Warsaw’s pedigree as a European musical capital. Home to Italian composers in the seventeenth century, a prescient supporter of Mozart in the eighteenth, host to traveling virtuosi in the nineteenth and producer of native talent in the early twentieth, Warsaw was no backwater. That it seemed to have become one was the fault of historical circumstance. Marek began the essay with a lament for what could have—and should have—been: “Were it not for the tragic years of World War II, contemporary music festivals in Poland would surely be a fine tradition already.”68 Thus, for Marek, the rationale for the Warsaw Autumn went beyond its stated aims to support and popularize contemporary music. It would also enable Polish musicians to reclaim the status in an international newmusic community that was rightfully theirs, but had been taken from them.

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Like the concert program itself, the Warsaw Autumn’s advance press set the tone for subsequent discussion of the 1956 performances. Critics all over Poland praised the festival for providing genuinely international contacts. Ludwik Ludorowski breathlessly recounted the excitement of opening night for his readers in Lublin, a city in the southeastern provinces. He reported that the National Philharmonic was festooned with the flags of different countries, the crowd was standing-room-only, and there were guests from China and Korea. Ludorowski could hear people chatting in English, French, German, Russian, and Czech before the concert hall suddenly went silent. Then the audience burst into applause: Nadia Boulanger had arrived. The National Philharmonic took the stage, the lights dimmed, ZKP’s president gave a short speech, and the music (an excerpt from Messiaen’s Les Offrandes oubliées) began.69 Ludorowski’s review suggests that the festival’s social environment—and, especially, the chance to encounter people from other places—was just as important to the Warsaw Autumn’s Polish participants as the music they were hearing. His comments also were not unusual, even if he did go into greater detail than most. Another commentator, Jerzy Młodziejowski, similarly emphasized the 1956 festival’s importance as a site for cross-border encounters. Writing in a local newspaper in northeast Poland, he described the years of socialist realism as a time of entrapment, during which Polish musicians had been enveloped by a “poisonous stench.” The 1956 festival offered relief from the pain of their isolation. “We all felt as though we were world citizens,” Młodziejowski gushed. He anticipated that these relationships would only continue to develop “when we ourselves travel to a distant country and we encounter the musicians we met in Warsaw.”70 Not everyone was convinced, however, that the festival had helped to mitigate Polish cultural isolation. For some critics, the first Warsaw Autumn had underscored just how out of touch with Western Europe Poland had become. According to Stefan Wysocki’s frothy account of his encounters with some of the festival’s most high-profile visitors, the august Belgian critic R.-Aloys Mooser thought that Polish composers were at least an “epoch” behind their peers in the West. “Depending on the composer’s age,” Mooser reportedly said, the delay was “approximately twenty-five to fifty years.”71 The problem extended to Polish audiences. One of the younger Warsaw critics, Ludwik Erhardt, chastised festivalgoers for their false displays of appreciation in response to the Schoenberg Piano Concerto. He knew the truth: “In the inner depths of your souls, you were horrified, because you heard music that you were unable to understand and respond to emotionally.” Erhardt surmised that audiences had only greeted the piece warmly because they were under the spell of Schoenberg’s fame and “the magic of the word ‘dodecaphony.’ ” He sympathized with their plight, however, because it was one that he shared. Including himself among the ranks of the mystified, he stated that “We are all the victims of seventeen years of isolation. We still need to hear a lot of this kind of

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music in order to learn how to listen to it, so that the basis for our enthusiasm will be sincere aesthetic experience rather than snobbery.”72 The question was whether the 1956 festival program had provided enough opportunities for listeners to encounter the works that would be most crucial to their aesthetic education. Erhardt did not think that it had, and one reason was the surplus of music from Poland. He wondered whether it would have made more sense for the visiting French orchestra to perform a piece by Messiaen in place of the required Polish composition.73 Zdzisław Sierpiński made a similar point in the harshly critical review he wrote for one of the Warsaw dailies. He would have much preferred hearing the Vienna Symphony play something by Schoenberg, Berg, or Webern instead of Lutosławski’s Concerto for Orchestra.74 Even critics writing for the regional newspapers—who tended to be gentler in their assessments than the Warsaw critics—thought there had been far too many Polish compositions on the program.75 The issue was not just the number of pieces by Polish composers, but also the performances of them. Organizers had hoped that foreign orchestras’ performances of Polish music would inspire domestic audiences to hold these works (and, by extension, their composers) in higher esteem; they also hoped that the technical finesse of these groups would spur Polish musicians to strive to reach international (that is, Western) performance standards. According to Jerzy Waldorff, this plan utterly failed on both counts. While the Eastern European orchestras had been well prepared, Waldorff thought that the Western ensembles had been trying “to make the greatest amount of money with the least amount of effort.” The Vienna Symphony’s performance was especially odious, for their “sloppy” playing had “annihilated” Lutosławski’s Concerto for Orchestra.76 Jan Boehm wondered whether the problem with the Vienna Symphony’s performance was “a lack of understanding.” He didn’t know whether it was even possible for an orchestra from Austria to fully grasp “the specific qualities of works by Polish composers.” At any rate, Boehm thought that the Lutosławski had lost some of its value for the Warsaw public, thanks to the Vienna Symphony’s lackadaisical rendition.77 Clearly, then, some commentators would have preferred the Warsaw Autumn to spend less time promoting Polish composition. Their complaints point to a fundamental issue in Warsaw Autumn programming. Because it involved a finite number of concerts that took place over a delimited number of days, the festival inevitably had winners and losers. Slots given to some composers were denied to others; the time the festival’s overwhelmingly Polish concertgoers spent listening to contemporary music from their home country represented lost opportunities for them to hear music from abroad. Critics’ complaints about the amount of Polish music also point to the divisions that can arise from a common vocabulary. For, as we have seen, “international” could mean many things at the 1956 Warsaw Autumn—import, export, or some

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blend of the two. The divisions cut even deeper when it came to the variable that festival organizers had left most open. “Contemporary according to whom?” Bogusław Schäffer asked snottily in his Warsaw Autumn review, which appeared several months after the festival had taken place.78 Certainly not according to him. A composer, musicologist, and all-around enfant terrible, Schäffer had a great deal of authority in late-1950s Poland due to his knowledge of the latest developments in European new music.79 In his professional opinion, festival organizers had failed to achieve their objectives, for the 1956 program was neither up-to-date nor an adequate representation of Europe’s leading composers. Schäffer directed his complaints primarily toward fellow musicians. But critics writing in other Polish media outlets felt the same way. Where was the Boulez? Erhardt asked. And where was the jazz?80 “The festival,” Sierpiński concluded gloomily, “did not provide a full picture of contemporary music—it presented only a small portion of it.”81 Had the Warsaw Autumn been worth it? Was it the most effective way to overcome the backwardness and isolation of the post-1939 years? Just as the festival program involved constraints of time and space, Poland had limited resources to support cultural development in the mid-1950s, when postwar reconstruction was still underway. For this reason, Sierpiński advocated scrapping the festival project entirely. He suggested channeling its funds to other events, such as the international Chopin and Wieniawski competitions. As for Polish composition, he thought that it could be promoted more effectively through the increased international dissemination of scores and recordings.82 Waldorff similarly wondered whether the money that was lavished on the 1956 Warsaw Autumn had been well spent. It was unclear to him whether hearing new music at a festival in Warsaw was the best way for Polish musicians to overcome their isolation. He claimed that Polish musicians would learn more through traveling abroad and encountering twentieth-century works in their native environments—hearing Berg in Vienna, for example, or Messiaen in Paris. But he was not willing to go as far as Sierpiński and call for the Warsaw Autumn to be discontinued altogether. Even if the first festival had failed in some of its particulars, Waldorff continued to see potential in the Warsaw Autumn’s basic idea.83 Erhardt was also willing to give organizers another chance. “Despite its many mistakes, the first festival of contemporary music was a highly necessary event,” he concluded. He was optimistic that, once these mistakes were corrected, the Warsaw Autumn would be important “not just for the musical life of Poland, but also for the musical life of all of Europe.”84 Although Waldorff and Erhardt may have softened their remarks, their barbs nevertheless stung festival planners in the ZKP. At a ZKP executive board meeting in early December 1956, Grażyna Bacewicz lambasted the critics as representing some of the worst traits of the Polish national character: to self-denigrate, to nitpick, and to subjugate themselves too readily to anything foreign.85 ZKP General Secretary Andrzej Dobrowolski’s assessment suggests that the union had taken at

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least some of the criticism to heart, for he admitted that the otherwise strong festival program could have done more to present German and Italian composition; the lack of music from these countries had been the most common critical complaint.86 Overall, however, ZKP members stood by the work they had done. Two composers—Bolesław Woytowicz and Kazimierz Serocki—claimed that the festival had done more to advance Poland’s international standing than Polish athletes’ recent (and far more costly) cultural diplomatic tours.87 One of the conductors, Witold Rowicki, crowed that, even with its mistakes, the 1956 festival had done more for Polish music “than eleven years of official cultural policy.”88 MKiS official Wiktor Weinbaum pushed back against this assessment, reminding Rowicki that the festival would have been impossible without the infrastructure that Poland’s postwar socialist state had created. That said, he agreed that it made little sense for them to fixate on some of the negative critical responses to the first Warsaw Autumn. Instead, ZKP should focus on the future.89 The state had, in fact, already committed to a second festival of contemporary music: a resolution passed in May 1956 indicated that the next Warsaw Autumn would take place at some point in 1958.90 Thus, critical commentary on the 1956 festival may have contributed to shaping views as to what music counted as contemporary, and what forms of international exchange would best overcome Polish cultural isolation. But ultimately the party-state, not critics, determined patterns of cultural investment. Its belief that the Warsaw Autumn represented a worthwhile next step in Poland’s evolving cultural policy meant that festival organizers had little reason to fear their more disgruntled critics in 1956. C O N T E M P O R A RY M U SIC B Y C HA N C E

The story of the first Warsaw Autumn is one of contingency—of the role that chance played in shaping Polish culture during the mid-1950s. The festival began during a period of uncertainty. Bylander rightly observes that “when the Polish Composers’ Union approved the establishment of the Festival in June 1955, no one knew what would happen in the political arena in the intervening months.”91 The musical arena was hardly more settled. ZKP’s leadership changed twice during the early Thaw, in 1954 and again in 1955. ZKP members were seeking to transform existing initiatives and launch new projects. Relationships between musicians and the political center were changing. Many composers were embarking on stylistic metamorphoses. In keeping with the climate of flux from which it emerged, the 1956 Warsaw Autumn encompassed elements both planned and unpredictable. Who knows what would have happened if Sikorski had not happened to speak with Bierut in person in 1954 and pitch the Warsaw Autumn idea? And who knows whether the 1956 concerts would have had the same symbolic significance without the accompanying backdrop of the Polish October Revolution?

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The role of chance in the first Warsaw Autumn speaks to the festival’s other contingencies. As we have seen, the 1956 concerts were indebted to relationships and patterns of cultural exchange that predated World War II. The Stalinist years also shaped the field of possibilities for the first Warsaw Autumn, and not just by providing a model of what to leave behind. The new festival benefited from institutional infrastructure and patterns of party-state investment that were established during Poland’s postwar transition to state socialism. Yet, at the same time, the Warsaw Autumn had succeeded in transforming the art world in which elite Polish composers worked. Creating the festival was a way for these figures to influence which values, practices, and ideas would become central in Poland’s official musical life during the Thaw. The moves they made established a paradigm that reflected what was possible in mid-1950s Poland and, in turn, created a framework for the future. Determining categories was fundamental to this process. Warsaw Autumn participants, from planners to commentators, were molding ideas about what international exchange and contemporary music might mean in a socialist—yet thawing—Poland. The shift from the Festivals of Polish Music to the Warsaw Autumn was a move from a model that highlighted a single nation and a single aesthetic orientation (even if the approaches to that aesthetic had not been uniform) to a model in which Poland was one nation among many and the emphasis was on stylistic pluralism. We have seen that, at the 1956 festival, being “international” meant exporting Polish composition, importing music from abroad, facilitating the movement of people across borders, and being attuned to Cold War geopolitical distinctions. The practice of contemporary music performance at the initial festival entailed getting up to speed on a modernist canon as part of the effort to make up for lost time. And, like the festival at which they were being negotiated, the categories “international,” “contemporary,” and “socialist” were not given at the 1956 Warsaw Autumn, but contingent, emerging through ongoing social interactions, and created as much by circumstance as by design. These categories would continue to be subject to negotiation in the years to come.

2

Building an Empty Frame

Advocates of modernism rapidly reshaped Polish musical life in 1957. ZKP and MKiS were already at work on the second Warsaw Autumn Festival. Conductor Bohdan Wodiczko led the National Philharmonic in performances of music by Bartók, Honegger, Martin, Martinů, and Stravinsky.1 The Polish Radio opened the first electronic music studio in Eastern Europe.2 And critics and musicologists revived the biweekly journal Ruch Muzyczny (Musical Movement), which the party-state had shut down in 1949 for its failure to adequately promote official cultural policy. Ruch Muzyczny’s authors made no secret of their pro-Western sympathies and their support for Poland’s post-October reforms. In two lengthy overviews of twentieth-century music, composer-musicologist Bogusław Schäffer encouraged his readers to value dodecaphony, serialism, and electronic music; to look to the West for the most important compositional developments; and to dismiss Britten, Copland, and Shostakovich as passé.3 Bohdan Pilarski’s review of the 1957 Prague Spring Festival lampooned Soviet posturing and lambasted the continuing ill effects of Stalinist-era policies on Czechoslovak composition.4 Other articles reported favorably on the Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music, which a small group of Polish composers attended for the first time in 1957.5 The journal presented extensive coverage of the 1956 Warsaw Autumn.6 Along with a crash course in contemporary art music (and what to think about it), Ruch Muzyczny introduced its readers to jazz.7 Artists and intellectuals in other fields were in a similar state of flux. As part of its platform of de-Stalinizing reforms, the PZPR indicated that it would cease to direct culture from above. Creators would now be free to choose the styles in 34

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which they worked. A hundred flowers bloomed, a state of ferment that was understood in Poland as a sign that the nation was successfully shedding its backwardness and joining the modern world.8 The explosion of cultural diversity in Poland also dazzled Western observers. After a visit to Warsaw, West German musicologist Fred Prieberg exclaimed in Musical America that “today it is possible in Poland to take up abstract painting, play jazz, write twelve-tone music, make a surrealist film—in general, to turn against the ideals of Soviet-sponsored ‘socialist realism’ in art.”9 In Melos, a West German new-music magazine, he laid bare the deeper implications of the turn to modernism: “One must ultimately understand that Poland is not at all a country under the Iron Curtain, but a cultural and intellectual part of Europe.”10 The new official policy of aesthetic pluralism served multiple purposes in Poland. It was a negotiating tactic for the party-state, which hoped to placate disgruntled cultural elites and thereby keep them on board for the larger project of building socialism. In turn, pluralism enabled these elites to have genuine experiences of freedom.11 When pluralism entailed the embrace of modernism, it also gained them recognition in the West. As desirable as pluralism may have been, however, Poland’s political leaders viewed the ferment with suspicion. PZPR First Secretary Gomułka mistrusted cultural elites, particularly writers—whom he counted as instigators of the turbulent events in Hungary and Poland in 1956.12 Prieberg’s scarcely concealed subtext suggests an additional reason for Gomułka’s concern: Prieberg readily equated Poland’s cultural difference from the Soviet Union with political opposition to socialism. From the PZPR’s perspective, artistic and intellectual freedom were permissible. But revisionist attacks on socialism were not.13 While Gomułka may have promised a “Polish road,” he had no intention of changing Poland’s ultimate political destination. Thus, the Thaw in Poland was short-lived: Gomułka’s consolidation of power led to a period of cultural retrenchment in the late 1950s that affected artists and intellectuals in many fields.14 The PZPR sought to curtail modernism in the visual arts by liquidating journals that promoted modernist aesthetics; it also shuttered exhibitions and galleries that championed abstract art.15 Writers and journalists experienced renewed restrictions, including reinvigorated censorship and a precipitous decline in the numbers of periodicals and books that were published each year.16 Some of these shifts affected Polish musical life. Ruch Muzyczny, for instance, was one of the publications slated for closure. The official reason was that the journal’s circulation was too low.17 The more likely cause was Eberhard Rebling’s incendiary review in the June 1958 issue of Musik und Gesellschaft: under the pretext of offering his Polish colleagues some friendly advice, the East German musicologist had denounced Ruch Muzyczny as promulgating “deliberately anti-socialist politics.”18 Ruch Muzyczny’s advocates launched an offensive in print to defend Polish cultural difference.19 A move of the editorial headquarters from Kraków to Warsaw—as well

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as a change in the journal’s format—enabled Ruch Muzyczny’s writers and editors to continue to operate.20 But although Ruch Muzyczny’s troubles were unsettling, they were an isolated incident. The cultural retrenchment that affected Polish artists and intellectuals in the late 1950s largely bypassed musicians. Influenced by Romantic notions of musical autonomy, ZKP members were generally among the least politically engaged of all Polish artists. While they didn’t necessarily support party directives, composers and musicologists rarely engaged in forthright critiques of official cultural policy. As a result, the PZPR tended to view ZKP as benign. Polish composition entered its most radical phase precisely when official policies toward the other arts had started to refreeze; music continued to enjoy relatively uncontested official patronage during the late 1950s and beyond. The Warsaw Autumn benefited from this ongoing support: festival advocates consolidated their institutional position in Poland as the Thaw was coming to an end. This chapter will examine how they did so. We will see that a pluralistic approach to concert programming enabled Warsaw Autumn planners to position their institution in ways that were relevant in Poland as well as in Cold War Europe more broadly. Critics and other commentators also participated in this positioning. By highlighting the festival’s stylistic and geopolitical diversity, these authors contributed to an emerging discourse of the Warsaw Autumn as an empty frame— that is, neutral territory in an otherwise polarized world of new-music performance. In what follows, I will show how various actors constructed this frame through their organizational practices as well as discursively. I will also explore the uses to which this frame was put. We will begin in 1957, when the possibilities of Poland’s Thaw were at their most wide open. M O D E R N I T Y, M U LT I P L I E D

What could they offer that other festivals could not? As organizers planned the second Warsaw Autumn, they were significantly more concerned with branding than they had been in 1956. State cultural officials advocated limiting the festival’s purview in order to differentiate it within an increasingly crowded international field. According to Wiktor Weinbaum, head of the MKiS Music Department, the programs at most European music festivals were a kind of “mélange,” a hodgepodge of repertoire from various eras that lacked a clear, overarching conception. Darmstadt was different in that its programs had focus; the Warsaw Autumn could benefit from this focus too. By presenting only contemporary music, the Warsaw Autumn would be taking a “defined artistic position,” which, Weinbaum argued, would guarantee European (read: Western) interest in the festival concerts.21 ZKP members readily agreed to this conception of the 1958 Warsaw Autumn. The question was what the term contemporary music ought to mean. In 1956, the

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designation had connoted works with established value but did not necessarily imply particular styles or dates of composition. Notions of contemporary music were becoming more concrete as organizers started to envision the 1958 festival program. One approach was to take the word contemporary at face value: ZKP General Secretary Andrzej Dobrowolski suggested limiting the repertoire to works that had been composed within the past ten to fifteen years, with some exceptions for the prewar “contemporary classics” that were still unknown in Poland.22 For some composers, “contemporary” implied more than a musical work’s date of completion. Younger participants in the 1958 Warsaw Autumn planning meetings conceptualized contemporary music according to notions of progress and stylistic advance that would have been right at home in the avant-garde centers of Western Europe. Tadeusz Baird complained that the word contemporary was not, in fact, specific enough for their purposes, because it typically referred to twentieth-century music in general. He proposed that they finesse their wording to make it clear that “we are talking about a festival of the so-called avant-garde trends in contemporary music.”23 Włodzimierz Kotoński likewise understood “contemporary” to be synonymous with modernist approaches to composition. Musing on the “contemporary classics” they might program for 1958, he claimed that a Rachmaninov piano concerto would “not be an option,” even if, technically, the work had been composed during the twentieth century.24 And it was not just the younger generation that felt this way. One of the older composers, Tadeusz Szeligowski, also contended that a work’s “contemporary character” could not be determined on the basis of its date alone.25 Yet things were not that simple. The ensembles from the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and Romania had surprised no one in 1956 when they showcased music that promulgated socialist-realist aesthetic ideals. Could these works also be understood as viable reflections of modernity? Dobrowolski thought so. He reasoned: “If the Moscow orchestra presents Miaskovsky’s Symphony no. 27 as part of its program, and the Romanian orchestra presents a suite by Enescu and dances by Rogalski, then that means these works are considered to be contemporary in those countries.”26 Dobrowolski’s argument was not simply about acknowledging socialist alternatives to Western models, and thereby managing delicate international relations within the Eastern Bloc. He also challenged the implicit assumption that avant-garde and contemporary meant the same thing. Speaking at a planning meeting in October 1957, he contended that avant-garde approaches, such as serialism and electronic music, were just one contemporary trend among many. Considering these views, it is unsurprising that Dobrowolski called for the 1958 Warsaw Autumn to be as stylistically diverse as possible.27 What is noteworthy is that this essentially pluralist conception of contemporary music received widespread support, even from those composers who had favored a more stringently avant-garde approach to the Warsaw Autumn’s

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programming. The idea that the Warsaw Autumn could offer a uniquely comprehensive overview of contemporary music took shape over 1957 during the preparatory meetings for the 1958 festival. This way of defining the Warsaw Autumn served organizers’ self-interest. It was specific enough to guarantee the festival’s international visibility. It was also specific enough to demonstrate the modernity and liberality of Polish culture, and thereby assert parity with the West. But programs of contemporary music at the Warsaw Autumn would not be so delimited as to simply reproduce the Western avant-garde’s values, in which priority was paramount. According to these standards, musical life in mid-1950s Poland would perennially come up short. Why would Western Europeans travel to Warsaw if they could sample the latest avant-garde trends at their sources, in Darmstadt, Paris, or Donaueschingen? If modernity was relative, however, then the Warsaw Autumn, in bringing together contemporary repertoire from more places than any other, could potentially be the most relevant new-music festival of all. One ZKP member put it this way: “I envision the festival as juxtaposing our conception of the musical world (or musical creativity) with the way these same issues are being understood by, let’s say, our Eastern neighbor, or, if an ensemble comes from the West, with their view of ‘the music of today’. The fundamental significance of this is that our festival would be able to differentiate itself . . . from other festivals, not just through the juxtaposition of the works themselves, but also because we would always be making our decisions with a certain thought as to who and what these works represent.”28 The conscious adoption of a pluralistic approach to programming contemporary music was an attempt by Warsaw Autumn planners to recalibrate modernist standards of value and thereby turn a potential handicap to their advantage. STA K I N G OU T ( N E U T R A L ) T E R R I T O RY

The idea that, because of the diversity of its programming, the Warsaw Autumn was a comprehensive, objective, and therefore neutral overview of contemporary music became a vital component of the festival’s positioning in its printed promotional materials. The most important of these were the introductory essays that appeared in the festival program books from 1956 to 1961. These prefaces articulated, clarified, and reiterated the Warsaw Autumn’s raison d’être. While they were meant to edify the festival’s general audiences, the essays were not directed solely to them. Like all Warsaw Autumn texts, they were written with the knowledge that cultural officials throughout the Bloc would be reading. Talk about the Warsaw Autumn was, as a result, neither idle theorizing nor the simple fulfillment of bureaucratic requirements. Strategies to mediate the festival’s reception were inseparable from efforts to rationalize the existence of such an institution in Cold War Eastern Europe and thereby secure legitimacy—along with a steady stream of

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resource allocations. Musicologist Andrzej Chłopecki has gone so far as to maintain that, whatever their ostensible pedagogical function, the prefaces primarily addressed political and state authorities, a move that turned the texts into “idiosyncratic ideological manifestos.”29 One function of the prefaces, then, was to highlight Warsaw’s credentials as a socialist city. They also distanced Poland from West Germany, thereby suggesting that, no matter what festival presentations of the Western avant-garde might imply, Polish political loyalties remained to the Warsaw Pact. In 1958 Tadeusz Marek claimed that Warsaw had become inherently antifascist through the horror of its wartime experiences.30 This rhetorical line crested in bellicosity in 1959, when Marek described Warsaw as “a city almost completely wiped from the face of the earth by Nazi barbarians, who were smug in their fanaticism, intolerance, and hatred of humanity.” The city’s resurrection had come about through the “love and fervent patriotism” of the Polish nation, though socialism also had a hand in Warsaw’s revival: Marek emphasized that “above all, our achievements to date have been made possible by the magnanimous aid and care of the state.”31 Warsaw, according to the program-book prefaces, was hardly neutral territory. Yet the Warsaw Autumn perhaps could be. The same prefaces that invested the festival’s location with meaning in 1958 and 1959 also employed rhetorical moves that emptied the Warsaw Autumn of bias, turning the festival—unlike the city in which it was taking place—into a neutral zone in which a variety of musical works and aesthetic opinions could come into contact. Thus, Marek announced in the 1958 preface that the repertoire had been conceived as an “anthology.”32 One year later, his opening essay institutionalized the discourse of the festival as a meeting place for the competing worlds of the Cold War. Yet festival planners were mute when it came to dictating what the results of this confrontation should be. Theirs was a “festival of ideas,” whose repertoire was selected and organized according to principles of “objective neutrality.”33 In Warsaw, the implication was, listeners were free to think whatever they liked. Therein lay one of the festival’s kernels of danger and allure, because, from an official standpoint, there was no guarantee that audience members would come to the appropriately socialist conclusions. Polish press coverage further disseminated an image of the Warsaw Autumn as an empty frame. Critics in Warsaw championed the festival’s supposedly unique impartiality as they whetted their readers’ appetites for the concerts in 1959. Ludwik Erhardt contended that the Warsaw Autumn’s “objectivity and liberalism” distinguished it from its competitors: “Our festival is the only one where no specific trends and compositional techniques are propagated—where no incense is lit before any altar. This is why it is possible for all works representing current aesthetic views to coexist at our festival.”34 The media blitz extended to cities throughout Poland, reinforcing the discourse of the Warsaw Autumn as neutral territory. One example is the article Krzysztof Antoni Mazur wrote for Dziennik Bałtycki, a

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regional paper published in the coastal city of Gdynia. Like Erhardt, Mazur highlighted the Warsaw Autumn’s inclusivity. He claimed that everything that could be described as “contemporary music” would be on display at the 1959 festival, from experimental works that “totally deviate from tradition” to “more moderate” compositions that were “tightly connected to former musical epochs.”35 Through emphasizing the Warsaw Autumn’s pluralistic approach to programming, these journalists helped to cement the discourse of the festival’s objectivity that was being shaped in planning meetings and disseminated to concertgoers via the program books. And just as the program books’ prefaces distinguished the ostensibly unbiased festival from its ideologically charged location, the newspaper articles promoting the 1959 Warsaw Autumn in Poland likewise cast the festival as neutral while simultaneously nudging readers toward the officially palatable interpretation. Thus, immediately after he proclaimed that the Warsaw Autumn was beholden to no orthodoxy, Erhardt prophesied that the 1959 concerts would be a victory for the aesthetic mores of socialism.36 Another Warsaw critic, Zdzisław Sierpiński, made a similar point by citing the views of an unnamed (but presumably Eastern European) observer of the 1958 performances. According to Sierpiński’s interlocutor, Darmstadt and Donaueschingen “are interesting festivals for sure,” but, because they lacked the quality control that came from “the aid and care of the state,” they devolved, all too readily, into “moments of commercial rivalry and snobbery.” While this commentator granted that there was rivalry at the Warsaw Autumn, it had a different tenor: it was a “Great Confrontation” that was taking place “on the border of two political systems,” not a tawdry struggle in a new-music market driven by capitalism.37 The unavoidable conclusion was that the Warsaw Autumn’s view of modernity was not simply equal to anything on offer in the West: it was better. In both of these articles, the very existence in Poland of a pluralistically conceived festival of contemporary music was presented as a testament to socialism’s superiority. Such positioning was prudent strategy when it came to mediating the Warsaw Autumn in Cold War Eastern Europe, where Poland was a cultural outlier. Branding the festival as neutral territory also appealed to music critics from the West, who were just as likely as Polish commentators in the late 1950s to describe the Warsaw Autumn as a stylistically inclusive alternative within an otherwise polarized cultural landscape. Peter Heyworth, using language that will by now sound familiar, characterized Warsaw as “the only Communist capital that allows virtually full freedom in music. It sits astride the two worlds of East and West (at any rate where music is concerned) and thus provides an ideal ground for them to meet on, not in competition and still less in a false bonhomie that would overlook the essential differences between them, but in an attempt to see each other as they are. That is surely the first prerequisite of understanding.”38 David Cairns described the festival using similarly formulaic language: “The Warsaw Festival has estab-

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lished itself as a protagonist of musical ‘coexistence,’ as an agreed field of ‘peaceful competition’ between competing systems.”39 Addressing Western readers, both Heyworth and Cairns furthered festival organizers’ project of establishing—and promoting—Polish difference. Texts—from the festival program books to newspaper reviews—enabled a discourse of the Warsaw Autumn’s neutrality to take root both in Poland and abroad. But what did it mean to say that the festival was liberal, objective, an anthology? The city in which the festival was taking place could hardly be described as neutral; according to the logic of Cold War cultural rivalry, the music performed at Warsaw Autumn concerts implied political affiliation by virtue of its composer’s nationality, style, and methods. If the Warsaw Autumn was objective, it could be so only through providing fair and balanced coverage—that is, by presenting a spectrum of music that was so broad that the opposing ideological charges of various works would cancel each other out. Like the question of what constituted “contemporary” music, however, the question of what constituted fair and balanced coverage defied easy answers. The 1958 and 1959 festivals demonstrated that it was one thing to construct an empty frame discursively. Engineering a neutral concert program was another thing entirely. A S W I T Z E R L A N D O F N EW M U SIC ?

In late August 1958 the second Warsaw Autumn was swiftly approaching, yet organizers seemed further away than ever from realizing their ideals. Many performers had canceled their appearances. Planners were not entirely certain which musicians would be coming to Warsaw, nor did they have a clear sense of what pieces these musicians were going to play. The problem was not just that the chaos was nerve-racking. The haphazard organizational procedures, fumed ZKP President Kazimierz Sikorski, meant that festival audiences were not going to receive a considered overview of recent musical trends.40 Even Tadeusz Marek, who touted the 1958 Warsaw Autumn’s comprehensiveness in the program book, took a dim view of the evolving repertoire. Lamenting that the concerts were going to be “onesided,” he declared that the plan to transform Warsaw into “a musical Switzerland” was turning out to be “more of a metaphor than the reality.”41 Sikorski’s and Marek’s complaints indicate that they each had a clear conception as to what the 1958 Warsaw Autumn should be. Other festival organizers did, too. Witold Lutosławski thought that they should tailor their coverage to reflect the international makeup of the Warsaw Autumn’s participants. Among other things, this meant that festival organizers should program music from France as a goodwill gesture to the head of the International Society for Contemporary Music’s (ISCM) French Section, who would be one of their invited guests in 1958. And yet, Lutosławski noticed as he and his colleagues scrambled to finalize the repertoire,

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the numerous changes and cancellations had stripped all of the French works from the 1958 festival program. He contended that they would be poor hosts if they neglected to present any music from their visitor’s home country.42 Another lastminute change—the substitution of the Toulouse Quintet for the West German Radio Wind Ensemble—put French composition back on the agenda. Ultimately, though, the Toulouse Quintet’s performance did not solve the problem for Lutosławski. For not just any music from France would do. After the 1958 festival, he complained that the quintet had been “second-rate,” with a “simply awful” pianist. Even worse, its program of Ibert, Poulenc, and Milhaud had given festivalgoers the wrong idea about musical life in postwar France. To provide 1959 Warsaw Autumn audiences with a more up-to-date (and, in his opinion, more accurate) view of contemporary French composition, Lutosławski recommended that festival organizers engage the performers connected with Pierre Boulez’s new-music concert series, Le Domaine Musical. His rationale? Faithful depiction. As he put it: “If it is said that the ‘Warsaw Autumn’ is a meeting of East and West, then those two worlds should be represented by representative works.”43 For Lutosławski, then, it was not enough to present music from a broad swath of nations; festival organizers should also ensure that these nations were represented in particular ways. Lutosławski’s worries about offending the French delegate were related to a broader set of concerns about the portrayal of Western European music at festival concerts. His colleagues, on the other hand, were more preoccupied with managing strained relationships within the Eastern Bloc. Just as festival organizers in Poland had specific ideas about what a comprehensive, accurate overview of contemporary music would entail, outside players—including authoritative figures throughout Eastern Europe—had their own views on what constituted fair and balanced coverage. After participating in the inaugural Warsaw Autumn, Czechoslovak musicians were piqued when they did not receive a repeat invitation for 1958. Andrzej Dobrowolski’s explanation—that space limitations made it impossible to invite everyone to every festival—did little to soothe their hurt feelings.44 And the negotiations that brought the Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra and Chorus to the festival were a carnival of errors, marred by bureaucratic inefficiency, the continual substitution of one ensemble for another, and mutual suspicion between Poles and East Germans.45 It was important for festival organizers to make these relationships work, because bungling cultural diplomacy within the Eastern Bloc could put the entire festival endeavor into question. Tadeusz Baird understood this: he urged his colleagues to think tactically, and to do what they could to placate Eastern European officials and musicians. He warned that failure to do so would supply further ammunition to critics of Poland’s post-1956 cultural turn.46 Wiktor Weinbaum amplified this point at the 1958 festival’s postmortem. He reminded ZKP’s executive board that they could ill afford to alienate their counterparts elsewhere in

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Eastern Europe, for the Warsaw Autumn was not just a platform to promote Polish agendas. “The People’s Democracies will demand performances of their works,” Weinbaum said. Moreover, the Warsaw Autumn would “lose its political raison d’être” if each festival did not present “a suitable amount” of music from the socialist sphere.47 In fine, performing a wide variety of music from Eastern Europe was the cost of admitting the Western avant-garde to 1950s Poland. Weinbaum’s remarks suggest that the representation of Eastern European music in 1958 had left something to be desired, while Lutosławski’s complaints about the Toulouse Quintet intimate that the West had been misrepresented, too. Although their public promotional materials had touted the Warsaw Autumn as an objective, neutral contact zone, festival planners recognized that the 1958 concerts were not quite the unbiased anthology of contemporary music that the program book had promised. That year the Juilliard String Quartet presented a program of William Schuman (String Quartet no. 3), Tadeusz Baird (String Quartet), Webern (Five Movements, op. 5), and Bartók (String Quartet no. 4). The Leningrad Philharmonic, under the direction of Evgeny Mravinsky, closed the festival with performances of Prokofiev’s Suite no. 2 from Romeo and Juliet, op. 64ter, and Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 11, op. 103 (“The Year 1905”). Stockhausen lectured on electronic music, whereas David Tudor, fresh from Darmstadt, introduced Warsaw Autumn audiences to chance composition, as well as to music for prepared piano. Hefty doses of the Second Viennese School responded to the ongoing Polish fascination with dodecaphony. Premieres by Henryk Mikołaj Górecki (Epitafium), Kazimierz Serocki (Musica Concertante), and Włodzimierz Kotoński (Chamber Music for 21 instruments and percussion), showed that modernist approaches were starting to take root among Polish composers, as did the presentation of Lutosławski’s Muzyka żałobna (Funeral Music), an important milestone in the composer’s development of a harmonic language based on the use of twelvenote chords.48 Commentators representing each side of the Cold War came to the same conclusion about this program: the 1958 Warsaw Autumn had been biased in favor of the West. Everett Helm, an American composer, critic, and arts administrator with important ties to the West German new-music scene, acknowledged festival organizers’ aims to present a spectrum of music from all over the world. “But interestingly enough,” he continued, “it was the Western music that was most amply represented and received the most attendance and applause.”49 Helm’s assessment would have received no argument from musicologist Yuri Keldysh, who in the late 1950s was one of the most powerful voices in Soviet music criticism. Keldysh claimed that the 1958 Warsaw Autumn had held a crooked mirror up to contemporary musical life: “Notwithstanding the presentation of a number of interesting and meaningful works at the festival, the general profile of the event prompts serious, justifiable objections. . . . [I]f a festival guest were to attempt, based on the works that were

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heard there, to compile an overview of the most important developments in contemporary music and the actual, real weight of these trends, they would come up with a very one-sided picture that is far from the objective state of things.”50 Keldysh’s concerns exemplified the official Soviet position on musical developments in post-1956 Poland. The 1959 Warsaw Autumn program provoked even louder accusations of bias. The high-profile guests that year—Dmitry Shostakovich and Pierre Schaeffer— suggested that organizers were attempting to create an impression of objectivity through juxtaposing the leading light of official Soviet composition with the French originator of the indubitably avant-garde musique concrète. Soviet aesthetics, however, were hardly newsworthy in 1959 for Polish audiences, who flocked instead to hear the latest developments in electronic music. The New York Times correspondent described the scene: It is 4:30 pm in Warsaw, and a crowded audience is even standing in the aisles as Pierre Schaeffer begins his lecture-demonstration on “musique-concrète.” Mr. Schaeffer is from Paris, concrete music is from the West, and the Poles are reverently ready to get in tune with the avant-garde. . . . Such observers have also had the occasion to sit through the endless opacity of the Piano Sonata No. 2 by Pierre Boulez. The reflection that this is what the Stalinist era kept out might even have provoked in some minds a kind thought about Stalin. Nevertheless a thirsty man is not to be blamed for drinking. The Poles, deprived until about three years ago of free artistic contact with the West, are now absorbing all they can of Western modernism.51

Post-Webernian serialism was just as big a story in the Polish press. For the first time, the Warsaw Autumn concerts had featured works by Nono and Boulez. Regardless of whether it was lauded or loathed, Western European serialism was an inescapable topic of conversation, not least because serialism had appeared to dominate the 1959 festival program. Zdzisław Sierpiński pointed to “a certain exaggerated emphasis on pointillistic music,” and he wondered whether the average (that is, the non-music-professional) audience member had been able to make any sense of the unfamiliar compositional techniques.52 Józef Kański, writing in the PZPR’s national daily, noted that the prevalence of serial composition had resulted in “a certain monotony,” while gaps still remained in the coverage of Eastern Europe, particularly Bulgaria and Yugoslavia.53 Some of the Western observers left Warsaw with a similar impression: an overstuffed Arthur Jacobs pleaded with festival organizers to aim for “a more balanced diet” now that they had “savored to the full the recently forbidden 12-note fruits.”54 Thus, Warsaw Autumn organizers appeared to have taken sides once again. A rising generation of Polish composers appeared to have done so as well. Henryk Mikolaj Górecki, Krzysztof Penderecki, and Witold Szalonek had important premieres in 1959 that demonstrated the extent to which each of them had been affected

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by Webern and the postwar European serialists. Górecki used serial operations to structure pitch and rhythmic durations in his Symphony no. 1, op. 14 (“1959”). The work begins with propulsive sequences of verticalized row forms in the strings, interspersed with interjections from the percussion; as the symphony progresses, Górecki abandons the first movement’s dense sound masses in favor of starkly reduced, pointillistic textures.55 Penderecki’s Strofy (Strophes) is pointillistic throughout. Scored for soprano, speaker, and small instrumental ensemble, this work sets texts by Menander, Sophocles, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Khayyam in their original languages. Displaying the sensitivity to timbre that would become his calling card in the early 1960s, Penderecki employed a variety of instrumental and vocal articulations to generate a sound world that is simultaneously variegated and austere. Szalonek likewise took a pointillistic approach in Geständnisse (Confessions), a work for speaker, choir, and chamber orchestra that sets poetry by Kazimiera Iłłakowicz. Concert programming further underscored Górecki’s, Penderecki’s, and Szalonek’s ties to the West. The Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra performed Górecki’s symphony alongside Nono’s Composizione per orchestra no. 1. The Silesian Philharmonic’s chamber orchestra, augmented by the National Philharmonic Choir and soloists Zofia Stachurska and Franciszek Delekta, played the Penderecki and the Szalonek during a performance that also included Webern’s Symphony, op. 21.56 Polish composers occupied a complex position in the Warsaw Autumn’s system of checks and balances: presumably, the country of their citizenship placed them in the East, yet the styles and strategies they favored suggested an opposing set of loyalties. Regardless of whether they were British or Soviet, international observers of the 1959 Warsaw Autumn linked the new wave in Polish composition to Western trends. The correspondent for The Times told his readers that “the younger composers” in Poland were “indistinguishable from our English progressivists,” though they were still distinct from the continental avant-garde, as “they have not gone all the way with Boulez and Schaeffer.”57 For the writers of Sovetskaya Muzïka (Soviet Music), Poland’s young composers had already gone far enough. Under the pretext of launching “a friendly (but perhaps also slightly unpleasant) conversation with our Polish colleagues,” Yelena Grosheva and Konstantin Sakva voiced their horror at what they had recently heard and seen in Warsaw. “As strange as it may seem,” they reported, “the ‘avant-garde’ endeavors of the most militant destroyers of art’s aesthetic foundations . . . have conquered the minds of a portion of Poland’s creative youth.” They excoriated Polish composers for wasting their time writing abstract works that smacked of French, West German, and Italian approaches to new music, when they should have been producing uplifting pieces that drew on and depicted the experiences of contemporary Polish history.58 Grosheva and Sakva certainly didn’t assume that Polish composers should be nonpartisan. To the contrary: their problem was that Górecki, Penderecki, and Szalonek had chosen the wrong side.

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Critics in Poland did not deny the avant-garde slant of the new Polish music that was performed at the 1959 Warsaw Autumn. They did, however, draw an important distinction when they described the relationship of Polish composers to the West. Both British and Soviet commentators emphasized the similarities between composers in Poland and their counterparts elsewhere, implying that the Polish composers lacked individuality and that their relationship to the West was primarily one of dependence. Polish critics, on the other hand, cast the nation’s young composers as equal, independent players in a border-spanning new-music community. Michał Bristiger claimed that, like their peers elsewhere in Europe, Górecki, Penderecki, and Szalonek were “concerned with a universal problem” in their music— that is, devising new compositional strategies after the breakdown of tonality.59 And they were solving this problem on their own terms. Answering those who would see Górecki, Penderecki, and Szalonek as epigones, Bohdan Pilarski contended: “I think it makes no sense to allude to ‘pilgrimages from Donaueschingen’ because the works the young composers presented to us are, above all, the result of their own ideas. The modernity of their music stems from capturing the spirit of the age, not from modeling themselves on (or blindly imitating trends from) the West.”60 In a similar vein, Bohdan Pociej denied that Polish composers were merely aping serial techniques. True, new Polish music had its roots in serialism, but, Pociej alleged, “what is more important is that it matured on our soil.”61 Not only was Poland’s emerging avant-garde distinct from the postwar avantgarde movements in the West; Polish critics also distinguished the members of this avant-garde from one another. Pociej discredited the idea that Poland’s young composers were coalescing into a new national school, because, in his view, Górecki, Penderecki, and Szalonek were so individual that “it is difficult to find some kind of national ‘common denominator’ ” that would bind them.62 Bristiger similarly characterized Górecki, Penderecki, and Szalonek as “three entirely different creative personalities,” whose works had provided festivalgoers with “three completely distinct musical experiences.” He claimed that, as a result, “allegations that the avant-garde supposedly eliminates all individual creative traits were entirely unfounded.”63 At their heart, these arguments were ones of pluralism. As they positioned the nation’s young composers in the intellectual press, Polish critics characterized the world of new music as one in which solutions to the problems of modernity might come from multiple places, not just the West’s established centers. By doing so, they argued for the unique worth of Górecki’s, Penderecki’s, and Szalonek’s approaches, suggesting that these composers were offering something much more than cheap knock-offs of Nono, Stockhausen, or Boulez. In addition, Bristiger answered the Soviet charge that avant-garde strategies were antithetical to the development of the personal creative voice that was necessary if a composer was going to speak to society. While these critics were not defining pluralism in quite the same ways as com-

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mentators on the Warsaw Autumn were, their emphasis on Polish composers’ distinctiveness and individuality performed similar cultural work to the moves that had cast the 1958 and 1959 festivals as zones of comprehensive stylistic neutrality. For both the composers and the institution that showcased them, a discourse of pluralism attempted to carve out a place for Polish culture that was distant from both the East and the West. At the same time, this discourse played to audiences in both spheres: rationalizing, on one hand, the promotion of avant-garde music in the official cultural life of a socialist state, while, on the other, suggesting that Polish musicians and institutions were just as legitimate as those in the West. In theory, the 1958 and 1959 Warsaw Autumn festivals were to be a neutral forum in which various conceptions of new music could peacefully coexist. Achieving this ideal in practice, however, was a near impossibility, since no work came to the festival without some kind of Cold War baggage. Regardless of what the festival programs and advance press may have said to the contrary, many observers interpreted the packed halls for serial and electronic music, and Polish composers’ affiliations with the European avant-garde, as signs that the Warsaw Autumn was, in fact, transmitting a pro-Western message. Such a message could increase Poland’s cultural prestige in the West, for it suggested that a socialist state could support a viable avant-garde movement in new music. At the same time, Soviet criticism of the festival made it harder for Warsaw Autumn planners to justify the institution to the Polish party-state officials on whose financial backing they depended. And this justification was necessary in 1958 and 1959, when Poland’s political center was recalibrating its relationships with artistic and intellectual elites as part of its efforts to maintain a socialist course of cultural development. For Warsaw Autumn organizers, this was a period of institutional uncertainty. While the state had made some moves toward establishing the festival as an ongoing, annual event, MKiS was still approving the Warsaw Autumn on a case-by-case basis. This had not been a problem in 1956, when the state approved a second Warsaw Autumn before the first had taken place; criticism of that year’s performances therefore could not jeopardize the festival’s immediate future. By 1959, however, there was no guarantee that the festival would continue. The Polish political center had become more sensitive to the Warsaw Autumn’s reception, especially in the international press; the question was whether Western (and domestic) acclaim could outweigh Soviet and Eastern European criticism. MKiS indicated that it would wait until after the 1959 concerts to determine the Warsaw Autumn’s future.64 Until then, the festival’s fate would be an open question. I N S T I T U T IO NA L I Z I N G P LU R A L I SM

Minister of Culture Tadeusz Galiński came to a decision on 22 December 1959, when he issued an administrative order that confirmed the Warsaw Autumn’s

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status as a permanent event on Poland’s cultural calendar, articulated the institution’s primary objectives, and established procedures for how the festivals should be run.65 The push for a rationalized model of festival planning had come from all sides: ZKP members who were frustrated in 1958 by the last-minute scramble for performers and repertoire, state cultural officials who likewise hoped to avoid a repeat of 1958’s near disaster, and journalists who fretted that shambolic organizational procedures would tarnish the Warsaw Autumn’s public image.66 The timing is significant: the Polish political center enacted the statutes at a moment when artists and intellectuals in other fields appeared to be losing ground. The 1959 statutes formalized the collective model that had been a part of Warsaw Autumn planning since the beginning. A Festival Committee was to be the primary organizational body; it was projected to comprise at least eighteen people. ZKP would dominate: in addition to ZKP’s president, the committee was to include an additional ten to twelve ZKP members. ZKP’s contingent would join forces with representatives from the other Polish music institutions and state agencies that played vital roles in bringing each year’s festival to fruition. The Music Group (Zespół do Spraw Muzyki) would advocate for MKiS’s objectives; it would also act as a go-between that linked the Festival Committee to officials at higher levels in the state apparatus. Two organizations, the International Cultural Relations Bureau (Biuro Współpracy Kulturalnej z Zagranicą, or BWKZ) and PAGART, the Polish state-run concert agency, would coordinate performers’ festival appearances. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs would facilitate Warsaw Autumn planning by clearing musicians’ and observers’ travel to Poland. Spokespersons from the Polish Radio, the National Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra, and the State Opera in Warsaw were also awarded slots on the Festival Committee. As they were negotiating the festival’s organizational structures, ZKP members and state officials were also determining what their relationship would be. Speaking for the composers and musicologists that made up its ranks, ZKP’s primary concern was to ensure that its members would have free rein to determine the Warsaw Autumn repertoire. This meant controlling performers to reduce their impact on the concert programs. Kazimierz Sikorski expressed the views of many of his colleagues when he said: “We cannot give in to pressure from performers. At the festival, the performers primarily want to promote themselves, not the works. This must be opposed. It is better to get rid of a performer than to ruin the festival’s [aesthetic] profile.”67 This also meant resisting state influence as much as possible, for, as Kazimierz Serocki put it, “I would be a little afraid of a [Festival] Committee that is appointed by the Minister [of Culture] and whose policies may not always be aligned with ZKP’s.”68 Given these fears, it might seem contradictory that, when ZKP members drew up the 1959 statute proposals, they made provisions for a state presence in Warsaw Autumn planning.69 Yet they were perfectly willing to accept

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MKiS’s involvement, so long as there was a clear division of labor. Although ZKP members were eager to select performers and repertoire, they were much less enthusiastic about the mundane, time-consuming logistical details of Warsaw Autumn planning. They thought that MKiS should play this administrative role.70 MKiS had little problem with this arrangement: the Music Group’s director agreed that ZKP should handle the aesthetics, whereas the ministry should handle the logistics.71 Such an approach to Warsaw Autumn planning had the potential to be mutually advantageous. Composers and musicologists would be freed from the threat that festival administration posed to their creative work, whereas partystate actors would benefit from ZKP members’ expert knowledge about contemporary music. This division of labor also reflected more widespread views in the late 1950s as to the forms that state involvement in culture should take.72 But MKiS’s participation in Warsaw Autumn planning was never purely logistical. The festival’s potentially delicate international politics gave the ministry an incentive to keep an eye on festival planning. The 1959 statutes kept ZKP in check by specifying that each year’s repertoire required the minister of culture’s approval; the ministry also retained ultimate control over the Warsaw Autumn budget. Chastened by the failure of socialist realism to take hold in Poland, the ministry’s influence on the Warsaw Autumn would largely be benign. Control of the festival budget nevertheless was a point of leverage: in the 1960s, resource allotments would enable the ministry to tilt the Warsaw Autumn’s stylistic balance without censoring works or banning performers outright. Aside from formalizing existing organizational procedures, the 1959 statutes institutionalized a view of the Warsaw Autumn as an empty frame—that is, an objective anthology of contemporary music, and neutral territory in the Cold War. According to this document, the festival’s purpose was “to acquaint Polish audiences with contemporary music as it is being composed and performed in Poland and abroad,” as well as to facilitate “the exchange of views between composers and musicians from various countries.”73 Crucially, however, these objectives were not just about what had been done in the past; they also established the criteria for future assessment. MKiS’s evaluation of the programs that festival organizers submitted for official approval would be based on the extent to which the performers and repertoire were thought to accomplish the Warsaw Autumn’s stated goals. And while the objectives helped to define the field of action in which festival organizers made their decisions, the goals were also broad enough to allow for multiple interpretations. The statutes did not indicate what music would count as “contemporary.” They also did not specify what would fulfill the mandate of cultural exchange. Thus, there was still plenty to negotiate after MKiS enacted the statutes, with some minor revisions, in March 1960, and finally appointed a Festival Committee to plan that year’s Warsaw Autumn.74

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A P R E C A R IOU S BA L A N C E

By early 1960, plans for the upcoming festival were already underway. In the summer of 1959, ZKP’s executive board decided to start organizing the 1960 Warsaw Autumn even though the event would not receive official clearance until the end of the year. Their efforts were strategic. The executive board reasoned that it would be harder for MKiS to renege on the festival if ZKP had already begun to engage performers and publicize the 1960 concerts internationally. They also wagered that the ministry would be loath to tarnish Poland’s post–October Revolution image by canceling an event that had already generated such lively—and, in the case of the Western critics, such favorable—coverage in the international press.75 To advance its objectives, ZKP’s executive board appointed a Temporary Repertoire Commission that started functioning in November 1959. Its eight members were established players in Poland’s elite, professional art-music world. Composer and conductor Witold Rowicki was the powerful head of the Warsaw-based National Philharmonic Orchestra.76 Other Temporary Repertoire Commission members held leadership positions in ZKP. Włodzimierz Kotoński was union treasurer, and composer and conductor Stanisław Wisłocki was one of ZKP’s two vice-presidents. In 1959 musicologist Józef Patkowski was also a member of ZKP’s executive board. Although they were not currently serving in the union administration when they joined the Temporary Repertoire Commission, Tadeusz Baird, Kazimierz Serocki, and musicologist Stefan Jarociński had played important roles in ZKP’s leadership during the crucial transitional years of 1954 and 1955.77 Witold Lutosławski was a particularly authoritative figure: since 1954, he had led ZKP’s Qualifying Commission, the body that determined who could join the union. For Polish composers, ZKP was the gateway to professional opportunity, including Warsaw Autumn promotion. The advent of Lutosławski’s tenure on the Qualifying Commission had coincided with the union’s steady marginalization of composers who were PZPR loyalists or who preferred to work in lighter, more popular genres—composers, that is, who were perceived as espousing the wrong kind of politics or as writing the wrong kind of music.78 His work on the Warsaw Autumn’s Temporary Repertoire Commission would give Lutosławski, as well as his colleagues, additional opportunities to play the role of gatekeepers who controlled access to the elite art-music circles of Polish cultural life. Aside from the power they wielded in ZKP and other Polish music institutions, commission members shared a common interest in modernist musical aesthetics. Baird was still in thrall to dodecaphony, while Lutosławski was working out his idiosyncratic approaches to twelve-tone harmony and indeterminacy.79 Serocki had begun the experiments with texture, timbre, and spatialization that would occupy him until the end of his career.80 A collector of folk songs during the Stalinist period, Kotoński in 1957 had been one of the first composers from Poland to attend the

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Darmstadt Summer Courses. He soon began composing electronic music, producing film soundtracks as well as stand-alone pieces. His Etiuda konkretna na jedno uderzenie w talerz (Study on One Cymbal Stroke, 1959) was a landmark first example of Polish musique concrète.81 Kotoński realized the study at the Polish Radio’s Experimental Studio, of which Patkowski, another Temporary Repertoire Commission member, became the head in 1957. Dedicated to the production and promotion of electronic music, the Experimental Studio was, like the Warsaw Autumn, a bid to spur progress and integrate Poland into the new-music networks of postwar Europe. These aesthetic affinities could have encouraged the Temporary Repertoire Commission to skew the 1960 Warsaw Autumn sharply toward the postwar avantgarde. But commission members were pragmatists, not idealists. Aware that they were operating within a context of institutional uncertainty, they opted for a strategy of deliberate moderation, seeking to craft a program that would appeal to MKiS and thereby increase the Warsaw Autumn’s chances of survival. One goal, then, was to make the 1960 program more audience-friendly by increasing the amounts of opera and ballet.82 Their other objective was to determine the “appropriate proportions” in the festival repertoire—that is, to find the ideal balance of the avant-garde, the moderates, and the contemporary classics. To that end, the Temporary Repertoire Commission began sorting works and composers into these categories at its very first meeting in November 1959 (Table 1). Each group was a grab bag linked by loose criteria, in which the commission was influenced as much by nationality and prestige as by compositional persuasion. The commission’s selections provide insight into the state of their knowledge, circa 1960, of twentieth-century music, as well as their perceptions of how a wellcalibrated festival program should look. The “contemporary classics” category suggests that festival organizers were actively constructing a modernist canon based on judgments of stylistic innovation. Predictably, their list included Bartók, Stravinsky, and the Second Viennese School, to the exclusion of perceived traditionalists such as Rachmaninov and Sibelius. Moreover, they chose works that would highlight the “classic” composers’ contributions to early-twentieth-century modernism. Thus, they judged Prokofiev’s “classic” pieces to be the ones he composed before his return to the Soviet Union. Commission members privileged Bartók’s work in modernist idioms, such as Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta. And they sought to perform Szymanowski’s decadent music, not the folk-influenced compositions that advocates of socialist realism in Poland had lauded during the Stalinist years. Organizers’ categorization of Szymanowski as a “contemporary classic” reflected the vicissitudes of the composer’s post–World War II reception in Poland: while critics and musicologists initially understood him as a flawed artist who had been hamstrung by his nation’s backwardness, by the late 1950s they had recast him as a foundational figure in the development of a twentieth-century tradition of Polish composition.83

table 1 Compositions and Composers Selected by the Temporary Repertoire Commission (23 November 1959) “Contemporary Classics” Composer

Work

Béla Bartók

Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion Contrasts Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta Piano Concerto no. 2 Řikadla [Nursery Rhymes] Histoire du soldat In memoriam Dylan Thomas Canticum sacrum Agon El retablo de maese Pedro Pierrot lunaire Fünf Orchesterstücke, op. 16 Suite for Piano, op. 25 Erwartung Variationen für Orchester, op. 31 “Dance of the Golden Calf,” Moses und Aron Jeanne d’ Arc au bûcher Variations, op. 30 Concerto for Nine Instruments Songs op. 14, 15, 19 Lulu Wozzeck Kammerkonzert Quintet Visions fugitives Sarcasms Piano Sonata no. 3 String Quartet no. 2 Litania do Marii Panny [Litany to the Virgin Mary] Pieśni księżniczki z baśni [Songs of a Fairy Princess] Metopy [Metopes] Król Roger [King Roger] String Trio Songs

Leoš Janáček Igor Stravinsky

Manuel de Falla Arnold Schoenberg

Arthur Honegger Anton Webern

Alban Berg

Sergey Prokofiev

Karol Szymanowski

Józef Koffler “The Moderate Group” Composer

Work

Olivier Messiaen

Réveil des oiseaux Vingt regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus Cinque canti

Luigi Dallapiccola Alberto Ginastera Heitor Villa-Lobos Hilding Rosenberg Konstantin Iliev Goffredo Petrassi Dmitry Shostakovich Karl Amadeus Hartmann

Sinfonia breve Serenata Cello Concerto no. 1 Symphony no. 6

Composer

Work

Boris Blacher Carl Orff Humphrey Searle Michael Tippett Jean-Louis Martinet Hans Werner Henze

Orchester-Ornament Trionfo di Afrodite

Ingvar Lidholm

Prométhée Fünf neapolitanische Lieder Four Nocturnes for Orchestra Ritornell

“The Avant-Garde” Composer

Work

Luigi Nono Karlheinz Stockhausen

Cori di Didone Gruppen Zyklus Kontra-Punkte Improvisation sur Mallarmé Le soleil des eaux Mädchentotenlieder Ein irrender Sohn Allelujah II Nones Rimes pour différentes sources sonores Serenade Transición II Piano Concerto Aggregate Galaxy II A Game around a Game Figures sonores Canticum psalmi resurrectionis

Pierre Boulez Bo Nilsson Luciano Berio Henri Pousseur Roman Haubenstock-Ramati Mauricio Kagel John Cage Roland Kayn Henry Brant Sven-Erik Bäck Yoritsune Matsudaira Dieter Schönbach Sylvano Bussotti Niccolò Castiglioni Iannis Xenakis

Achorripsis for 21 instruments

“Polish Works” Composer

Work

Kazimierz Serocki Tadeusz Baird Witold Szalonek Krzysztof Penderecki Witold Lutosławski Jan Krenz Henryk Mikołaj Górecki Bogusław Schäffer Wojciech Kilar Włodzimierz Kotoński Zbigniew Turski

Epizody [Episodes] Egzorta [Exhortation]

Musique en relief Sinfonia da camera

source: ZKP 11/75. Protokół z posiedzenia tymczasowej Komisji Repertuarowej IV Międzynarodowego Festiwalu Muzyki Współczesnej /1960/, 23 November 1959.

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Not all of the Temporary Repertoire Commission’s selections were so obvious, however. Take the elevation of Józef Koffler, one of the many Polish Jews who perished during World War II. A niche composer even in Poland in the late 1950s, Koffler would hardly seem to merit inclusion in the “contemporary classics” category.84 Yet putting him there allowed festival organizers to make a larger point. Koffler had been one of the first Polish composers to write twelve-tone works, and he could therefore function as a national counterpart to Schoenberg and Webern. In their “contemporary classics” category, then, Warsaw Autumn planners were defining prewar modernism in narrow ways, while simultaneously intimating that the history of this aesthetic movement was large enough to include a place for composers from Poland. Two of the Temporary Repertoire Commission’s other labels relied on judgments of musical progress that owed much to currents trickling into Poland from West Germany and France. Their category of stylistic “moderates” included Messiaen, Dallapiccola, Henze, and Ginastera, as well as Shostakovich and the Bulgarian composer Konstantin Iliev. The blurring of East–West divisions in this group suggests that, for composers who didn’t occupy the extremes, style didn’t map easily onto a presumed point of geopolitical origin. With the avant-garde, on the other hand, Cold War boundaries remained in force. For Warsaw Autumn planners, all that was new, edgy, and Western fell into this category. Obscuring aesthetic differences that were keenly felt elsewhere (such as at Darmstadt in 1958), they placed Cage alongside Nono, Boulez, Stockhausen, Xenakis, Berio, Kagel, and Polish-Jewish émigré Roman Haubenstock-Ramati. It is also unclear precisely which Cage piece the commission desired, since the “Piano Concerto” named in their planning materials could refer either to the (1950–51) Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra or to the (1957–58) Concert for Piano and Orchestra, which had recently been presented in a recording at the 1959 Darmstadt Summer Courses.85 The separation of Poles into their own group could suggest that nationality trumped style when it came to promoting homegrown composers at the 1960 festival. Yet that was not entirely the case, since this category heavily favored the members of Poland’s emerging avant-garde. The commission planned to feature new works by Górecki, Szalonek, and Penderecki, the trio that music critics had hailed as auguring a new dawn in Polish composition. They wanted to include a piece by Wojciech Kilar, another member of the youngest generation; like many of his colleagues, Kilar was composing with modernist techniques. Bogusław Schäffer relished provocation and was thoroughly committed to ideal of a disruptive, everadvancing musical avant-garde. As a conductor, Jan Krenz gave important premieres of new Polish music; he was also experimenting with the new trends in his own compositional work. In addition to promoting some of their more radical colleagues, the Temporary Repertoire Commission also planned to show off its members’ own engagement

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with postwar modernism. The composers on the commission—Baird, Kotoński, Lutosławski, and Serocki—added their names to the Polish category. This was a clear departure from the thought, floated in planning meetings for the 1958 Warsaw Autumn, that organizers should not put their own music on the festival program.86 Because they played multiple roles in their art world, Temporary Repertoire Commission members could use their clout as festival administrators to further promote the aesthetic views they were championing in their own music. Or, to put it another way, Warsaw Autumn planning fostered a kind of redundancy, in which the artistic aspirations and administrative activities of one contingent in Polish musical life were creatively intertwined. So much for objectivity. The Temporary Repertoire Commission’s categories implied value judgments and exclusion by their very nature. Although commission members characterized their work as motivated by a desire to finesse the 1960 Warsaw Autumn’s stylistic balance, the way that they made their decisions speaks to the pull that modernist definitions of new music were exerting on several institutionally powerful Polish musicians. Yet these same categories could also be used as data to demonstrate that the avantgarde had been contained. Such was the case on 29 October 1960, when MKiS’s Music Group called a special meeting to discuss the most recent Warsaw Autumn. That year’s concerts had provoked the usual howls from Eastern European and Soviet reviewers; the festival had also incited a skirmish in the Polish press as critics debated the merits of Górecki’s brash new orchestral work, Scontri.87 Citing this multiplicity of views, Music Group Director Wiktor Weinbaum asked ZKP’s representatives: Was the festival fulfilling its ideological objectives? Did it present a sufficiently broad range of current musical trends?88 The composers at the meeting, many of whom were active in Warsaw Autumn planning, assured Weinbaum that the festival was indeed meeting its goals. As to its stylistic comprehensiveness, Lutosławski hedged his answer. He stated that the Warsaw Autumn was comprehensive in presenting the compositional trends the Festival Committee felt had some vitality.89 Kazimierz Serocki more forthrightly engaged the subtext to Weinbaum’s question: the conviction, whispered behind closed doors, that the Warsaw Autumn was a worthwhile institution but that it presented too much avant-garde music. He countered this suspicion by appealing to statistics. Serocki explained that organizers had divided the repertoire into groups while planning that year’s concerts. He further indicated that the classics added up to 1,029 minutes of music, or 74 percent of the total program length in 1960. Moderate works comprised 253 minutes (or 18 percent) of the repertoire, whereas 103 minutes had been devoted to the avant-garde, only 8 percent of the entire festival. The avant-garde could hardly be accused of domination, Serocki reasoned, if its proportional share of the program had been so limited.90 The specificity of Serocki’s figures suggest an awareness of—and a willingness to work within—the party-state’s procedures for regulating culture. Bureaucratic

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accounting based on style and technique was part of the way that culture worked in Poland circa 1960. When the Temporary Repertoire Commission began classifying pieces of music according to the extent to which they were considered avantgarde, the PZPR had already mandated that abstract works could account for no more than 15 percent of any public art exhibition. Art historian Piotr Piotrowski claims that this rule was essentially unenforceable; nevertheless, it did suggest that, when it came to promoting the avant-garde, there were some lines that could not be crossed.91 As for the Warsaw Autumn, Serocki’s statistical defense also demonstrates how ZKP members sought to use the constraints of Poland’s official cultural life as a means to further their own professional objectives—in this case, ensuring the ongoing presentation of avant-garde music at the festival concerts. During the early 1960s, classifying works according to style and point of geopolitical origin became a thoroughly institutionalized component of Warsaw Autumn planning, one that affected how the organizational committees carried out their day-to-day work, as well as how they presented their choices to MKiS for its approval. In June 1962, for example, the minister of culture received a packet of materials related to that year’s Warsaw Autumn: the Festival Committee’s draft program, reports from peer reviewers, and commentary by ministry official Wiktor Weinbaum. Festival organizers summarized their aims in the draft program’s prefatory remarks. Many of these objectives were standard; they included presenting a comprehensive picture of contemporary composition, playing the “classics,” presenting the best Polish works from the past year, and ensuring the performance of music from socialist countries. More specific goals for 1962 were to increase the amounts of opera and ballet and to highlight composers who were not connected to the Second Viennese School.92 Like the aim of increasing audience accessibility in 1960, these goals were tailored to appeal to the political center and thereby mediate the performance of new music in socialist Poland. Proof of these assertions came in the numbers. Demonstrating geopolitical parity was easy enough. To demonstrate the levelness of the playing field, the total running time of music from each camp was tallied to the minute. According to the 1962 draft program, music from the capitalist West would predominate (as it did in most years), but not egregiously so. Its 671 minutes were to be countered by 558 minutes of music from socialist countries, in which the Polish works would last 183 minutes and the Soviet compositions 241.93 Needless to say, differences of musical style and technique were blurred to create these images of regional cohesion. What the East lacked in duration was to be made up in 1962 by the bodily presence of its musicians. Like pieces of music, performers were a variable in the Warsaw Autumn equation; their points of origin were monitored just as closely as composers’ methods and nationalities, and could just as easily be used to gauge whether the festival’s geopolitical distribution was suitably wide-ranging. Predictably, the 1962 draft program sorted performers along the lines of East and West.94 Musicians

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from the Eastern Bloc outweighed their Western counterparts, an edge that mostly came from the heavy presence of Polish orchestras, soloists, and conductors. Calibrating the aesthetic balance was, as ever, a much bigger problem, since the relative sizes of the style categories reflected judgments as to how important various strategies were when it came to presenting a purportedly unbiased, comprehensive overview of contemporary music. Works on the 1962 draft program fell under three main headings: “classic” twentieth-century works; “current and less recent pieces by the older generation of the greatest twentieth-century composers”; and “newest music,” that is, works with relatively recent dates of composition (Table 2). The Festival Committee further subdivided pieces in the latter category into two groups: compositions representing “the newest stages of post-dodecaphonic compositional technique”; and others whose strategies were “mixed,” meaning that they might include “elements of tonality and neoclassicism, as well as individual explorations in the field of musical language.”95 The aesthetic divisions had been refined since 1959. No longer were Poles in a category of their own. Nor was the “avant-garde” located solely in the West. Rather, grouping Penderecki, Górecki, and Serocki with figures such as Xenakis and Stockhausen suggested that the avant-garde had ceased to be an import into Poland from somewhere else. Pieces by Stravinsky, Hindemith, Webern, and Schoenberg could now be classed in either of the first two categories, depending on whether they had, according to the Festival Committee, “already achieved a lasting place in the history of contemporary music.”96 Idiosyncratic decisions prevailed despite the seemingly more precise categorizations: Webern’s Variations, op. 30, were taken to be canonical but his Concerto, op. 24, was not. Tallies accompanying each category made a stark argument for aesthetic proportionality. In terms of raw length, works from the avant-garde were projected to last 251 minutes in 1962, barely edging out the older generation (223) and lagging behind the classics (307). At any rate, the inclusion of classic composers in two different categories puffed up their portion of the program. But performances from the mixed group would take up the most time. This category included everything that fell between the canon’s and the avant-garde’s extremes. It therefore brought together works of wildly different stylistic persuasions, from Eight Etudes and a Fantasy, Elliott Carter’s abstractly intellectual exploration of woodwind timbre and ensemble coordination, to The Legend of Love, a lushly pictorial, orientalist ballet by Azerbaijani composer Arif Melikov. Clocking in at 459 minutes, the mixed-techniques category would far outstrip the amount of time allotted to the avant-garde. The assumption underlying these calculations was that units of time were inherently unbiased—that a minute of music in one style was equal to a minute in any other. By this rationale, the longer the work, the greater its impact would be. Thus, the 1962 draft program could suggest that festivalgoers’ perceptions would be dominated by music in a more moderate vein. But the dynamics of prestige

table 2 Proposed Repertoire for the 1962 Warsaw Autumn (Draft Program Sent from ZKP to MKiS for Approval, May 1962) I. Classic Twentieth-Century Works Composer

Work

Duration (in minutes)

Arnold Schoenberg Béla Bartók Igor Stravinsky

Moses und Aron Contrasts Persephone Oedipus Rex Six Bagatelles, op. 9 String Quartet, op. 3 Variations, op. 30 Jeux Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp Słopiewnie [Word Songs] Maski [Masks] Renard String Quartet no. 1 Petite symphonie concertante Kammermusik, op. 24

30 18 50 30 8 18 8 18 15 18 10 20 18 22 12 TOTAL: 307

Anton Webern Alban Berg Anton Webern Claude Debussy Karol Szymanowski Igor Stravinsky Béla Bartók Frank Martin Paul Hindemith

II. Current and Less Recent Pieces by the Older Generation of the Greatest TwentiethCentury Composers Composer

Work

Luigi Dallapiccola Dmitry Shostakovich Igor Stravinsky Dmitry Shostakovich Bohuslav Martinů Igor Stravinsky

Cinque canti Suite from Lady Macbeth Concertino Two Pieces, op. 11 Serenade for Chamber Orchestra Concerto in E-flat Major (“Dumbarton Oaks”) Concerto, op. 24 Suite, op. 29 Septet Violin Sonata no. 1 in F Minor, op. 80 Duo concertant Symphony no. 2 Cantata no. 2, op. 31 Summer Music String Quartet no. 3, op. 22

Anton Webern Arnold Schoenberg Igor Stravinsky Sergey Prokofiev Igor Stravinsky Karl Amadeus Hartmann Anton Webern Samuel Barber Paul Hindemith

Duration (in minutes) 12 18 15 15 25 12 10 14 15 20 16 16 8 10 18 TOTAL: 224

III. Newest Music (A) The Newest Stages of Post-Dodecaphonic Compositional Technique Composer

Work

Dieter Schönbach Stanisław Kotyczka Krzysztof Penderecki Niccolò Castiglioni Jan Krenz

Lyrische Gesänge Permutacje [Permutations] String Quartet Aprèslude Capriccio

Duration (in minutes) 10 8 12 6 8

Composer

Work

Krzysztof Penderecki Henryk Mikołaj Górecki Franco Donatoni Włodzimierz Kotoński Mátyás Seiber Bolesław Szabelski Wojciech Kilar Romuald Twardowski Luigi Nono Cornelius Cardew Franco Evangelisti Kazimierz Serocki John Cage Bo Nilsson Karlheinz Stockhausen Luciano Berio Iannis Xenakis Yoritsune Matsudaira Tadeusz Baird

Canon Canti strumentali For Grilly Canto Suite for Harpsichord and String Quartet Apostrofy for 9 instruments Riff 62 Antyfony [Antifone] Cori di Didone Third Orchestral Piece Ordini Segmenty [Segments] Music for Wind Instruments 20 Gruppen Gruppen Allelujah II Pithoprakta Figures sonores Wariacje bez tematu [Variations without a Theme] Quartet 1961

Henri Pousseur

Duration (in minutes) 8 10 6 8 12 10 10 8 12 8 6 6 12 6 20 20 8 15 10 12 TOTAL: 251

(B) Mixed Techniques (Elements of Tonality and Neoclassicism, as well as Individual Explorations in the Field of Musical Language) Composer

Work

Grażyna Bacewicz Aurel Stroe Lazar Nikolov Boris Blacher, Paul Dessau, Karl Amadeus Hartmann, Hans Werner Henze, Rudolf Wagner-Régeny Kazimierz Sikorski Gunther Schuller Jiří Jaroch Thea Musgrave North Zygmunt Mycielski Galina Ustvolskaya Boris Klyuzner Wolfgang Fortner Elliott Carter Ralph Shapey Arif Melikov Willem Pijper Ingvar Lidholm

Concerto for Orchestra Piano Sonata Sonata for Flute and Piano Jüdische Chronik

Trumpet Concerto String Quartet no. 1 Symphony no. 2 Serenade Octet Symphony no. 2 Sonata for Violin and Piano Violin Sonata 5 Bagatelles Eight Etudes and a Fantasy Movements The Legend of Love String Quartet no. 5 Mutanza

Duration (in minutes) 20 22 16 35

15 19 25 11 12 22 18 20 15 15 10 150 20 14 TOTAL: 459

source: MKiDN. Ministerstwo Kultury i Sztuki Wydz. Konkursów i Festiwali (14). VI MFMW “Warszawska Jesień” (Projekt programu i uwagi do projektu programu) 1961–1962 r. Założenia programowe VI Międzynarodowego Festiwalu Muzyki Współczesnej “Warszawska Jesień,” 1–3.

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meant that some minutes of music at the Warsaw Autumn would matter more than others. And in this respect the avant-garde was a problem. Just how much other music would it take to neutralize its charge, especially in Cold War Eastern Europe, where contact with the Western avant-garde continued to have appealing connotations of resistance? The various actors involved in Warsaw Autumn planning didn’t always arrive at the same answer to this question. Like the ZKP-dominated festival organizing committees, state cultural officials also sought to mold the Warsaw Autumn’s stylistic contours. Their control over the festival budget gave them the means to do so. In 1962, for example, MKiS refused to increase the festival budget to finance a presentation of Gruppen, Stockhausen’s mammoth work for three simultaneously performing orchestras.97 State officials also claimed that they lacked the funds for Berio’s Allelujah II. Moreover, the festival would now open with an evening of Szymanowski symphonies to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the composer’s death. These decisions decreased the avant-garde’s share of the 1962 Warsaw Autumn program. The result was a different stylistic ratio than the one Festival Committee members had originally anticipated; removing the Stockhausen and Berio also recalibrated the 1962 festival’s East–West balance. The specific cases of Gruppen and Allelujah II were part of the Warsaw Autumn’s bigger financial problems in 1962, when MKiS approved a substantially lower budget than the one the Festival Committee had requested.98 At the time, the Warsaw Autumn’s funds came from multiple sources. Through PAGART, the BWKZ paid non-Polish performers’ expenses; the ministry’s Music Department handled Polish musicians’ appearances. The responsibility for all other costs fell to ZKP, which ultimately received its funds from MKiS. Any complaints about the festival budget had to be taken up with the ministry directly. The nadir came in March 1963, when the minister of culture suggested that the Warsaw Autumn be suspended for a year as part of a nationwide effort to curb spending.99 Declaring that even a momentary cancellation could damage the Warsaw Autumn’s international reputation, the Festival Committee rejected his proposal. Their solution was to revise the program to keep costs to a minimum, which, among other things, meant making do without Die Reihe, a twenty-seven-member new-music ensemble from Vienna. Organizers had invited the group to perform pieces by Cage, Frederic Cerha, Haubenstock-Ramati, and Schoenberg. With the new budgetary constraints, they could no longer afford to bring such a large Western ensemble to the 1963 Warsaw Autumn.100 After meticulously going over the new draft program, Minister of Culture Galiński was satisfied with the changes committee members had made. He approved the amended program and budget, and plans for the 1963 festival went ahead.101 The financial constraints were real: the early 1960s were a period of economic stagnation in Poland.102 That these constraints disproportionately affected the

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presentation of Western, avant-garde music was a byproduct of running a contemporary music festival in Cold War Eastern Europe. Cultural exchange agreements meant that it would always be possible to host visiting ensembles from elsewhere in the Eastern Bloc. It was significantly more expensive to engage Western performers, especially if they were to be paid in hard currency—a limited, controlled resource in 1960s Poland. We should be wary of viewing MKiS’s financial decisions on the Warsaw Autumn as motivated solely by official antipathy to music by the Western avant-garde. Yet the political center did remain ambivalent in the 1960s when it came to supporting avant-garde music in socialist Poland. The PZPR Central Committee’s Culture Department made this ambivalence clear in a set of talking points it prepared for a meeting that took place in early 1963. While the talking points paid lip service to Polish composers’ creative freedom, they also stressed that this freedom should not keep composers from fulfilling their social obligations.103 For the ZKP members involved in Warsaw Autumn planning, these duties included cultural outreach and the education of Polish audiences through the presentation of wideranging, comprehensive, and unbiased festival concert programs. Repertoire categorization was thus a form of insurance. Generating stylistic and geopolitical parity through the force of numbers enabled Warsaw Autumn planners to argue that they were living up to the claims of objectivity that had become such an important part of festival discourse, and thereby achieving the goals that the 1959 statutes had codified. T H E WO R K O F N O N I D E N T I T Y

In his review of the tenth-anniversary festival, Tadeusz Kaczyński claimed that “the Warsaw Autumn does not have its own identity; it is simply a window through which the contentious terrain of twentieth-century music can be seen.”104 This mode of discourse was nearly as old as the festival itself. When they were organizing the 1958 concerts, planners adopted the strategy of pluralism to distinguish the Warsaw Autumn within the border-spanning new-music networks of postwar Europe. Diverse programming—with its capacity to suggest that the festival was an ideological blank—also proved useful at home. Developing an identity of nonidentity enabled the Warsaw Autumn’s advocates to negotiate a secure institutional position during a period of cultural, social, and political flux. This organizational victory allowed them to continue to mobilize resources and enjoy the benefits of state support as Poland’s Thaw came to a close. The practices of regulated pluralism that developed in the Warsaw Autumn’s first decade emerged through interactions among composers, performers, critics, musicologists, state cultural officials, and party authorities. These interactions meant that contemporary music came to be defined at the festival in particular

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ways. As Warsaw Autumn planners selected works for the festival program, they were continuing to negotiate what the term contemporary music would mean in socialist Poland. While they made judgments according to style and technique, additional factors shaped their decisions. One of these was the desire to assert the festival’s relevance within postwar new-music networks: organizers were keenly aware of competing institutions in postwar Europe and the Warsaw Autumn’s status in relation to them. Another factor was the need to adapt their aesthetic vision and organizational practices to the constraints and possibilities that were particular to Poland. Considering the circumstances—Eastern Europe during the Cold War—it is unlikely that festival planners ever could have presented avant-garde music exclusively. Their view of “new music” privileged pluralism, not purity. Warsaw Autumn programming therefore had the potential to suggest a more expansive vision of what new music might be. Yet repertoire categorization also solidified perceptions of where aesthetic boundaries lay. This was especially true when it came to policing the borders of stylistic and technical innovation. For no matter how different from one another the works in the “moderate” categories may have been, they did share one thing: festival organizers didn’t think that this music was avant-garde. While Warsaw Autumn planners ostensibly served the ends of pluralism as they made their repertoire decisions, their acts of categorization also facilitated the institutionalization of avant-garde values in socialist Poland’s official musical life. Behind-the-scenes efforts to shape festival programming in the late 1950s and early 1960s demonstrate the importance of social interactions in enabling certain aesthetic outlooks and musical practices to flourish. Interactions that took place during festival performances were just as important for defining “contemporary music” at the Warsaw Autumn. We have already seen that concertgoers could affect critics’ and observers’ perceptions of the festival’s stylistic balance when they expressed their views on which performances were worth hearing. The next chapter will take a closer look at the listening practices and concert-hall behaviors of the festival’s earliest audiences.

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Warsaw’s National Philharmonic Concert Hall was in an uproar on 24 September 1963. Italian composer Franco Donatoni gesticulated grotesquely as he led the Silesian Philharmonic and Swedish organist Karl-Erik Welin in the world premiere of Per orchestra, his most daring experiment to date with compositional contingency. He had written this piece as a series of twenty panels, using musical games and transformational procedures to generate a series of precise instructions that, when followed, created aural and visual effects of symphonic chaos. When the twelfth section was finished, Donatoni left the stage; the other musicians gradually followed. Then something strange happened: one by one the players began to reappear, initiating the remaining eight parts of the piece. Donatoni finally returned, signaling to various instrumental groups every so often. His actions did nothing to control the cacophony.1 This was Donatoni’s second appearance at the Warsaw Autumn. The first had taken place one year prior, when he led the London-based Melos Ensemble in For Grilly, his “improvisation” for seven instruments, as part of a program that also featured music by Mátyás Seiber, Thea Musgrave, Janáček, and Stravinsky. Soon after the 1962 festival, the Warsaw Autumn Repertoire Commission approached Donatoni to ask if he would compose a new work for 1963. The organizers’ plan was to schedule as many world premieres that year as possible, and not just by Polish composers: along with Donatoni, their wish-list included Xenakis, Varèse, West German Dieter Schönbach, and the emerging Bulgarian modernist Konstantin Iliev.2 Attempts to mount new works at the 1963 Warsaw Autumn were part of organizers’ strategy to raise the festival’s international profile. These pieces were important because, as critic Stefan Wysocki asserted in Poland’s intellectual press, 63

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world premieres were “the main attraction” at new-music festivals and a testament to these institutions’ relative rank; he was therefore pleased to report that, in 1963, eighteen compositions had their first hearings at the Warsaw Autumn—half of them by non-Polish composers.3 As a rising star in the Western European avant-garde, Donatoni seemed especially capable of adding glitter to the Warsaw Autumn roster. For those who hoped that the world premieres would bolster the festival’s standing both at home and abroad, the critical responses to Per orchestra must have been disappointing. Stefan Kisielewski lauded the piece, calling Donatoni’s rebellion against artistic propriety “highly significant in the era of the avant-garde, when the extremes of organization (pointillism) exist alongside the extremes of freedom and the exploitation of chance (aleatoricism).”4 But he was in the minority. Other Polish critics were much less convinced by the work that had been produced specifically for their hometown festival. Commenting in the PZPR’s national daily, Józef Kański complained that “for a stunt pulled on the audience,” Per orchestra was “far too long and could have been done without entirely.”5 Jerzy Waldorff likewise dismissed the piece, writing off Donatoni’s provocation as a distraction from the Warsaw Autumn’s more worthy task of facilitating East–West cultural diplomacy.6 Many listeners at the Donatoni premiere shared the critics’ disdain. They responded to Per orchestra’s avant-garde theatrics with a pandemonium of their own, whistling, jeering, clapping aggressively, and otherwise seeking to disrupt the performance by any means possible. In the archival recording of this concert, it is difficult to tell where the audience’s mayhem ends and Donatoni’s music begins.7 What could these reactions have meant? Kisielewski claimed that the rioters were not really offended. Instead, they were just having a bit of fun as they met Donatoni’s challenge in kind.8 But although the Warsaw Autumn public may have been in on the joke, Waldorff claimed that they were in no need of it. Donatoni’s “hilarious antics” were what it took to enliven bored audiences in the West, whereas “we,” he crowed, “are not yet jaded, so this kind of nonsense is a waste of our time.”9 Kisielewski’s receptive account suggests that avant-garde music called for a certain kind of listener response: outrage, even if manufactured. Waldorff ’s dismissive gloss intimates that there was something particular about hearing avant-garde music in Cold War Poland, and that composers and performers needed to take it into account. My aim in this chapter is to pursue the implications of these critics’ suggestions. While the festival audience’s response to Per orchestra was colorful, it was hardly unusual. By 1963, active audience engagement had become an established part of the Warsaw Autumn experience. This chapter will look closely at audiences in the festival’s first decade, to consider the effects of Warsaw Autumn performances on their hearers, as well as the work audiences performed through their concert-hall behavior. We will see that the Warsaw Autumn shaped listening practices, facilitating some reactions while shutting down others. Concert-hall experiences cultivated listeners’

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tastes, opened spaces for political action, facilitated performances of social relationships, and enabled festivalgoers to participate in a larger world of musical modernity. Social interactions in the concert hall, in turn, shaped the Warsaw Autumn. The size and reactivity of its audiences were crucial elements of the festival’s mediation in a socialist context. More broadly, the collective activity of Warsaw Autumn listeners contributed to the delineation and reinforcement of generic boundaries that occurred during festival events. For the practice of contemporary music at the festival went beyond showcasing particular compositional styles and techniques: it also involved assumptions about the kinds of social interactions that new music entailed. Audience response, then, was just as important as concert programming in articulating what “contemporary music” would mean at the Warsaw Autumn. N EW M U SIC A N D S O C IA L SE RV IC E

To begin to understand the significance of audiences to the Warsaw Autumn, we need to return briefly to the Stalinist years. Socialist-realist aesthetic theory conceptualized music composition as a fundamentally relational activity, in which the bond between creators and perceivers was of paramount value. ZKP President Zygmunt Mycielski forthrightly expressed this idea in 1949, when he outlined Polish composers’ responsibilities in their newly Stalinized sociopolitical environment. “The composer is not an isolated individual,” he stressed, using language that was typical of the period. Instead, this figure “is someone who uses artistic means of expression to create a musical work that contains emotional content which is capable of moving the broadest possible mass of listeners.”10 As ZKP’s mouthpiece, Mycielski understandably addressed the issue of socialist realism from the perspective of creative producers. However, reaching the masses was not just a question of determining which compositional tools were best suited to the task of building a socialist musical culture. Communication between composers and listeners also required the development of informed audiences, whose members would be able to appreciate the new works they were hearing.11 Thus, upowszechnienie (roughly pronounced “oo-pov-shekh-NYE-nye”) became one of the buzzwords of the early 1950s. Upowszechnienie, or the mass dissemination of culture throughout Polish society, was carried out in various ways, including the formation of amateur performing ensembles and the publication of pieces intended for less skilled players. The festivals of new Polish music in 1951 and 1955 were two of the most important agents of upowszechnienie, for these events were uniquely situated to educate multiple populations—the composers who wrote new pieces for them in a socialist-realist vein, the performers who added these works to their repertoire, and the audiences who learned about the new aesthetic by attending festival concerts. MKiS lavished its resources on the festivals in recognition of their potential to inculcate new aesthetic values among musicians and to

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circulate these mores throughout the country, thereby helping to create the sophisticated public that was supposed to be a feature of the culturally evolved socialist state.12 Upowszechnienie had its origins in the cultural politics of the late 1940s, and we might therefore expect the concept to have been abandoned during the period of moderate, de-Stalinizing reforms that followed the political upheavals of October 1956. But upowszechnienie remained a live issue in Polish musical circles well past this date. When ZKP members evaluated the works their colleagues wrote to fulfill state commissions during the late 1950s, they made judgments according to how well a piece’s style, form, and harmonic language would uplift musically untrained audiences or school amateur players, concerns that were reminiscent of upowszechnienie as it was practiced in the Stalinist period.13 Internal conversations among composers were matched by more traditional vows to contribute publicly to the social welfare. In 1959, for example, ZKP pledged its commitment to the musical education of Polish youth. The union’s plan was to be part of a much larger series of party-state initiatives that had society-wide edification as their aim and were launched in preparation for the millennial anniversary celebrations that would take place throughout Poland in 1966—marking, depending on the point of view, either one thousand years of Polish statehood or the thousandth anniversary of Poland’s adoption of Christianity.14 The persistence of social service and education as topics in ZKP discussions suggests that, although outwardly the aesthetic orientation of Polish musical life had changed, at least some of the underlying ideology had remained the same. Vestiges of the upowszechnienie project similarly lingered in the Warsaw Autumn, although planners did not refer to the concept by name. During a brainstorming session for the 1958 festival, Włodzimierz Kotoński chastised his colleagues who saw the institution’s primary goals as increasing Poland’s cultural standing on the world stage and disseminating new Polish music abroad. Instead, he put social service front-and-center, arguing that “the festival is not for foreigners, to convince them that our music is developed. It should be for the public, for musicians; it should enable us to make up for lost time; and, above all, it should be organized for Poles.”15 State cultural officials evidently shared these objectives, for the 1959 MKiS statutes that confirmed the festival’s legal status, explained its rationale, and delineated its organizational procedures enshrined public education as the institution’s number-one priority. The aims of Cold War cultural diplomacy were named second.16 P R O O F I N T H E N UM B E R S

But was there an audience for new music in Poland? For those who envisioned the Warsaw Autumn public as comprising composers, musicologists, and performers, the answer was an unqualified yes. It was less clear that nonprofessionals would

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flock to concerts of elite contemporary music. Recalling his experiences of seeing new works play to empty houses during the interwar years, Piotr Perkowski warned his colleagues that “too large a dose” of avant-garde composition at the 1958 festival would “scare off the public.” A composer, administrator, and educator at Warsaw’s State Higher School of Music, Perkowski made no secret of his antipathy to serialist and aleatoric trends. His concerns here, however, appear to have been motivated more by a clear-eyed assessment of the realities of arts funding in socialist Poland. He bluntly countered those who idealistically construed the “Warsaw Autumn listener” as a musician or a musician-in-training. MKiS, he contended, would never support channeling scarce financial resources to an institution that, from state employees’ point of view, was “only for a handful of those awful composers” whose salaries consistently outstripped their own.17 The question, then, was how to ensure high attendance at Warsaw Autumn events and therefore demonstrate that the institution was performing a worthwhile social function. Though Perkowski was skeptical about the avant-garde’s appeal, most of the early festival organizers thought that it was precisely this type of music that would be the biggest audience draw. ZKP General Secretary Andrzej Dobrowolski explained why: “Regardless of whether any one person likes the music or not, everyone will come if we perform Stockhausen here in Poland for the first time. The event will rouse interest, because Stockhausen is unknown here. Everyone will come just to see what it is.”18 Festival organizers, in other words, wagered that curiosity about Western European culture would refute the conventional wisdom that music like Stockhausen’s was off-putting to all but true believers. Giving Polish audiences the chance to taste formerly forbidden fruit was just one way that festival organizers sought to reconcile the seemingly contradictory aims of promoting elite music while demonstrably performing acts of social service. A self-consciously pluralistic approach to concert programming was another strategy to meet these objectives. In the previous chapter, we saw how festival organizers and commentators used the concept of stylistic diversity to position the Warsaw Autumn as neutral territory where the musical worlds of East and West could meet. Pluralism also responded obliquely to the lingering policy goal of upowszechnienie, in that the festival’s diverse repertoire could be interpreted as offering its audiences a broad-based musical education. The variety of music on offer served still another, more practical aim when it came to boosting turnout: appealing to concertgoers with a range of tastes. Dobrowolski advocated for Stockhausen in 1958, but he was not in favor of leaving listeners with more conservative preferences out in the cold. He argued instead that the festival should offer “something for everyone.”19 This comment is noteworthy because it implies that Warsaw Autumn planners did not assume that any one individual would attend all of the performances with equal interest, though there were probably some concertgoers who did.

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It is also important to recognize that, whatever the rhetoric, pluralism at the Warsaw Autumn did not extend into full-blown populism. At a meeting of state officials and ZKP representatives in October 1959, Repertoire Commission member Kazimierz Serocki pooh-poohed a proposal to heighten the festival’s impact on Polish society by mounting mass concerts of “popular” art music, such as works by Khachaturian.20 Far from raising the festival’s profile, he declared, such performances would decimate audience turnout. Another Repertoire Commission member similarly decried the introduction of “the vulgarity of popular music” into an event with “such great political and artistic significance.”21 The commission offered instead to lure audiences with exhibitions of Polish graphic design, visual arts, architecture, and film, all areas that experienced their own modernist turns in the wake of the Thaw. The limited notion of pluralism promulgated by festival planners speaks to changing cultural priorities in Poland during the 1950s: from the Stalinist-era mandates to reach as large an audience as possible, to the balancing act of a post-Stalinist, yet still socialist, institution like the Warsaw Autumn, in which the necessity of speaking to society was coupled with the thought that elitism might be the very source of the event’s appeal. While the Warsaw Autumn’s particular approach to stylistic diversity lowered barriers to entry primarily for those who were already sympathetic to high culture, other attempts to popularize the festival were potentially more wide-ranging. But even these efforts could end up reinforcing a perception that the festival was geared mainly to the creative intelligentsia. One experiment in facilitating broader access to the Warsaw Autumn took place in 1962, when the director of the National Philharmonic concert hall slashed ticket prices for festival events. He also introduced cheap standing-room tickets to further stimulate turnout. The strategy worked almost too well: that year the numbers were higher than ever, but the proceeds from ticket sales were disappointingly low. Because revenue from ticket sales was used to cover some of the festival’s costs, suppressing prices was ultimately not a sustainable way to attract larger audiences. The director’s solution was to preserve the most generous financial incentives for ZKP members, who would receive a 33 percent discount when they purchased an all-access pass to festival performances. Other concertgoers would receive a 20 percent discount when they bought festival passes instead of single tickets—terms that were less advantageous than the ones Polish musicologists and composers enjoyed, but which nevertheless encouraged investment in the Warsaw Autumn as a whole. As for the standingroom tickets, they were to be reserved for groups that had requested them beforehand, such as entourages from the Polish Higher Schools of Music or one of the other creative unions.22 Festival attendance had already been on the rise when the National Philharmonic’s director started to experiment with ticket prices (Table 3). There was a noticeable jump upward in 1960 after modest gains in 1958 and 1959. After further

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table 3 Audience Turnout at the Warsaw Autumn, 1956–69 Year

Events

1956 1958 1959 1960 1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968

20 18 19 16 16 17 17 18 18 16 17 14

1969

Works

Listeners

78 8,433 58 9,409 63 9,987 71 11,209 66 12,570 83 18,738 96 18,900 92 18,900 79 17,087 70 15,471 76 16,343 59 10,450 (without Teatr Wielki) (1,740) 17 71 12,240 (without Teatr Wielki, Teatr Dramatyczny)

source: ZKP [uncataloged document]. Sprawozdanie Komitetu Międzynarodowego Festiwalu Muzyki Współczesnej w okresie XIII “Warszawskiej Jesieni” w roku 1968/1969, załącznik nr 2.

increases in 1961 and 1962, organizers of the 1963 festival considered staging open rehearsals to sate growing listener demand.23 Almost 19,000 people packed into Warsaw’s concert halls in 1963 and 1964, marking a twofold increase in turnout since the 1950s and stretching festival venues to the limit.24 Most in the audience had booked their seats long before the festival began, a prudent strategy when, according to the 1962 report, even average concerts were overfilled, and some performances drew twice as many concertgoers as there were tickets.25 These numbers are significant for two reasons. Warsaw Autumn attendance swelled at a time when turnout remained flat for other theater, opera, and symphony performances in Poland, a phenomenon historian Andrzej Paczkowski attributes to the growing influence of television.26 This suggests that the Warsaw Autumn was offering its audiences something that other forms of live performance were not. In addition, the attendance explosion of the early 1960s could not have been sustained by ZKP alone, for historically it has been one of the smallest Polish creative unions; at the time its membership was not large enough to fill over a thousand seats in the National Philharmonic’s main hall for days on end. Festival audiences, then, must also have been coming from somewhere else. That they were doing so was an especially useful piece of information for Warsaw Autumn planners, who, in order to secure a steady stream of state resource allocations, needed to suggest that the institution was relevant beyond a circumscribed compositional elite. Thus, Festival Committee reports to MKiS in the early 1960s

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consistently presented rising turnout as proof of the Warsaw Autumn’s vital social function. The tallies become even more suggestive when we think about the festival’s venues and their location in Warsaw. Most events took place in the National Philharmonic Concert Hall, destroyed in World War II and rebuilt during postwar reconstruction. In contrast to the painstaking resurrection of Warsaw’s Old Town, the new hall was no copy: its transformation concretized some of the complexities of Poland’s international relations during the twentieth century. The old and new buildings encapsulated Polish cultural allegiances (or aspirations) in material form: whereas Karol Kozłowski had modeled his 1901 original after the Paris Opéra and Leipzig Gewandhaus, Eugeniusz Szparkowski and Henryk Białobrzeski reimagined the postwar structure along standard socialist-realist lines.27 The result was a concert hall that, when it was inaugurated in 1955, would have been at home in Moscow, except for the Polish ornamentation that was meant to give the building a local flavor. The neighborhood surrounding the National Philharmonic was, like the hall itself, thoroughly transformed in the early 1950s, becoming saturated in the process of reconstruction with elements that connoted state power. The concert venue lies in the shadow of the Palace of Culture and Science, a towering, crenellated (and controversial) building that was Stalin’s “gift” to Warsaw. Completed in 1955, the “palace” mimicked the Stalinist-gothic “wedding cake” skyscrapers—now commonly referred to as the “Seven Sisters”—that had been erected in Moscow between 1947 and 1953.28 It was, as a result, a palpable reminder in Poland of Soviet influence.29 The National Philharmonic was also just a short walk from the Plac Defilad, the PZPR’s extensive parade grounds. The connection of public space with communist political authority applied more generally in Warsaw, even if the locations in question were not expressly party-state buildings. David Crowley has argued that the city’s inhabitants viewed all public space, including official cultural life, as thoroughly politicized during the late 1950s and early 1960s; private life was where unbridled personal expression might occur.30 Considered within Warsaw’s post–World War II urban landscape, the festival’s growing audiences were therefore additionally meaningful because they represented the concentration of large numbers of people in official public space (Figure 2). As such, they had the potential to remind Polish cultural officials of “the masses”—one of the most reliable elements in the lexicon of socialist propaganda—and thereby further confirm the Warsaw Autumn’s legitimacy. The figures are also significant for what they do not say. Presenting turnout as a lump sum could suggest that attendance rates were evenly distributed among the various events, when records of festival postmortems reveal that they were not. Aggregating the data glossed over the politically inconvenient reality that performances by the Eastern European groups were often poorly attended, whereas presentations of Western avant-garde music (such as the demonstrations of elec-

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figure 2. Festival audience at the National Philharmonic Chamber Hall, 1961. Photograph by Andrzej Zborski, Polish Composers’ Union/Warsaw Autumn Archive.

tronic music in 1958 and 1959) were famously standing-room-only.31 The tallies in Festival Committee reports likewise provided no information about audience demographics, and, as a result, they did not answer the question of just whom the Warsaw Autumn was attracting—a large cross section of Polish society or a more limited array of distinct social groups. Enumerating audiences as a mass had the additional effect of absorbing individuals into a collective unit, thereby rendering them largely voiceless and turning the mere fact of their presence at festival events into evidence of support for the Warsaw Autumn endeavor. As we will see, listener responses at festival concerts were considerably more complex both in the range of behaviors on display and in their signification. At any rate, bureaucratic monitoring of Warsaw Autumn turnout was useful only up to a point. Numbers alone failed to convince—especially once the festival’s concert programs were taken into account. Even after the changes of 1956, both state cultural officials and PZPR actors remained skeptical that Western-oriented avant-gardism was capable of engaging a diverse body of listeners. Writing to the Polish Minister of Culture in June 1962, the head of MKiS’s Music Department assessed that year’s proposed Warsaw Autumn repertoire as providing a suitably wide-ranging, objective overview of twentieth-century music. That said, however, the 1962 festival’s character was still going to be “avant-garde and exclusive,” a caveat that assumes the fundamental incompatibility of avant-garde aesthetics and audience outreach.32 The Culture Department of the PZPR Central Committee had similar concerns. In March 1963, members of its working group on music

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described the Warsaw Autumn as bolstering the tendency of Polish composers to produce works that were complex and incomprehensible, lacking the more traditional conception of beauty that would make these pieces accessible to listeners with varying levels of musical training.33 These commentators had a point. The self-conscious difficulty of much of the festival’s repertoire was hardly populist. NAT U R A L I N S T I N C T S , E M B O D I E D K N OW L E D G E

Yet the behavior of the festival’s concertgoers was not exactly bourgeois, either. As elsewhere in Europe, habits of bourgeois respectability had directed Polish listeners inward during the nineteenth century.34 The result was a mode of musical spectatorship that, in comparison to earlier conventions, was at once more personal and more absorbed, because an interiorized approach to listening ensured that outside observers could not, for the most part, perceive how those around them in the concert hall were experiencing a performance. Events at other Warsaw venues, such as the regular subscription concerts at the National Philharmonic, still took place in silence during the 1950s and ’60s.35 The Warsaw Autumn was different, and not only because its format—multiple performances a day, for a week or more—departed from the concert season’s prevailing norms. The practices of Warsaw Autumn listeners deviated as well from the restraint with which Polish audiences typically exhibited their responses to art music. Traces of these practices remain in eyewitness accounts of Warsaw Autumn events. By restoring some of the voice that is lost in the data on audience turnout, descriptions of listeners’ varied reactions grant a more nuanced understanding of what it may have meant for festival audiences to hear performances of twentiethcentury works. These reports indicate that vocal interjections and physical gestures were already part of the Warsaw Autumn experience in 1958, when ZKP General Secretary Dobrowolski counted active audience engagement as one of the biggest successes of that year.36 Volatility quickly became the festival public’s most noticeable trait. Viewed by outside observers, it suggested a different perspective on the Warsaw Autumn’s presumptive elitism. In 1962, for instance, an Austrian observer recorded sighs of satisfaction, outbursts of spontaneous applause, whistling, hissing, and audible grumbling—and this was just what happened during the music. Interpreting these reactions as signs of an egalitarian spirit, he contended that festival audiences comprised “interested amateur listeners” as opposed to the “specialists” that congregated in Darmstadt and Donaueschingen.37 Listeners at the Warsaw Autumn were (in the Austrian’s mind at least) less a rarefied group of experts than a representative sample of Polish society. Their responses, immediate and embodied, contributed to an idea that the festival spoke to all kinds of listeners, not just jaded professionals. The intriguing behavior of Warsaw Autumn audiences was one of the few things that commentators from both sides of Europe could agree on during the Cold War.

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Like the Austrian reporter quoted above, a Czechoslovak critic viewed audience reactivity at the 1962 concerts as emblematic of healthy social involvement. “It is unbelievable how widely popularized the art of listening is here,” he effused, praising Polish listeners for not being “a passive mass that applauds everything presented to it.” He admitted that unruly behavior at the Warsaw Autumn might upset devotees of nineteenth-century concert rituals, in which musical works were to be apprehended in an atmosphere of devotional silence. But, the critic continued, even the staunchest defender of audience propriety would want to join in the fray once he realized that “these are the unmediated responses of engaged listeners, who are demanding their right to critique.”38 By manifesting their shock, enthusiasm, and dismay, Warsaw Autumn audiences were undermining the dictation of taste from above. This could be an especially useful idea in a socialist context, in which the ideal listener was supposed to maintain her critical faculties while responding to artistic works, and the collective audience, conceptualized as a representative sliver of the “broad masses,” was, ostensibly, the ultimate arbiter of aesthetic value. The Warsaw Autumn Festival Committee was happy to exploit this strand of critical reception in its annual reports to MKiS. The quirks of rioting audiences went far beyond statistics as an argument for the Warsaw Autumn’s social utility, because it gave organizers a rationale for applying the language of populism to an event that, by any other standard, was elitist. Thus, one report noted that audience reactions included “applause or expressions of disappointment” that were “expressed without snobbishness.”39 The implication was that the festival public was educated enough to come to its own conclusions, as well as unpretentious in its aesthetic judgments. By the Warsaw Autumn’s tenth anniversary in 1966, this dual image of its public was so established that the program book’s commemorative preface lauded festival concertgoers as a “growing audience trained to listen to contemporary music.”40 The audience even appeared in a series of photographs that were printed in the program book to document ten years of festival history. These images presented a collection of famous Western faces—Benjamin Britten, John Cage, and Nadia Boulanger—interspersed with pictures of PZPR officials soaking up the Warsaw Autumn atmosphere. Some photographs captured composers chatting with performers. Others were snapped during the concerts. And there was a candid of the Warsaw Autumn public. This curious picture shows a woman who has kicked off her shoes; she yawns as the people around her talk to one another. The caption reads, “The audience reacted in various ways to the festival performances,” and although the image appears to preserve a moment when the musicians were not playing, it does encapsulate the presumed skepticism and naturalness of Warsaw Autumn concertgoers.41 For many observers, festival audiences’ lack of inhibition created an impression of informed spontaneity—a trait that made for good press abroad and persuasive

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bureaucratic reporting at home. Yet rowdiness also did other kinds of work at the Warsaw Autumn concerts, and here it is worth leaving the immediate performance situation for a moment to think more abstractly about the potential effects of externalized listener responses. A useful starting point is political scientist Michael Chwe’s account of how information comes to be shared among members of a group. Chwe posits that common knowledge arises from successful information transfers among senders and receivers. These transfers are not unidirectional: senders convey information, but they also need to know that their message has been received. Because feedback is so fundamental to Chwe’s model, he understandably privileges certain physical arrangements—including inward-facing circles and panopticons—as sites of common knowledge production. He also considers certain types of ritual action—such as participating in a structured series of physical gestures, or singing music in patterns of call and response—to be especially effective for generating common knowledge, because the repetitive nature of these sequences gives members of the group performing them ample opportunity to confirm message transfer.42 Using Chwe’s emphasis on feedback as a guide, we can think of vociferous audience behaviors at Warsaw Autumn concerts as the first step in common-knowledge generation during a musical performance. Physical reactions—whether expressed vocally or in gestures—gave individuals a chance to observe how other listeners were reacting to the music and to broadcast aspects of their own experience. Participating in the whistling, joining the clapping, or shouting in affirmation were all ways that individual audience members could let others know whether they were responding similarly to the performance. Silence, if shared, could also generate common knowledge—since, in this case, the collective lack of overt, noisy reactions occurred in an environment where such interjections were commonplace. By allowing information about aesthetic experiences to move from the realm of the ineffable to the world of external observation, active listening practices at the Warsaw Autumn turned concert venues into spaces of real-time comparison, where audience members not only gleaned information about twentieth-century compositions, but also learned how to respond to them. P O L I T IC S I N T H E C O N C E RT HA L L

While the rituals Chwe examines are by definition highly ordered, frequently repetitive, and hence predictable, audience behaviors at the Warsaw Autumn concerts could be much more variable. Moreover, externalized responses were not “merely” spontaneous. Festivalgoers’ actions were performed, observed, and interpreted not according to any predetermined schema, but within a context where meaning was plotted according to various implicit and explicit coordinate systems, including the Cold War’s geopolitical categories, long-standing assumptions

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of Eastern European backwardness, and modernist paradigms for assessing musical prestige. A yawn, then, could suggest much more than boredom or physical fatigue—depending on the vantage point of both the sender and the perceiver, this gesture could also say something about political conviction, individual (or collective) taste, and social or cultural status, to name just a few of the potential options. Returning to the photograph in the 1966 program book that I mentioned above: there is something cheeky about this image of the festival audience, not least because, in its content and placement, the snapshot seems to poke fun at the rituals of Cold War cultural diplomacy that are celebrated visually on the foregoing pages of the program book. Yet it is also ambiguous. Why is the woman yawning? What are those around her discussing? One of the most important pieces of information—the stimulus that elicited these responses—is quite literally not in the picture. If the yawn is understood as a sign of rejection, then the photograph might imply the institutionalization at the Warsaw Autumn of a kind of socialist modernism in which the audience’s proper attitude was to be one of critical engagement rather than unquestioning acceptance. But while the size and reactivity of festival audiences may have encouraged the responsible cultural functionaries, there was no guarantee that listeners’ responses were aligning with ideological orthodoxy. Reactions to specific performances could, in fact, register contradictions. Such was the case in 1958, when festivalgoers responded in diametrically opposed ways to an East German presentation of Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw and Paul Dessau’s unabashedly socialist-realist cantata Die Erziehung der Hirse (The Cultivation of the Millet), a setting of an epic poem by Bertolt Brecht that details—in fifty-two verses—a triumph of collective farming (and, as a result, the victory of the Soviet army over Nazi forces) in wartime Kazakhstan.43 Everett Helm reported that “the applause was so great” in response to Schoenberg’s harrowing portrayal of the Warsaw Ghetto “that the work had to be repeated.”44 While listeners had packed every available seat to hear A Survivor from Warsaw, the performance space was “half empty” just before Brecht-Dessau’s cantata began. The numbers dwindled still further once The Cultivation of the Millet started playing; the listeners who stayed for the whole piece were hardly more polite. As Helm told his readers in the Musical Quarterly: “Some of the most obviously ‘party-line’ passages caused scarcely controlled tittering and mirth in the audience.”45 In the San Francisco Chronicle, he provided a juicier account of a fellow “who was forced to double up behind the seat in front of him to control his laughing seizures.”46 Extrapolating from the behavior he observed during the Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra’s performance, Helm contended that Polish public opinion was unambiguous and unanimous in regards to both the Schoenberg and the Brecht-Dessau. He then went one step further to intimate that, whatever they might suggest about musical taste, festivalgoers’ ostensibly aesthetic judgments were simultaneously a referendum on Cold War geopolitics.

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Such an extrapolation was possible, in part, because these works were already freighted with political baggage. Schoenberg, of course, reliably raised the hackles of the Eastern Bloc’s antiformalists. And The Cultivation of the Millet made no secret of its message. Brecht-Dessau’s cantata acquired additional shades of meaning due to the particular circumstances of its 1958 Warsaw Autumn performance: the East Germans intended the presentation of this piece to reeducate their wayward, culturally revisionist neighbors in the proper cultivation of socialist-realist aesthetics.47 Considering how readily apparent the political connotations of these works would have been in the late 1950s, it is easy to see how favoring Schoenberg over Brecht-Dessau might seem like choosing sides in the Cold War. Yet within the Warsaw Autumn’s politicized atmosphere, all public manifestations of listener opinion—regardless of their private impetus—could potentially be understood as forms of political action, even when the music in question lacked an overt ideological thrust. There were several aspects of the Warsaw Autumn that encouraged concertgoers to view their experiences through a political filter, beginning with its very existence—that is, the act of performing contemporary music, representing a varied stylistic spectrum, as part of a socialist country’s official musical life. Festival texts also defined specific frameworks for interpreting Warsaw Autumn events. Essays in the program book encouraged listeners to perceive the concerts in terms of the Cold War categories of East and West, domestic and foreign. The 1959 preface, for instance, indicated that the festival provided the basis for “a multifaceted comparison of contemporary Polish music with the achievements and aims of foreign musicians from both socialist and capitalist countries.”48 In other words, audiences were primed to hear the concerts with an ear not only to charting musical techniques, but also to monitoring geopolitical provenance. Western observers were, of course, especially keen to see positive audience responses to modernist music as signs of a more general Polish divergence from Soviet policy. But there is evidence to suggest that many Polish listeners also perceived their actions during the festival concerts as a kind of anticommunist protest. In this regard, Stefan Kisielewski’s praise of the Warsaw Autumn’s “nonconformist public” is especially evocative, all the more so for having been voiced in 1963.49 Post-socialist reminiscences are understandably more forthright in positing connections between concert-going behaviors and political expression. Writing in 2007, composer and festival planner Krzysztof Baculewski recalled his “aesthetic-political displays” during the Warsaw Autumns of his youth: meeting fellow Polish composers for drinks rather than attending concerts of Soviet music that was “of little aesthetic or compositional interest.”50 Critic Dorota Szwarcman presented a more sober account that same year of what it had meant politically to attend the festival during the socialist period. “Everyone felt the obligation to voice their opinion if they did not like something,” she wrote. “And if the Warsaw

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Autumn could be called an oasis of freedom in the sad Polish People’s Republic, it was so in this way as well. There was freedom of speech here.”51 What these accounts share is an assumption that individual actions spoke to a larger audience in a context where censorship and restrictions on open political discourse were unfortunate facts of life. By calling his truancy a “display,” Baculewski betrays his expectation that his absences would have been noticed, and that those in the concert venue would have understood why he and his friends had skipped the performance. Szwarcman’s version implies that attendees understood their actions as relevant in an arena that extended far beyond the delimited context of any one festival event. By emphasizing concertgoers’ commitment to enacting their individual rights, she intimates that members of the Warsaw Autumn audience were modeling the virtues of a liberal democracy, and therefore proposing an alternative to official party-state uses of public space. For at least some Polish listeners, the chance to participate—and to be seen as participating—in contrarian modes of public discourse was just as important as encounters with the music. A sociological study of 1997 festival audiences even goes so far as to suggest that Warsaw Autumn attendance was driven primarily by politics before 1989, whereas private, personal interest had to wait until the post-socialist period to become a key motivating factor.52 Festivalgoers’ experiences of political divergence were real and significant. At the same time, it is all too easy to assume that the Warsaw Autumn audience represented a slice of Polish civil society that had momentarily been freed from partystate control. The point Laura Silverberg has made about East Germany’s socialist modernist composers is worth reiterating here: musical preferences are not always reliable indicators of political sympathies, especially if interest in modernism’s “progressive” techniques is assumed to be incompatible with fealty to socialism’s “progressive” politics.53 High-ranking PZPR members regularly attended Warsaw Autumn concerts, especially the opening-night gala, and they were not necessarily opposed to the music they heard.54 Conversely, Polish critics who disparaged the wilder forms of Western experimentalism were not necessarily speaking from a platform of party allegiance. Considered against the backdrop of Polish society at large in the 1950s and 1960s, the Warsaw Autumn was, moreover, a relatively safe space for publicly expressing divergent points of view. The consequences of voicing dissent in other contexts were not always so benign. To name just one incident out of many: on 14 March 1964, a group of cultural figures sent a letter to Poland’s prime minister protesting censorship and restrictions on paper allocations. The signers of the “Letter of the Thirty-Four” became the targets of party-state retribution. Kisielewski was among them. A similar protest brought him new trouble in 1968, when he was barred from publishing for three years and physically attacked by “unknown assailants.”55 The Warsaw Autumn’s propaganda value removed some of the danger

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from performing dissent, so long as these demonstrations took place during festival concerts. It also helped that audience reactions were, on the surface at least, directed toward the music; most expressions of divergence therefore discreetly avoided overt commentary on domestic or international politics. An additional safeguard was the way that listeners manifested their views—in ephemeral, often ambiguous, physical and vocal gestures, rather than the more concrete and determinate medium of written language. T H E WO R K O F S C A N DA L

While the political factors may have been pervasive, they were far from the only ones to influence listening practices at the Warsaw Autumn during its first decade. Viewing audience behavior exclusively from a Cold War vantage point can blind us to other ways in which audience behaviors could be meaningful. For one thing, the relentlessly politicized approach does not always listen very closely to what concertgoers were saying to one another during those fabled intermissions. A report from the 1959 festival demonstrates that not all of the attendees had aesthetic edification or political action foremost on their minds. Instead, their objective was pleasure. The young composer Joachim Olkuśnik described the atmosphere that year as one of amorous possibility, because, he exclaimed, “the fair sex was particularly well represented—and it really was quite fair!” Between performances, these attractive, smartly dressed women mingled, chatted, and flirted in the National Philharmonic’s hallways and lobbies. In this context, being well versed in the latest trends could work to the advantage of both the pursuers and the pursued. According to Olkuśnik, men and women alike had engaged in performances of modernity that were meant to lure the opposite sex: “On one side, there were fashionable hairstyles and outfits. On the other, there were the calculating methods of super-modern Don Juans, whose methods of seducing the naïve relied, among other things, on their ‘intellectual babble’ about Boulez and Webern.”56 Because Western music had cachet in Poland, knowledge about it was valuable not just for its own sake. For at least some members of the Warsaw Autumn audience, an education in avant-garde music was a status symbol, one that would, they hoped, increase their chances of success in fields that were, shall we say, extramusical. Aside from the erotic potential of postwar serialism, a narrow emphasis on Cold War political issues forgets that uninhibited reactions at festival concerts were also being judged according to value systems that predated the conflict, even if they had acquired new potency after its onset. Notions of Eastern European backwardness constituted one of these; modernist ideals—which assumed the superiority of compositional innovation over traditionalism—were another. Some of the same hierarchical relationships that had influenced the Warsaw Autumn’s founding and approach to repertoire selection therefore affected critical evalua-

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tions of the festival audience’s relative sophistication. As a result, some of the most vital effects of attendees’ actions were to suggest Poland’s status vis-à-vis Western Europe and its prestige according to modernism’s teleological narratives of continual aesthetic progress. For when it came to making up for lost time, simply performing avant-garde compositions at the festival was not enough: how audiences responded to this music was an equally important marker of Poland’s modernity within an increasingly globalized economy of musical prestige. And here the Warsaw Autumn’s early listeners were sometimes found wanting. Everett Helm’s reports from the 1958 festival provide a clear example of how similar kinds of externalized reactions could, depending on the music in question, be understood either as signs of the audience’s increasing urbanity or as marks of their lingering cultural backwardness. As we saw earlier, the responses to East German socialist realism included a half-empty hall, dramatic exits, barely concealed snickers, and waves of giggles. By sarcastically calling Brecht-Dessau’s The Cultivation of the Millet a “glorious story of collective triumph,” Helm implied that the piece was propaganda that deserved to be mocked by the Warsaw public.57 He was considerably less sympathetic when festival concertgoers ridiculed David Tudor. As they had during the Brecht-Dessau cantata, audience members erupted into “hilarious laughter” in 1958 when they were confronted with Tudor’s half-recital of Bo Nilsson (Quantitäten), Christian Wolff (For Prepared Piano), Cage (Music of Changes), and Stockhausen (Klavierstück XI), all pieces that Tudor had recently performed in Darmstadt to accompany Cage’s provocative lectures.58 Although festivalgoers in Warsaw may have laughed at both East German socialist realism and the Euro-American avantgarde, for Helm the situations were not equivalent. With the Brecht-Dessau he heard the laughter as proof of good judgment. When it came to Tudor’s performance, however, “the wisdom of introducing music for prepared piano into this festival is highly questionable,” he sniffed, “for the audience lacks the necessary background to evaluate this kind of ‘musical circus.’ ”59 Helm’s accounts portrayed Polish audiences as being at an interim stage of development compared to their counterparts in Western Europe. Rejecting Brecht-Dessau’s The Cultivation of the Millet demonstrated that festival audiences had left socialist realism behind. Warsaw Autumn concertgoers were also modern enough in 1958 to applaud Webern and post-Webernian serialism, musical preferences that aligned them with some of the prevailing tastes in Western European centers for new music. Their reactions to the prepared-piano repertoire were also not wholly out of step with the initial Western European responses to postwar American experimental music: Cage and Tudor’s first appearance in Donaueschingen provoked a similar mix of laughter and outrage. But that performance had taken place back in 1954. After years of radio play, promotion, musicological situating, and Tudor’s concertizing, West Germans had started to take the American avant-garde

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seriously.60 There were some Poles who were keeping pace; they were most likely composers and performers who had traveled or otherwise accessed musical information from abroad. And they knew not to laugh during Tudor’s recital. The reporters from Trybuna Robotnicza (Workers’ Tribune), a regional PZPR newspaper, detailed the strange behavior of the two young “acolytes of the new music” who were sitting next to them during Tudor’s performance: “In silent awe they observed all the weirdness that was happening onstage, they took it all deadly seriously and were offended by the uproarious reaction from the majority of us who were in the hall.”61 This minority of initiates, however, did not figure in Helm’s estimation that, overall, Polish audiences were insufficiently advanced to appreciate the American avant-garde and therefore should not be exposed to it until they were ready to respond properly. Helm, one of the moving forces behind the establishment of the Darmstadt courses, was speaking as an influential Western outsider. His biases put him squarely on the side of musical progress: tellingly, he assumed that the incredulous laughter at Tudor’s recital was solely due to the audience’s general lack of knowledge about experimental aesthetics. Yet perceptions of backwardness also came from within, and here we can see the extent to which practices of new music at mid-century entailed the adoption of similar ideas in multiple places—in this case, standards of musical value that had largely been defined in the West. Stefan Kisielewski’s account of the riots in 1962 suggests the degree to which an awareness of Western trends had come to dominate perceptions of new music and audience behavior within Poland. The audience was spectacularly rowdy that year, especially in response to the Polish premieres. One of the targets was Penderecki’s Canon, a piece that was tailor-made to garner prestige in a milieu that prized perpetual innovation. It deploys the same forces as the previous year’s Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima, but then goes one step further: Penderecki uses recording technology to put the ensemble of fifty-two strings in counterpoint with itself. Sonically, Canon features all of the unsettling acoustic trappings of Threnody without the balm of a politically correct title. Measures 13–15 demonstrate how Penderecki creates a polyphonic texture through layering sonic effects that are played at different pitch levels and at varying rates of motion (Figure 3). As violins 18–24 and cellos 1–5 waver between pitches in a slow vibrato, violins 1–12, violins 13–17, and cellos 6–10 wander in irregular glissandos. In the meantime, the double basses and violas play one- and two-octave clusters. Penderecki further variegates his sonic palette by incorporating the players’ voices. The violists and double bassists sing bocca chiusa; in measure 15, violinists 1–12 whistle, replicating the pitches in their cluster of harmonics. All the while, one of the work’s two tape recorders captures the sonic events for playback during the piece’s second half. Canon’s gritty extended techniques, clusters, and abstract counterpoint were calculated to provoke, and the Warsaw Autumn audience responded as if on cue.

figure 3. Penderecki, Canon, mm. 13–15. Penderecki KANON FÜR STREICHORCHESTER UND TONBAND. Copyright © 1962 by Schott Music, 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, Mainz, Germany.

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Kisielewski disagreed with these reactions. He described Canon as such an “easy, infectious work” that the protests against it could only be a sign of lingering Polish conservatism.62 This conservatism was all the more shocking because its perpetrators had been the young—the very generation that was supposed to be on the vanguard of musical development. Kisielewski was also dismayed to recognize the protesters as students at Warsaw’s State Higher School of Music—the capital’s cultural elites-in-training had thus shown themselves to be more provincial than a composer from one of the southern provinces. Performed and observed in an international forum, the young students’ unruly behavior had the potential to reflect poorly on Polish musical life more generally. Like Helm in 1958, then, Kisielewski disputed the notion that all scandals were created equal. He granted that the students were free to revolt; however, what they really needed was more education to correct their embarrassing lack of taste. Inverting the prevailing hierarchy in socialist Poland (in which cultural influence was supposed to radiate outward from the capital), Kisielewski proposed that Penderecki should come to Warsaw to bring its “fatally belated” youth up to speed on modern trends.63 But what counted as an “informed” response? And who got to decide? Kisielewski’s authority as a music critic meant that his disparagement of the students’ shortcomings could not simply be ignored. One defender explained the students’ actions as motivated not by too little education, but by too much: they had amply understood Penderecki’s intentions, and revolted in part because they had recognized the challenge his iconoclasm posed to the years they had spent honing more traditional approaches to musical craft.64 The Canon episode in 1962 demonstrates that Polish audience members were performing cultural work at the local and national levels through their volatile reactions to festival concerts. As these listeners manifested their taste preferences, they exposed and reinforced factional divisions in Poland’s elite music circles, where rival groups were competing for financial support, institutional clout, and exposure—including performances at the Warsaw Autumn itself. In the specific instance of 1962’s rioting traditionalists, we might understand their disruptive behavior as an attempt to assert dominance in a forum that, in general, had excluded the more conservative Polish composers. Fully apprehending such messages depended not just on physical presence in the concert hall, where externalized responses provided information about audience members’ aesthetic judgments. In many cases, it also required insider knowledge: who people were, where they had been trained, the musical styles they preferred, and the social circles in which they moved. At the same time, the Warsaw Autumn was an international forum. Although some unruly audience members may have seen themselves as engaged in struggles

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over aesthetic value that were relevant primarily on the local or national level, they were simultaneously acting within a cross-border context of musical exchange. And the meaning of their actions might appear very different when viewed by an outsider. Kisielewski’s critical gloss of the reactions to Penderecki’s Canon encapsulated long-standing Polish inferiority complexes about the nation’s place on the international cultural scene. In contrast, Elliott Carter’s impressions of the 1962 festival public suggest that Kisielewski had little reason to worry. Carter, who was used to the rather more tepid responses new music tended to receive in the postwar United States, was gobsmacked by the Warsaw Autumn’s packed halls and extroverted public. Like Kisielewski, he observed the “whistling and wild applause” in response to the avant-garde Polish compositions. He also correctly identified the group who was responsible: in a private letter to an influential patron, he noted that the demonstrations were “mostly by young students who paid no attention to the more conservative things.”65 Looking from the outside in, however, he appears to have missed the bigger point that was glaringly obvious to Kisielewski. The students were more subdued in response to the conservative works not because they were bored by this music, but because they were conservatives themselves: as a result, they had nothing to protest. The “wild applause” Carter highlighted was not necessarily a sign of approval and could be deployed antagonistically, as an interjection that was meant to cut an offending performance short. Whistling clearly expressed disapproval. No matter: Carter presented these reactions in a passage that, overall, praised Poland’s edgy composers and the Warsaw Autumn’s engaged audiences. Could the presence of rioting skeptics actually increase the festival’s status as a truly modern event? Carter appears to have thought so. Even Kisielewski, who disparaged the protests against Penderecki in 1962, thought that, in general, the audience had the right to revolt. For as much as applause, he wrote, “the whistling ennobles the festival, giving it an atmosphere of engagement and of a battle for sacrilegious freedom.”66 Naysayers therefore played a special role at the Warsaw Autumn, just as they had at performances of new music that took place in the early twentieth century. The scandalized audience member has become a stock figure of modernist cultures of music performance and of the stories that continue to be told about them. If, broadly speaking, romantic listening experiences were marked by introspection, in a silence that was venerated but also policed, audiences for modern music, the legends go, were distinguished by their energy, rebelliousness, and vocality. The 1913 premiere of The Rite of Spring is just the most famous example among many—a landmark at which modernism became, as historian Modris Eksteins puts it, “a culture of the sensational event.”67 Provocation, scandal, event: for many in the Warsaw Autumn audience, this is what the avant-garde was all about. Composer and pianist Zygmunt Krauze recalls that the arguments were part of what made the early festivals so exhilarating:

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Aside from relaying some of the pleasure and excitement the rioters produced, Krauze’s reminiscence suggests that ruckuses in the concert hall affected festival participants’ minds in ways that lingered long after the shocks of a specific performance. Confronting combatants enabled concertgoers to perceive themselves as part of the unfolding history of twentieth-century music, with its avant- and arrière-gardes, its rivalries, and its sanctifying scandals. Conflict could also suggest to the festival public that the Warsaw Autumn was on par with new-music institutions in the postwar West: through challenging and defending recently composed works, participants could imagine themselves to be active contributors to the creation of a border-spanning avant-garde, rather than imitative adopters of aesthetic values that had been articulated elsewhere. Splintered public opinion and extroverted audience behavior were crucial to creating these experiences of a diverse, dynamic modernity at the Warsaw Autumn. SP E C TAC L E’ S A F T E R M AT H

Audiences during the festival’s first decade were a mass of contradictions. They were a group of supposed everymen, in which some listeners broadcast elite tastes for social and cultural gain. They were participants in a socialist education project, but they also used festival events to engage in potentially subversive political action and hedonistic pleasure-seeking. Depending on the context, protesters could either diminish the festival’s prestige or augment it; in some instances they did both simultaneously. And concertgoers’ extroverted reactions created an atmosphere of factional struggle and individual difference. For many Warsaw Autumn participants, this climate of contestation was just as integral to the practice of “contemporary music” as particular styles or compositional approaches. Yet eternal scandal foundered on the very education the festival promoted. During its earliest years, a lack of familiarity contributed to the electric atmosphere. So much was new: not just the Western avant-garde, or a wave of hot young Polish composers, but also works by Schoenberg, Webern, Berg, and Stravinsky. Over time, audience expectations to hear the unexpected began to clash with their prior experiences, which had seasoned their ears with a growing knowledge of avant-garde works.

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By the mid-1960s, listening to avant-garde music at the Warsaw Autumn had become fairly routine. Tadeusz A. Zieliński, steadfast supporter of postwar Polish composition, admitted that the titillation of the new dissipated through repetition. In 1964 he mused that “seven Warsaw Autumns have been enough time for us to become familiar with all the breakthroughs in contemporary music, and the works performed up to now have acted as a vaccine immunizing us against experiencing another shock on the same level.”69 A year later, another Polish critic claimed that the lack of scandal came from an evolution in audience taste, not the failure of festival organizers.70 It was not the festival that had changed, nor composers, but listeners. The irony is that rioting audiences had contributed to the very institutional clout that had made their continued education possible. Reactive listeners helped ensure state support of the Warsaw Autumn endeavor. But the more exposure these audiences had to avant-garde music, the less likely they were to react in the ways that had first made them so remarkable. Extroverted listening behaviors laid the groundwork for the audience’s eventual convergence by offering opportunities for group participation that facilitated the formation of shared musical tastes. Less than ten years after it had begun, advocates were defending the Warsaw Autumn against charges that it was becoming stagnant. That they felt compelled to do so proves the iconic power of succès de scandale in deciding what is new, what is vital, and what is modern. Yet the history of the Warsaw Autumn also proves the danger of looking for modernity solely among rioting crowds. Moments of scandal are fragile, for they are essentially unrepeatable. Focusing on moments of revolt privileges instances when the unknown is first perceived. The Warsaw Autumn was a site for such spectacle, but it also generated legacies and a sense of a shared culture. Some events were spectacular, some mundane, but they accumulated year on year. And if the political charge lasted longer than the aesthetic one, this was not least because the public expression of divergent opinions long remained the exception to the rule in Poland. Less sustainable were the ephemeral moments and extravagant gestures of avant-garde aesthetics. Audiences came to expect the unexpected, at the same time as they became familiar with its musical means. Hearing the new was institutionalized, to the extent that future shocks had to come largely from outside the avant-garde. Paradoxically, the culture of the sensational event that the Warsaw Autumn promoted had been tempered by the festival’s success.

4

From Warsaw to the World

Elliott Carter scribbled hastily in the Vienna airport as he waited to board his flight to Rome. He was en route from Poland, where he had just been an official observer at the 1962 Warsaw Autumn Festival. He was writing, as he often did, to Paul Fromm, the influential Chicago-based supporter of contemporary American music who had commissioned Carter’s 1961 Double Concerto.1 Assuming that Fromm would be eager to hear about the support for new music he had discovered in Warsaw, Carter gushed about the festival’s large, responsive audiences: the Dorian Quintet had performed his Eight Etudes and a Fantasy to appreciative listeners in a jam-packed hall. His Polish hosts had lavished him with complementary scores and recordings; even the coffee and sandwiches had been free. He was dazzled by (and more than a little envious of) the resources that Polish composers enjoyed: orchestras to play their music, state-funded publications and recordings of their scores. Most of all, Carter was captivated by the apparent romance of postwar Warsaw, with its ruins, reconstructions, and undaunted population. He mused: “The Polish people seem so interested, so much alive and intelligent and even gay in the middle of their physically shattered splendor and thus reveal a spiritual splendor even more.”2 The last time he had experienced something similar was in Depression-era New York, during the glory days of his youth and the New Deal. Carter’s experiences abroad led him to reflect on cultural policies at home. In Poland, he found, “the interest in the U.S.A. is very great everywhere.” There were tremendous opportunities to make inroads among Polish musicians. But, he complained, the U.S. Department of State was missing these chances to extend American influence into Cold War Eastern Europe. The problem was that government officials were focused on the wrong things. “Unlike the groups of primitive Texan 86

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farmers the State Department sends around these days,” Carter lamented, American musicians had trouble securing the travel funds that would enable them to participate in the 1962 Warsaw Autumn.3 He saw these small stumbles as symptoms of a cultural policy that had lumbered off course. While Polish composers were flourishing thanks to state largesse, those in the United States were in danger of withering. One lesson he took home from Warsaw was therefore potentially subversive: when it came to cultural infrastructure, the United States had something to learn from the socialist example. Fromm agreed with Carter’s assessment. “America treats its composers very badly indeed,” he replied, “and perhaps a comparison with the European situation would be at least a beginning toward an effective reappraisal of our present cultural confusion.”4 Since establishing his private foundation in 1952, Fromm had been attempting to resolve this confusion by building institutional structures to support contemporary music in the United States: he commissioned new works, sponsored performances, and launched ventures at Tanglewood and Princeton University.5 In Carter’s letter, Fromm saw a further chance to recalibrate the prevailing dynamics of American musical life. He suggested that Carter publish his impressions of the Warsaw Autumn in Perspectives of New Music, a recently launched journal, produced with Fromm’s financial backing, that aimed to give a mouthpiece to elite modernists in the United States. Carter agreed. Purged of its dishier details, his “Letter from Europe” appeared in the journal’s second issue in early 1963.6 Thus transplanted, Carter’s festival experiences became implicated in a set of institutional power struggles that were very different from the ones that affected Warsaw Autumn planners’ day-to-day maneuvers. Carter’s letters are examples of cultural mobility in action. By ferrying information and ideas from Europe to the United States, these texts enabled the Warsaw Autumn’s impact to extend beyond Poland; Fromm hoped that the cultural values mobilized by Carter would stimulate change in American musical life. This mobility was possible, in part, because Carter himself was mobile. It is no coincidence that he wrote to Fromm in an airport, as air travel was becoming increasingly common in the 1960s.7 Jet aircraft were linking cities across the globe; liberalizing visa policies in many countries eased travelers’ movement across state borders.8 The advent of mass travel affected the practice of new music, not least because it made institutions and performance venues increasingly accessible. Carter’s opening gambit in his published letter speaks to this very issue. There were so many events dedicated to contemporary music, he told his readers, “that if any of the group of musicians regularly invited were to accept all his invitations, he would be kept busy almost all year simply in traveling from one country to another.”9 Carter ticked off a list of cities that made up the burgeoning new-music festival circuit: Amsterdam, Berlin, Darmstadt, Donaueschingen, London, Palermo, Tokyo, Venice, Warsaw, and Zagreb. A group of new-music nomads was working this circuit,

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moving, seemingly unimpeded, from one event to another, disseminating information, exchanging ideas, and forging bonds as they encountered each other repeatedly in locations scattered throughout Europe—and, Carter’s inclusion of Tokyo suggests, increasingly farther afield. By 1962, then, the Warsaw Autumn had become part of an established itinerary. This chapter will shift focus from a national context (albeit one that was inflected by international concerns) to look more closely at how the Warsaw Autumn functioned as a zone of cultural mobility from the late 1950s into the mid-1960s. Though it was separated from other new-music institutions by geographic, political, and economic distances, the Warsaw Autumn was not a discrete node, occupying an isolated point in a fractured cultural landscape. Rather, the institutional apparatus that supported and disseminated contemporary music post-1945 is better understood as an interrelated system, in which actions in one place could affect conditions in another. The movement of people encouraged these connections. Each year, the Warsaw Autumn brought together composers, performers, musicologists, cultural officials, arts administrators, critics, journalists, and non-music-professionals. Some of these festival participants were based outside Poland. When they traveled to Warsaw, their journeys involved movement across borders in the most literal sense. The Warsaw Autumn also required the transport of music scores, instruments, and recordings, because festival events could not take place without these items. And the physical mobility of people and objects coincided with motion of a less tangible kind: the circulation of ideas from one place to another, and journeys that took place primarily in the mind. In many cases, the effects of the mental journeys lingered even longer than those of the physical ones, for they enabled festival participants to conceive of themselves as linked with a larger world of contemporary music performance. The fluidity between physical and mental border crossings at the Warsaw Autumn therefore supports a point Stephen Greenblatt made in his 2010 blueprint for cultural mobility studies: literal and metaphorical movement are fundamentally interconnected.10 Regardless of whether the journeys were imagined or actual, movement to and from the Warsaw Autumn engendered multiple kinds of cross-border relationships. Some of these interactions involved formal, state-level exchanges of observers, performers, and compositions. Official exchanges were a particularly prevalent form of contact between Poland and the other Eastern European states; Western ensembles also appeared at the Warsaw Autumn in the 1960s, thanks to government-sponsored tours. These carefully crafted performances of cultural diplomacy tended to reinforce existing state divisions and prevailing notions of East–West opposition. At the risk of oversimplifying, I will call these encounters international, in the sense that Steven Vertovec defines the term in his work on migrant communities in Europe. Internationalism in this case entails sustained, top-down contact

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across borders; governments forge international ties that typically work to perpetuate contemporary notions of the nation-state.11 Many Warsaw Autumn encounters can be meaningfully understood as forms of international contact because the assumption was that the delegates, performers, and musical works that traveled to Poland officially were functioning as stand-ins for a particular state. Other connections were more informal: they involved tourism, the personal relationships that festival participants forged at Warsaw Autumn concerts, and the circulation of music scores—including those that diverged in style and compositional technique from the official cultural policies in the Eastern Bloc’s less aesthetically liberal corners. These interactions are better understood as transnational. If internationalism, according to Vertovec, is top-down, then transnationalism is bottom-up. He views transnational relationships as the work of nonstate actors— businesses, nongovernmental institutions, and individuals—whose sustained interactions have the potential to question existing national borders and to challenge state monopolies on determining meaning.12 The boundaries between the terms international and transnational are fuzzy, especially when they are applied to a state-sponsored institution like the Warsaw Autumn. These terms are nevertheless useful, in that they can allow us to conceptualize more precisely the different kinds of cross-border relationships the Warsaw Autumn facilitated. International and transnational forms of contact also coexisted (and overlapped) with other binaries that were in play at the festival during the 1960s. Among these was the distinction between official and unofficial music cultures that was active throughout Eastern Europe, because a person’s relationship to the state apparatus in his home country could affect the kinds of border crossings in which he was able to engage. In the chapters that follow, I will examine mobility at the Warsaw Autumn from the perspective of official observers, tourists, performers, and the dissemination of musical works. I will begin with nonperformers—listeners who traveled to Poland to hear the festival concerts. Invited international guests participated in the Warsaw Autumn from the very beginning; by the 1960s, festival audiences included swelling numbers of tourists, especially from Eastern Europe. While their participation might, at first glance, seem a peripheral issue, foreign attendees played important roles in the multidirectional flows of information, ideas, values, assets, and objects that the Warsaw Autumn facilitated. Which visitors were desirable, and why? How were they able to travel to Poland? What happened while they were there, and after they left? V I SI T O R S , PA RT 1 : O B SE RV E R S

From the earliest stages of the Thaw, contact with invited foreign visitors had been an important part of Polish composers’ strategy to restore their ties with the outside

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world. ZKP had sought to internationalize the 1955 Festival of Polish Music by inviting visitors from afar, rather than featuring performers or compositions from other countries. Similarly, the internationalism of the first Warsaw Autumn was as much a function of the guest list as it was of the program. In 1955 and 1956, the ability of foreign visitors to cross borders and transport materials made them key to organizers’ project to use festivals as a means to disseminate Polish music internationally. At the Warsaw Autumn’s subsequent installments, the Festival Committee continued to use its financial resources to sponsor invited guests (or, as they called them, “observers”), thereby ensuring an international presence at festival events. Although the committee did not cover travel costs, Warsaw Autumn observers could expect their hosts to supply concert tickets, pay for hotel accommodations, and handle their expenses in Poland. The process for inviting official observers unfolded in several stages. The Festival Committee devised a preliminary list based on its members’ personal contacts and the information they had gleaned at previous Warsaw Autumns. Composers, musicologists, and performers participated in the process in surveys conducted via their professional organizations, ZKP and the Society of Polish Musical Artists (Stowarzyszenie Polskich Artystów Muzyków, or SPAM).13 At MKiS, the music division and BWKZ suggested potential candidates. ZKP contacted composers’ unions in other socialist countries— Warsaw Pact members, but also China, Mongolia, North Korea, Vietnam, and Yugoslavia, each of which received invitations to send observers to the Warsaw Autumn in 1961.14 As with many of the Warsaw Autumn’s logistical elements, concerns for geopolitical parity shaped the guest lists. In 1962, the year Carter traveled to Warsaw, there were resources to sponsor sixty guests in total—half of them from the East and the other from the West. To manage international relations within Eastern Europe, the Festival Committee, MKiS’s music division, and BWKZ precisely delineated how the invitations were to be distributed throughout the Eastern Bloc. Twelve invitations were destined for the Soviet Union, whereas East Germany and Czechoslovakia were each allotted six; other socialist countries were granted between one and three of the remaining spots.15 Once the Festival Committee had assembled the preliminary guest lists, the candidates underwent additional vetting at MKiS and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Ministerstwo Spraw Zagranicznych, or MSZ). No invitations could be sent until MSZ had reviewed candidates’ information and approved their entry into Poland. The process was often slow.16 In many cases, potential guests received their invitations after they had already made plans for late September. Even if they didn’t have prior commitments, invited observers didn’t always have time to arrange a trip to Warsaw. The multiphase, bureaucratically cumbersome process meant that the actual number of observers present at the earliest Warsaw Autumns was lower than the sixty official guests the Festival Committee could, conceivably, have sponsored each year.

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Faced with the difficulty of meeting its targets, the committee proposed in 1960 that other Polish cultural institutions start inviting guests of their own; they reasoned that the more institutions that were involved, the higher the number of international visitors ultimately would be.17 By mid-decade, ZKP and Polish Radio regularly sponsored visits; these guests typically came from other countries in the Eastern Bloc.18 The state-run music publishing house likewise sent invitations to sister institutions in other Eastern European countries.19 The BWKZ kept its own lists of observers—divided, as ever, into groups from East and West.20 Self-interest propelled festival organizers’ decisions. Composer and Warsaw Autumn Secretary Witold Rudziński made no secret of this fact in his 1960 report on festival planning. The committee, he explained, had sought to invite people “who could promote the festival [and] make interesting comments about it,” such as “distinguished critics, musicologists, musical functionaries, theorists, and, finally, composers (especially those whose works are being performed at the festival).”21 Warsaw Autumn planners were, in short, seeking visitors with established authority, who had access to resources, positions in powerful institutions, and connections to media outlets. Festival observers’ journeys to the Warsaw Autumn were, in some senses, economic exchanges, since the tacit expectation was that Polish organizers’ hospitality would be repaid in good publicity and other benefits. Everett Helm’s visit to the 1958 festival illustrates how this dynamic could play out in practice. Helm’s clout and connections made him an attractive festival observer. He was affiliated with numerous publications, ranging from the daily press to specialized journals, in Western Europe and the United States. He used these connections to publish at least five accounts of his first visit to the Warsaw Autumn in 1958. Through Helm, then, a variety of readers in Great Britain, West Germany, and the United States learned that Polish composers were experimenting with the twelve-tone techniques that had previously been denied them. Helm was not convinced by everything he heard in Warsaw, but, he wrote in The Musical Quarterly, Lutosławski’s Funeral Music was “highly expressive and original,” whereas Górecki’s Epitaph was “outstanding for its sensitivity and invention.”22 While his report for The Musical Quarterly’s specialist audience understandably privileged musical description, Helm’s account in the San Francisco Chronicle was more of a travelogue, geared toward satisfying his readers’ curiosity about life behind the Iron Curtain. To his surprise, Helm had discovered that this curtain was made of “gauze.” Perhaps, his review suggested, Eastern Europe was not so other after all: “Except for the omnipresence of state control, Warsaw gives an impression not much different from Western cities. The citizens discuss their government and politics openly and often critically and take a lively interest in the arts, music, and literature of the Western world. We came away with the impression of a friendly, open-minded, cultivated people.”23 Helm’s description is noteworthy not just for

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the parallels it draws between Poland and the West, but also for its emphasis on freedom, openness, and transparency. Such tropes were common in political travel writing by Westerners who visited socialist countries; references to freedom of movement, for example, were a way for these authors to suggest that their accounts were trustworthy.24 Helm’s knowing reference to police surveillance, like his reservations about some contemporary Polish music, additionally signaled that he was no propagandist. His reviews, then, had the ring of authenticity. Because Helm adopted a pose of professional critical distance, he could promote the Warsaw Autumn in ways that went beyond what festival organizers could do themselves. In November 1958, Helm sent festival organizers a packet of these reviews.25 His writings, which burnished the festival’s image abroad, likewise bolstered the Warsaw Autumn’s status in Poland. The director of MKiS’s Music Group was soon extolling the benefits of favorable coverage in European publications; it is likely that Helm was one of the reviewers the director had in mind.26 Considering the overwhelmingly positive image he had painted of Poland, its leading composers, and the Warsaw Autumn, it is no surprise that organizers invited Helm to return to the festival in subsequent years. When they were in Warsaw, festival observers attended concerts and participated in events that were intended to foster international contact. These events included morning press conferences, which Carter described as “a good natured social meeting in which the composers and performers, or conductors of the previous day’s concerts, were questioned and their works discussed.”27 Participants in the press conferences conversed in Polish, Russian, French, and German. There were also opportunities for less structured interactions. In “private talks” with members of the Soviet delegation, Carter had been surprised by the depth of their knowledge of twentieth-century composition, and tickled when “one of the Russian musicologists criticized my Eight Etudes and a Fantasy . . . as not being advanced enough.”28 Though he did not mention it in his published piece, Carter also connected with a Hungarian music critic, to whom he pledged “to ship some records through a Viennese backdoor”; he likewise promised to send materials to the members of a Slovak string quartet that he had met in Warsaw. In addition to professional networking, Carter had time for extracurricular activities: touring Warsaw’s reconstructed Old Town, and visiting artists’ studios with Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, one of the 1962 festival’s other invited guests.29 In truth, listeners bearing foreign passports were a small presence compared to the sea of Poles that flooded Warsaw’s concert halls during the annual festivals. But travelers from afar assumed an importance that overshadowed their actual numerical proportions. For Polish cultural institutions, sponsoring foreign observers constituted a form of cultural outreach that strengthened international relations between Poland and the world. Bringing Eastern European composers, musicologists, and cultural officials to Warsaw cemented institutional ties between socialist

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states. Contacts between publishers could facilitate the movement of music scores from one place to another. Links with the directors of Western European music festivals, on the other hand, integrated the Warsaw Autumn into continent-wide performance circuits that transcended Poland’s immediate geopolitical location. Throughout the 1960s, festival planners consistently desired high-profile guests from Western Europe and North America, for these individuals were viewed as potent generators of prestige, important sources of information, and authoritative arbiters of modernity who could legitimate the Warsaw Autumn both in Poland and in the West. The practice of inviting foreign observers to the Warsaw Autumn therefore aligns with Danielle Fosler-Lussier’s description of the push-pull dynamics of cultural diplomacy. Countering reductive notions of American cultural imperialism during the Cold War, she asserts that when the U.S. Department of State engaged in musical initiatives, “music was not only pushed across borders by nation-states seeking to impose their influence: music was also pulled across borders by people who actively wanted it.”30 As we have seen, the Warsaw Autumn involved a similar interplay of pushing and pulling. True, the festival’s invited observers traveled to Poland with their own agendas: Carter, for instance, used his 1962 visit as an opportunity to promote his preferred brand of American modernism. Yet we have also seen that festival organizers invited foreign observers as a means to accomplish their goals. They knowingly sought people with established clout in other new-music worlds. They used sponsored visits to pull these figures into Poland, where the physical presence of prestigious guests testified that the Warsaw Autumn was becoming a center of East–West cultural exchange—one of the reasons for establishing the festival in the first place. Organizers hoped that, once the festival was over, these tastemakers would internationally disseminate the message of Poland’s newfound musical modernity by publishing articles in high-profile publications, delivering radio broadcasts, and circulating the festival’s promotional materials, including the program books and the sound recordings that were made during festival concerts. The examples of Helm’s visit in 1958 and Carter’s attendance in 1962 suggest that this strategy could be effective. Many official observers, however, took home more than positive impressions of the festival. Their visits had tangible, far-reaching effects on the lives of Polish composers. POLES OUT OF POLAND

The Warsaw Autumn was designed to bring Polish composers into contact with the outside world. From the outset, this not only meant importing music, people, and ideas into Poland; it also meant launching Polish composition beyond national borders, out into the compositional networks of the Eastern Bloc, Western Europe, North America, and beyond. This pattern became so well established that, by the

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time the Warsaw Autumn was celebrating its tenth anniversary in 1966, composer, festival planner, and ZKP Vice-President Włodzimierz Kotoński was able to describe the annual concerts as a “noble exchange of new works.”31 Visits by high-profile foreign guests were crucial in establishing the festival as a site of cross-border cultural mobility. Kotoński stressed the observers’ enormous influence, especially in Western Europe—where many of them had the power to arrange performances and dispense commissions. When these figures came to Warsaw, Kotoński told his interviewer, they wasted no time in snapping up the Polish composers whose music they encountered at festival events. Kotoński (Figure 4) was among those who benefited from the international contacts he made at the Warsaw Autumn, and, several decades later, he continued to credit the festival with opening a world of compositional opportunity to him in his early career. He recalled: During its first phase, the Warsaw Autumn was very meaningful for me, above all as an opportunity for getting out [of Poland]. I was thirty or thirty-one when it began, a young composer, but in terms of new music I was just beginning. That my works were performed [at the festival] and heard by many of the organizers of musical life, especially from Western countries, was influential in establishing interest in my music. I received commissions from the West and was able to establish contacts. This in turn affected the very form of my compositional ideas. If you do not have to worry about who is going to commission your next work, your thoughts work in an entirely different way. . . . A few of my works had specified parameters, such as instrumental theater pieces for Sweden or Norway, since that is where those commissions came from, or chamber music in Germany. . . . My successes at the Warsaw Autumn, not only the performances but also the good reviews I received in Poland and abroad, buoyed my spirits, and that support meant that my ideas were better able to come across [in my music].32

Contacts with West Germany were especially important to Kotoński in this transformative phase of his career. Some of the most powerful figures in West German new-music circles attended the Warsaw Autumn during its first decade. They included Wolfgang Steinecke, one of Darmstadt’s founders and its director until his death in 1961; Otto Tomek, director of new music at the West German Radio (WDR) in Cologne; Willfried Brennecke, also of the WDR; and Heinrich Strobel of the Southwest German Radio (SWDR).33 Hermann Moeck published twenty Kotoński scores in his Contemporary Chamber and Orchestral Music series, established in 1959 specifically to publish pieces by living Polish composers and handle performance rights for these works in Western countries.34 Kotoński also gained international exposure through the well-developed West German radiofestival complex. He received three commissions, one in 1966 and two in 1971; his Muzyka kameralna (Chamber Music) had its West German premiere at the 1959 Donaueschingen Music Days, the festival connected with the SWDR. Three more

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figure 4. Włodzimierz Kotoński and Stanisław Wisłocki after the Warsaw Autumn performance of Kotoński’s Musique en relief, 25 September 1960. Photograph by Andrzej Zborski, Polish Composers’ Union/Warsaw Autumn Archive.

compositions—Musique en relief (1959), Canto (1961), and Monochromie (1964)— were world premieres at Darmstadt.35 Kotoński was not alone. His colleague and fellow Warsaw Autumn planner Kazimierz Serocki trod a similar path, regularly writing new works in response to West German radio commissions, and gaining new listeners through performances at Donaueschingen and Darmstadt. Serocki had been the first Polish composer to break into the program of the Summer Courses when his Musica concertante received its world premiere there in 1958.36 Moeck picked up Serocki’s works along with Kotoński’s. In late 1960 Serocki received permission from ZAIKS, the Polish artistic copyright agency, to publish two of his works in West Germany: Improvisationen and Oczy powietrza (Eyes of the Wind).37 But Penderecki was the brightest Polish light in West Germany’s new-music scene. His first Warsaw Autumn performance—the 1959 premiere of his sparse, post-Webernian Strophes for soprano, narrator, and chamber ensemble—catalyzed a chain of events that gained him fame and fortune abroad. Impressed by Strophes, Heinrich Strobel commissioned a new work from Penderecki for the 1960 Donaueschingen Music Days.38 Thus began a period of intense promotion that culminated

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in the WDR’s 1963 commission of the St. Luke Passion, which constituted a turning point in Penderecki’s career when he completed it in 1966. By 1969, Penderecki was living in West Berlin, earning a stipend from the West German government, outfitting his wife in the latest French fashions, and giving interviews to the New York Times—in which he touted Warsaw as “the musical capital of the world.”39 Although Penderecki, Serocki, and Kotoński were not the only Polish composers whose works were published and performed in West Germany, they were the most successful in terms of obtaining commissions from prestigious institutions and securing performances in high-profile venues. They also had another thing in common: their experiments with instrumental, vocal, and electronic sound put them at the outer stylistic edge of 1960s Polish composition. That this trio, in particular, found receptive patrons in West Germany suggests that their promotion was not simply about the indiscriminate support of Polish music per se. Why did West Germany’s musical movers-and-shakers support Poland’s emerging avant-garde? Ruth Seehaber suggests that West German patronage was motivated in part by genuine interest in the music and newfound respect for the advanced level of Polish culture.40 But Polish composition also enabled West German cultural administrators to solve a more practical problem: crafting consistently novel concert programs. By 1960, the quick expiration of avant-garde aesthetics was making this task increasingly difficult. Everett Helm counted the world premiere of Penderecki’s Anaklasis as the only highlight of that year’s Donaueschingen Festival, where the postwar avant-garde otherwise seemed to be gasping its last breath. In contrast, Helm reported that Penderecki’s contribution to Donaueschingen “made the radical [Bo] Nilsson’s work sound old-fashioned in comparison and provoked the only near-riot of the festival.”41 Polish music, whose whiff of scandal wafted to West Germany from beyond an increasingly hardened Cold War horizon, seemed to promise compositional rejuvenation. Thus, the relationship between Polish avant-garde composers and their West German patrons was one of mutual benefit, in which each side had something to offer as well as something to gain: the patrons offered commissions and exposure, whereas the composers could offer newness and innovation, which were especially valuable assets in a cultural economy that privileged modernist notions of prestige. In their own, limited way, musical contacts between Poland and West Germany could also promise rejuvenation of another sort. During the 1960s, the People’s Republic of Poland (Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa) did not have formal diplomatic relations with the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). Some of this was due to the lingering fallout of World War II: until the Oder-Neisse treaty of December 1970, which officially recognized Poland’s postwar western border, Polish foreign policy would be propelled by fears of West German revanchism. Poland’s diplomatic recognition of East Germany was another sticking point when it came to friendly relations with the FRG.42

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While there was little contact at the state level, nonstate actors sought to improve relations between the two countries. Some of these efforts took place in the realm of commerce: the first West German trade mission to Warsaw took place in 1963. Other contacts occurred on a more spiritual plane. Motivated by a spirit of Christian atonement, religious leaders in West Germany strove to convince the domestic public that it was morally necessary to improve relations with Poland. They also sought to communicate with their Polish counterparts. In 1962, West German Protestants issued the Tübingen Memorandum to criticize the FRG’s foreign policy visà-vis Poland and to call for the official acceptance of post–World War II borders. West German Catholics took a similar position in 1968, when the Bensberger Circle issued a memorandum that criticized prevailing foreign policy while urging Poles and West Germans to enter a new era of mutual understanding.43 In the meantime, Poland’s Catholic clergy had also used religious channels in an attempt to engineer political change: addressing their West German counterparts, the 1965 Letter of the Polish Bishops overtly called for reconciliation between the former enemy nations.44 On the surface, these religious communiqués might seem to have little to do with West German promotion of Poland’s avant-garde composers. But radio stations are a suggestive point of contact, because some of the figures involved with religious activism also held powerful positions in the West German media. Klaus von Bismarck, for example, not only contributed to launching the Tübingen Memorandum; he was also director-general of the WDR, one of the most active promoters of Polish music throughout the 1960s. Walter Dirks, connected with the Bensberger Circle, worked at the SWDR from 1948 to 1965, and then at the WDR from 1965 to 1967.45 More generally, we might understand musical relations— including contacts at the Warsaw Autumn—as part of a larger effort among Polish and West German citizens to undertake cultural diplomacy during the 1960s via nonstate channels. For a host of reasons, then, many members of Poland’s compositional avantgarde found West Germany to be a receptive environment for their works. Other Polish composers became part of different music networks in the United Kingdom and the United States. One of Tadeusz Baird’s contacts was Cleveland Orchestra director George Szell, who asked the composer in 1965 for his most recent scores.46 Moeck included some of Baird’s works in his series; Baird also signed a contract with the United Kingdom–based Chester Music to publish and distribute his compositions in the West.47 In a sign of Lutosławski’s growing international fame, Aaron Copland invited the composer to lecture at Tanglewood in 1962. The interview Lutosławski gave to the New York Times while he was in the United States highlighted the independence and adventurousness of Polish musicians, the centrality of the Warsaw Autumn in Poland’s new-music scene, and Polish government support of “far-out” composition.48 After weighing various offers (including one from powerhouse new-music supporter Universal Edition), Lutosławski

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signed a contract with Edition Wilhelm Hansen, a Danish music-publishing company affiliated with Chester Music.49 Not all of these connections were forged at the Warsaw Autumn. But a significant number of them were: festival performances were often the first time that Polish composers became visible to the Western patrons who subsequently influenced their careers. Because it brought people together on an annual basis, the Warsaw Autumn also allowed existing ties to be deepened. What did Polish composers have to gain from the connections they made with the Warsaw Autumn’s Western observers? There was, of course, the prestige. For Polish composers, inclusion on the Warsaw Autumn program was already a sign of status. If that exposure enabled a composer to meet a potential foreign patron, and obtain a performance, publishing contract, or commission in the West, then the composer’s standing at home increased still further, which in turn created even more opportunities for international promotion. Along with the prestige, publishing abroad gave composers a way to escape Poland’s inefficient system for disseminating scores and recordings. Polish composers continued to complain, as they had in the 1950s, that state agencies were not doing enough to disseminate their music internationally. Ars Polona, the agency responsible for exporting Polish art abroad, was an endless source of frustration; the Polish State Music Publishers (Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, or PWM) was another.50 Composer Augustyn Bloch voiced some of these complaints in 1965, when he reported on a recent trip to the Zagreb Biennale. He was speaking to a group of ZKP representatives and Polish cultural administrators who were meeting specifically to discuss the problem of internationally promoting new Polish music. According to Bloch, PWM’s exhibition at the Biennale had been very poor, whereas Moeck had sent a representative to Yugoslavia and mounted an “excellent display.”51 The implication was that the West German publisher was doing a better job of promoting Polish music than Poles themselves. Another problem was that PWM could not keep up with foreign demand for new Polish scores.52 Partnering with publishing houses in the West therefore enabled composers to benefit from these companies’ more developed advertising and distribution networks. And there was the remuneration. Publishing enabled Polish composers to maintain a foothold in foreign markets even if they were not physically abroad. It was legal for Polish composers to earn hard currency from their foreign publications.53 Co-edition contracts allowed Polish composers to sidestep a 1962 law that obligated them to publish their works in Poland.54 These contracts granted PWM the rights to publish and distribute compositions in the socialist sphere, whereas a Western publisher would have the same rights to publication and distribution in the capitalist sphere. The process for entering into these agreements went as follows: once the composer had agreed to sign a co-edition contract with PWM, he would approach MKiS to receive permission to publish abroad; the process was

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cumbersome because MKiS had to approve the publication of each work on an individual basis. If the decision was positive, MKiS contacted ZAIKS, the Polish artistic copyright agency, which would, in turn, arrange a contract in the Western country on the Polish composer’s behalf.55 ZAIKS was also authorized, on the basis of a Ministry of Finance ruling from 9 August 1960, to establish accounts in Warsaw’s Commercial Bank (Bank Handlowy) to handle royalty payments disbursed in foreign currency.56 Lutosławski remembered this process as difficult, saying that he struggled with Poland’s Ministry of Finance for two years before finally receiving permission to partner with a Western publisher.57 Baird, on the other hand, indicated in June 1965 that he was encountering little more than token resistance from state officials. After he informed MKiS that he had “recently received many lucrative offers to publish his works abroad,” the minister of culture replied that they “could not keep” the composer from taking advantage of the offers, but “they appeal to his conscience as a Polish citizen and urge him not to accept.”58 Baird, like so many of his Polish colleagues, ignored the minister’s entreaty. Foreign commissions were another source of access to hard currency, a substance that was ever elusive—and for that reason all the more desirable—in 1960s Poland. While Soviet musicians earned the same amount for performances in the West as they would in Moscow or Leningrad, Polish composers suffered no similar financial disincentives for accepting commissions from Western institutions. They were paid at the same level and in the same funds as their counterparts in France, Italy, or West Germany. The money they earned abroad could, Kotoński recalled, be “legally or half-legally” brought back to Poland or held in foreign bank accounts.59 These economic opportunities could have lasting, transformative effects on Polish composers’ lives. As Lutosławski became better known outside Poland, for example, he no longer had to write functional music to make ends meet at home. Two prizes totaling U.S. $10,000, along with the Western publishing royalties he began to earn in 1966, enabled him to escape the noisy torment of his cramped Warsaw apartment and buy a freestanding house in one of the city’s quiet, desirable suburbs.60 This was a luxury well beyond the means of most Polish citizens, who were limited to earning cash solely in the domestic economy. Because they could publish in the West and accept Western commissions, Polish composers were able to move between the Cold War’s divided, competing economies in ways that most Polish citizens could not. Unlike artists, ordinary Poles technically were not allowed access to hard currency in the 1960s, and hardcurrency bank accounts would not become legal in Poland until the 1970s. In principle, composers’ use of these funds throughout the 1960s was subject to the Byzantine regulations established by the Ministry of Finance. Composers technically were supposed to use these funds solely to cover the costs of international travel, to pay living expenses when they were abroad (provided that their stay lasted two weeks or less, and the sum total of their room and board did not exceed the set

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limits for the country in question), or to buy goods in the nascent “internal export market,” where otherwise unobtainable Western products, or the higher-quality products of domestic manufacturing that typically were designated export-only, could be purchased for hard currency.61 Other uses required special permission. Kotoński recalled that these rules were subject to lax oversight: “No one kept an eye on it, neither those who were receiving the payments nor those who were supposed to be enforcing the law. . . . I never heard of anyone being prosecuted for illegal possession of hard currency, even though that often happened in the Soviet Union.”62 He also remembered that nearly everyone found ways to work around the official regulations, which dispensed only minuscule amounts of hard currency for travel to Western countries. It is possible that Polish officials turned a blind eye because the state also benefited when composers made inroads into border-spanning networks of musical exchange. Composers’ royalty payments were taxed, bringing small infusions of hard currency into dwindling national coffers; ZAIKS also deducted handling fees.63 But the more important gains were cultural. During the 1960s, new music— both the Warsaw Autumn as an institution and the composers it promoted—enabled Poland to compete successfully in Western economies of prestige. These successes occurred at a time when the overall state of Poland’s economy was considerably more lackluster. Economic problems had, in fact, been the stated reason for nearly canceling the 1963 Warsaw Autumn. And restrictions had already started to affect the festival’s sponsorship of foreign observers, including the powerful Western patrons who, as we have seen in this section, were significantly shaping the development of new Polish music. Since MKiS was the ultimate source of Warsaw Autumn funding, the festival’s year-to-year resources were subject to fluctuations in ministerial policy. A ruling from 18 September 1962 prohibited the organizers of international events from continuing to use their financial allocations to cover foreign visitors’ lodging and expenses in Poland.64 Warsaw Autumn planners tried to negotiate; despite the minister of culture’s intervention, Poland’s premier denied the Festival Committee’s request to invite fourteen official observers in 1963. Approval came only for Dieter Schönbach and Franco Donatoni, two Western European composers who were writing new works especially for the 1963 Warsaw Autumn, along with Nadia Boulanger and émigré composer Michał Spisak. Even this required the Festival Committee to make a special visit to MKiS.65 A year later, the committee once again urged MKiS to circumvent its policy. Their rationale? The role of the Warsaw Autumn’s invited guests in disseminating a positive image of Poland abroad. “The foreign observers and musical specialists are the most important promoters of the festivals,” committee members wrote in their 1964 annual report. “We would like them to participate at the Festival Committee’s cost. . . . The growing international interest in the Warsaw Autumn entitles us to this.”66 Starting in 1965, the committee was able to resume inviting foreign com-

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posers and observers to Warsaw, but never at the same levels as just a few years previously.67 V I SI T O R S , PA RT 2 : T OU R I ST S

Instead, the new model was tourism. While the Festival Committee might provide concert tickets and other small perks, most guests were now expected to cover all of their own expenses. Warsaw Autumn planners had initially been reluctant to cast the festival as a tourist destination because they associated music tourism with European spa towns, the peregrinations of bourgeois dilettantes, and flashy performances of easily digested standard musical fare. None of these seemed compatible with their aim to edify Polish audiences through exposure to difficult contemporary composition.68 These attitudes started to change in the early 1960s, when handpicking the guest list became increasingly difficult because of MKiS’s changing regulations on inviting international observers. At the time, more travelers were already starting to pay out-of-pocket to attend Warsaw Autumn events. The steady growth in foreign tourism, the Festival Committee explained in its 1962 report, had motivated them to reassess their institution’s potential significance outside Poland. If, at first, the festival had primarily served Polish composers and general audiences, increases in tourism were evidence that “the Warsaw Autumn’s influence is now crossing our country’s borders.”69 In other words, tourists were starting to share the position that had been occupied by the festival’s invited observers. Like the official guests, these travelers could connote the Warsaw Autumn’s prestige as a world center of new-music performance. And, similarly to the official guests, the symbolic importance of tourists overshadowed their true numbers: audiences of local citizens would remain the festival’s primary constituency. In some cases, the tourists of the mid-1960s had once been among the festival’s sponsored observers; this was especially true of the regular attendees from the West. Yet the presence of tourists could also have additional shades of meaning, because their journeys were motivated, ostensibly, by personal desire—not the lure of official invitations. Another difference was that, unlike the festival’s sponsored visitors, their numbers were potentially unlimited throughout the 1960s. A question, then, was how to stoke travelers’ desire to attend the Warsaw Autumn. As views on tourism changed, the organizers took steps to increase the festival’s visibility, accessibility, and attractiveness as a travel destination. Promotional brochures containing text in five languages (Polish, English, French, German, and Russian) advertised the upcoming festival programs and disseminated information on traveling to Warsaw; according to the BWKZ, ideally these would be distributed each year in January.70 Joining the Geneva-based European Festivals Association was another strategy to increase the Warsaw Autumn’s foreign exposure, especially in the

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West. While the association’s initial membership fee in 1961 was U.S. $1,200, and its annual dues $600, the Festival Committee anticipated that an influx of hard-currency-toting Western tourists would quickly offset these costs.71 MKiS dispensed the funds, and the European Festivals Association started promoting the Warsaw Autumn in 1962. Advertising directly in Western markets was a trickier proposition for an institution based in a socialist economic context. While in principle the Festival Committee was not opposed to placing advertisements in foreign publications, MKiS’s regulations specified that they could not use state funding for this aim. In 1964 the Festival Committee sought an alternative solution: sending promotional materials to the publications that had proposed the purchase of ad space, and requesting that the magazines print information about the Warsaw Autumn gratis because they were not in a position to pay.72 In later years, festival planners responded to similar inquiries with categorical refusals, pleading the Warsaw Autumn’s status as a state-financed institution.73 Just as festival organizers strove to increase the Warsaw Autumn’s visibility outside Poland, they sought to ensure travelers’ smooth passage across Polish borders. Obtaining entry visas was not always a straightforward proposition, particularly if a visitor was traveling from the West. The Festival Committee’s 1962 report recommended closer partnership with the MSZ, since the Warsaw Autumn office had received numerous pleas for help that year from prospective participants who were having trouble with their visa applications. By mid-decade, committee members were optimistically reporting that applying for a Polish visa in Western Europe had largely become a formality, provided that the request was made early enough; citizens of Austria and the Scandinavian countries could obtain an entry visa at the Polish border.74 West Germans faced more scrutiny: before they could travel to the Warsaw Autumn, they were required to apply for a tourist visa at the Polish Military Mission in Berlin and to submit their personal data to the Warsaw Autumn Festival Office.75 The office passed these details on to MSZ’s International Cultural and Academic Exchanges Department, which in turn sent its decisions back to the Polish Military Mission in West Germany.76 The names of West German citizens who had been cleared to enter Poland were also sent to the Polish Ministry of the Interior.77 Since they were aware that some of their most vocal and prestigious allies hailed from the West, Warsaw Autumn personnel did their best to ease a process that was distinguished by impediments, bureaucratic control, and surveillance. Once travelers arrived in Warsaw, they required services. Festival organizers initially directed visitors to Orbis, Poland’s tourist office; Orbis, however, was ill equipped to handle travelers whose interests were so specialized.78 To fill the gap, the Festival Office began serving the needs of all foreign guests, both officially sponsored and not. This required resources: in 1961, the Festival Committee requested that their budget be increased in order to hire guides who were fluent in French, English, German, and Russian. They also asked for funds to arrange trans-

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figure 5. A group of the Warsaw Autumn’s international visitors en route to Żelazowa Wola, 1968. Photograph by Andrzej Zborski, Polish Composers’ Union/Warsaw Autumn Archive.

portation between concert venues.79 To orient visitors who were unfamiliar with the city, the 1962 program book featured a schematic outline of Warsaw inside its back cover; such maps continue to be part of the festival program books. When visitors were not attending concerts, they could participate in one of the cultural events that had been planned for their benefit. Options in 1962 included a bus tour of Warsaw, a screening of Polish experimental films, or an excursion to Chopin’s birthplace in the village of Żelazowa Wola, where tourists could explore the on-site museum and hear a recital of Chopin’s music.80 For travelers, then, attending the Warsaw Autumn could overlap with more standard forms of tourism—sightseeing in urban centers, visiting historical landmarks, and consuming exotic goods and experiences (Figure 5). From the standpoint of ZKP and party-state officials, on the other hand, the festival could serve as a platform to promote the modernizing city of Warsaw, as well as Polish culture more generally. In this way, the Warsaw Autumn was akin to the film festivals that had sprung up in previous decades in places such as Venice, Cannes, and Berlin. James English has described film festivals as being “all about location,” in that these institutions involve a symbiotic relationship between the cities in which they occur and the artists they promote.81 Thus, the festivals have not only enabled some artists to profit symbolically; by establishing certain locations as

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cultural capitals, these events have also enhanced the prestige of the urban centers in which they take place and, consequently, facilitated the international promotion of these cities as desirable places to live and to visit. The film festivals, in turn, have drawn on the “glamour and status of their host cities” by circulating glossy images in their promotional materials and staging events in open-air venues that are incontrovertibly grounded in a specific urban environment.82 The problem for Warsaw Autumn promoters was that, unlike Venice or Cannes, their city was not a particularly glamorous tourist destination. “Despite all the assurances of the travel office,” Everett Helm moaned in 1965, “a journey to Poland is still an adventure. . . . I asked myself constantly: why could I not experience this healthy dose of contemporary music in a more advanced country?”83 Even VIP performers did not always fare well. Mstislav Rostropovich reportedly complained about his shoddy accommodations when he came to the festival in 1966 to perform the Polish premiere of Boris Tchaikovsky’s Concerto for Cello and Orchestra. Rostropovich’s difficulties were not unprecedented for a Soviet traveler in Eastern Europe during the 1960s. These visitors did not always receive the warm welcome, services, and perks that Western travelers enjoyed: Soviet tourists’ lack of hard currency made their visits literally less valuable to their Eastern European hosts, and, for some local populations, visitors from the USSR were unwelcome reminders of Soviet domination.84 But Rostropovich was no ordinary Soviet traveler: his status as a high-level performer meant that his complaints had to be taken seriously. PAGART, which had helped arrange the cellist’s visit to Warsaw, sent a representative to a Festival Committee meeting to explain the “accident”; the staterun concert agency also sent a letter to the PZPR Central Committee to clarify and defuse the situation.85 While the Rostropovich case was extreme, it spoke to an ongoing problem with festival planning: finding hotel space for out-of-town guests. In the 1960s, Warsaw was still undergoing post–World War II reconstruction. The city continued to lack adequate housing for its inhabitants, to say nothing of accommodations and facilities for visiting performers and swelling numbers of foreign tourists. These challenges were endemic to Poland more generally and were the subject of a series of articles on tourism that were published in the official press in 1965. The final installment appeared in Kultura under the title “Tourism without Myths and Exaggerations.” This front-page editorial described tourism from the West as a potential economic generator and called for improved tourist infrastructure— not just hotels, but also restaurants and auto repair shops, some of which could be privatized to improve their quality and efficiency. As for why foreign (read: Western) tourists might want to visit Poland in the first place, the author reasoned that poor climate and boring architecture had not prevented Denmark, Holland, and Norway from becoming desirable travel destinations. One thing Poland had, aside from its lakes and forests, was location: it could be a stopover point for Swedes

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traveling south, or for Westerners en route to the USSR.86 The emphasis on Western tourists is symptomatic of trends throughout the Eastern Bloc, where hardcurrency-toting travelers from the West were valued for the boost they could give to local and national economies. Like their counterparts in Poland, party-state officials in Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union fixated on Western tourists for precisely this reason.87 The Warsaw Autumn did not figure in this blueprint for Poland’s future in tourism. But it is significant that, as festival organizers were reassessing the potential of foreign travel during the mid-1960s, similar conversations were taking place elsewhere in Polish society. It is also noteworthy that the Kultura article discusses tourism primarily in terms of attracting Western interest; as we have seen, Warsaw Autumn planners had similar preoccupations. In both cases, that is, travelers from the West were construed as the benchmark of Poland’s international prestige; their presence could also have tangible economic benefits. And the editorial’s characterization of Poland as a potential East–West transfer point shares striking similarities with the Warsaw Autumn’s established discourse, which had long cast the festival as a point of contact between disparate geopolitical zones. What the Kultura piece failed to mention was that, for many years, Poland had already been attracting considerable numbers of tourists from elsewhere. So had the Warsaw Autumn. But these visitors were not coming from the West. A N O P E N W I N D OW

During the 1960s, the Festival Committee’s annual reports dutifully tabulated the growth in foreign tourism to the Warsaw Autumn. In 1961, a busload of forty-six musicians came from Prague.88 In 1962, there were entourages from the Soviet Union (seventy-two people), France (three), and Czechoslovakia (twenty-five).89 At the 1964 festival, forty-three visitors came from eleven countries in the West, whereas sixty-seven travelers came from seven countries in the East; there was also a group from Lithuania and Latvia that comprised thirty-seven musicians and their younger colleagues.90 Two groups of composers, musicologists, and performers—one from Tallinn (thirty people), the other from Novosibirsk (fifteen)—journeyed to Warsaw in 1965, where they joined seventy-three other tourists from eight Eastern European countries and thirty-one visitors from thirteen Western countries.91 One hundred and twenty-seven visitors from twenty-four nations attended the Warsaw Autumn in 1966.92 And so on. What quickly becomes apparent from these tallies is that visitors from the Eastern Bloc consistently outnumbered attendees from Western Europe and North America. The Soviet tour groups were particularly large; they were part of an even bigger wave of Soviet travelers that was inundating Eastern Europe during the Thaw. In 1963 alone, more than sixty thousand Soviet citizens traveled to Eastern Europe

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via Inturist, the Soviet state travel agency, and Sputnik, the Soviet organization that handled youth tourism.93 Changing Soviet views on travel facilitated their journeys. Noting that the Stalinist years had been marked by insularity and nearly insurmountable restrictions on the cross-border travel of ordinary citizens, Anne Gorsuch argues that tourism became central to evolving notions of Soviet identity under Khrushchev.94 Eastern Europe was Soviet tourists’ most common destination. Soviet travel regulations favored the intelligentsia. Members of this group were more likely than workers to have the personal connections that were key to obtaining permission to travel to Eastern Europe. They had more vacation time, and more disposable income; thus, they could more readily afford trips that were expensive compared to traveling within the USSR.95 Soviet visitors to the Warsaw Autumn conformed to this pattern. Regardless of whether they traveled to Poland as official festival delegates or as tourists, the overwhelming majority of these Warsaw Autumn attendees were professionally involved with music in some way. Official delegates were typically figures of considerable institutional authority—musicologists and composers who were among the most inured to the ideological dangers of exposure to avant-garde music. Tourists tended to be less established. Often they were students, younger musicians, or early-career conservatory professors; they often were less immune to the avant-garde’s temptations. Both the official delegates and tourists were vetted by the Soviet Union before they were allowed to go to Poland. Approval was by no means guaranteed: many Soviet composers were not allowed to attend the festival.96 What did Soviet travelers find in Eastern Europe? Most fundamentally, Gorsuch argues, they encountered difference. A journey to Czechoslovakia, East Germany, or Poland also gave Soviet tourists an opportunity to consume both material goods and the products of Western culture.97 Already in 1957, the Warsaw Autumn’s Polish organizers were anticipating that the festival would lure Soviet and Eastern European tourists with the promise of forbidden fruit. MKiS official Wiktor Weinbaum predicted that, even if mass tourism to Poland would probably be a long time in coming, they could count on interest from their socialist brethren: “Tourists from socialist countries will certainly come to Warsaw when the festival is happening, because Poland will be the only country between the East and the West, where a decidedly modern artistic event will be taking place.”98 Put another way, the Warsaw Autumn offered its participants the chance to indulge in a very specialized form of cultural consumption. At festival performances, Soviet tourists had direct encounters with music by Poland’s compositional avantgarde, as well as music from the West that was difficult to hear back home. Georgian composer Giya Kancheli’s reminiscences of his Warsaw Autumn experiences demonstrate just how powerful these encounters could be. Kancheli first attended the festival in 1962, when he was a composition student whose curiosity had been piqued by tales of the avant-garde music that was being performed in Poland each Septem-

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ber. With about twenty companions, Kancheli made his way to Warsaw; short on cash, the students lodged in a dormitory. Years later, he recalled his shock during one of the performances, when a trombonist came onstage, silently disassembled his instrument, and exited without playing a single note. “There were many things that we didn’t understand,” Kancheli explained. “At the time, we knew nothing about Cage and his 4′33″. This type of performance was a complete surprise for us, and so was the musical language used in many of the more conventional works.” Just as instructive was the liberal atmosphere that accompanied the festival’s variegated compositional roster. Kancheli stressed that “already as a young, beginning composer I was aware of the significance of the Warsaw Autumn. Now, decades later, I am even more aware of how significant it was. Poland was a socialist country where people felt free to do things that were inadmissible in another socialist country, the Soviet Union.”99 At a time when information, and access to it, was entangled with the exercise of power, the openness of the Warsaw Autumn offered Kancheli a taste of seemingly unbounded possibilities—as political as they were musical. Along with the memories, festival visitors could acquire more tangible tokens of their Warsaw Autumn experiences: scores, recordings, and the hefty program book, which included detailed information about composers and their works. This was true of all festival attendees, not just the ones from the Soviet Union; however, lack of access to other information channels gave these materials a significance in the socialist East that they did not necessarily have elsewhere. Transporting these objects back to the USSR enabled the Warsaw Autumn’s effects to continue to ripple outward, affecting individuals who were unable to attend the festival in person. The transfer of materials facilitated personal and professional bonding in addition to disseminating information. As Sofia Gubaidulina recalls, Soviet festival attendees brought back “not only their impressions, but also records, tape recordings, scores, and books. We shared all those riches with one another. And in these sessions of collectively hearing contemporary Western music what were perhaps our most important musical contacts arose. Sympathy and interest in the work of one another and even friendship grew.”100 The Warsaw Autumn was just as relevant to musical tourists from countries such as Czechoslovakia, which, like Poland, claimed an interstitial, East–West cultural position during the Cold War.101 Czechoslovak authorities curtailed travel to Poland and Hungary after the revolutions of 1956; by the early 1960s, however, Czechoslovak tourists were able to travel more widely in the Eastern Bloc, particularly if they did so in collective tour groups.102 The Warsaw Autumn attracted Czechoslovak musicians who were passionate—or at least curious—about contemporary composition. One of these figures was the Slovak musician, poet, and visual artist Milan Adamčiak. Adamčiak was still a student when he attended a few Warsaw Autumn events in 1965, among them Anna Halprin’s experimental Parades and Changes in a performance by the San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop with

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music by Folke Rabe and Morton Subotnick. He was so captivated by these experiences that he contacted the Festival Office in 1966. Using a dual-language dictionary to write the letter in Polish, he described himself as “interested in contemporary music, especially avant-garde” and requested tickets for every Warsaw Autumn concert planned for that year.103 Adamčiak would go on to become a devotee of Cagean aesthetics and a proponent of Fluxus in Slovakia.104 T H E R I P P L E E F F E C T S O F F O R E IG N T R AV E L

The history of foreign travel to and from the Warsaw Autumn suggests the power of new-music institutions to build cultural trade routes and foster multidirectional relationships. The festival facilitated the movement of visitors from abroad; this motion overlapped with other kinds of transfers—of information, goods, ideas, values, money, and prestige. As we have seen, the Warsaw Autumn was a destination as well as a point of departure. At festival events, information flowed inward, toward Polish musicians and audiences. It also moved outward: reports by international visitors enabled news of the Warsaw Autumn to reach the broader world, in which Poles were attempting to assert their cultural status. In other words, the practice of contemporary music at the Warsaw Autumn depended on cross-border mobility. Brigid Cohen has urged scholars to pay closer attention to the twentieth century’s mobile moderns—exiled, uprooted, and journeying from one place to another. What might we learn about modernism, she asks, if we looked beyond national paradigms and focused instead on the figures that do not easily fit within them?105 While Cohen engages primarily with issues of migration and long-term displacement, her question is also valid when it comes to thinking about institutions such as the Warsaw Autumn, at which more momentary experiences of dislocation also helped to shape ideas about new music and circulate them from place to place. Technologies of travel and liberalizing visa regimes made it increasingly possible for new-music practitioners to be nomads; international festivals and other institutions gave these nomads places to go. The Warsaw Autumn existed at the interface of the local, national, and global. It was very much rooted in dynamics that were specific to Poland and its capital city. At the same time, the festival contributed to the uprooting of new music and those who made it, a dynamic to be explored in more detail in the next chapter. As we have seen, not all travelers to the Warsaw Autumn were created equal. The most prestigious—hence most desirable—guests were Westerners with established institutional authority. They were the most capable of boosting the festival’s economic functioning, through both their ability to confer prestige and their access to hard currency. Contact with these visitors also enabled some Polish composers to expand their professional networks and take advantage of new artistic (and, frequently, financial) opportunities in the West. Festival organizers’ efforts to

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court these guests conformed to larger efforts in 1960s Eastern Europe to attract Western tourists. The status of Soviet and Eastern European visitors was more ambiguous. Members of the official delegations were prone to criticize the Warsaw Autumn, thereby creating more problems for festival organizers than they solved. Those who traveled to the festival as tourists tended to be more sympathetic to its programs, but they also tended to be students and early-career professionals—lacking, that is, the resources that would enable them to promote the Warsaw Autumn in highprofile publications, commission new works, or program Polish compositions at a festival of their own. Yet growing numbers of tourists, most of them from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, did allow Warsaw Autumn planners to claim that the festival in the 1960s was demonstrably becoming a European center of crossborder encounters and debate. And these travelers did enable the Warsaw Autumn’s impact to radiate outward from Poland, as they shared program books, recordings, scores, and experiences with the members of their personal and professional networks after they returned to their home countries. While they did not necessarily woo Soviet and Eastern European tourists, festival organizers were sensitive to the effects that the Warsaw Autumn might have on them. Reflecting on the influx of Soviet travelers in 1962, composer and Repertoire Commission member Kazimierz Serocki told the New York Times that “the Warsaw shock treatment may well start a chain reaction in the Soviet way of composing music.”106 Serocki quickly denied ever saying any such thing: less than three weeks after the review appeared, the composer wrote a letter to the director of MSZ’s International Cultural and Academic Exchanges Department, claiming that the journalist had utterly misconstrued his “sincere joy at the large number of Russian colleagues who participated in our festival this year.” While Serocki was not willing to go on record by sending a letter of complaint to the New York Times, he urged the director to convey his position “to those people and institutions who— in your opinion—should be made aware of it.”107 Serocki’s swift disavowal suggests that this assessment—attributed to him, printed in the American press, implicitly criticizing Soviet musical policy, and imagining an inversion of the Eastern Bloc’s presumed cultural hierarchies—could turn out to be a significant problem. Regardless of exactly what Serocki said, his comment was prescient. The Warsaw Autumn experiences of many young Soviet and Eastern European musical tourists did have lasting effects. By the mid-1960s, Warsaw Autumn programs were featuring avant-garde music from Eastern European countries other than Poland. Festival planners were also continuing to seek out what they considered to be the latest, most advanced music from the West. The next chapter will examine organizers’ efforts to program the work of avant-garde musicians who were located on both sides of the Cold War’s East–West geopolitical divide, and it will consider the various types of cross-border connections that this programming facilitated.

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Mobilizing Performers, Scores, and Avant-Gardes

In September 1964, after stops in Paris, London, Venice, and Prague, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company arrived in Poland to perform at the Warsaw Autumn. The company presented four dances (Rune, Story, Night Wandering, and Antic Meet), Robert Rauschenberg supplied the décor, and resident musicians John Cage and David Tudor provided the sound. For most of the program, Cage and Tudor managed on their own; for the last number, however, they had requested a cohort of chamber musicians to augment a rendition of Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra.1 They found their collaborators in Musica Viva Pragensis, a newmusic ensemble that had assisted the Cunningham dance company with its recent appearances in Czechoslovakia and that, serendipitously, was also scheduled to appear at the 1964 Warsaw Autumn.2 Established at the Prague Conservatory in 1961, Musica Viva Pragensis testified to the rising cultural temperature in Eastern Europe: the group was the first ensemble of its kind to be connected with an official Czechoslovak music institution. The formation of Musica Viva Pragensis likewise testified to the appeal (and circulation) of avant-garde ideals across Cold War boundaries. Flautist and composer Petr Kotík, one of the group’s founding members, was initially exposed to Western European trends through his artist father.3 By the time Kotík launched Musica Viva Pragensis, he had already met Nono and was well on his way to becoming a Cage devotee.4 These affinities were made palpable when, in a literal moment of East–West convergence, Musica Viva Pragensis collaborated with Cage and Tudor at the Warsaw Autumn. We might understand this episode as one instance in what Richard Toop has called the avant-garde’s “expanding horizons.” He observes that, during the 1960s, 110

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“the number of composers affiliated to the notion of an avant-garde swelled dramatically—even globalized.”5 Musica Viva Pragensis was certainly a sign of this expansion; the Warsaw Autumn’s first presentation in 1964 of unofficial (because serial) Soviet composition suggested that notions of a technically progressive postwar avant-garde had spread even farther afield. According to Toop, avant-garde movements in countries such as Cuba, Yugoslavia, and Japan challenged the presumed authority of an international avant-garde that was concentrated in the traditional centers of Italy, France, and West Germany. However, he has less to say about the processes by which this globalization took place. Charting these processes is my aim in this chapter. The Warsaw Autumn contributed to the development and dissemination of avant-garde music in the 1960s by mobilizing performers and compositions. As with the journeys of the festival’s tourists and invited guests, this mobility involved physical as well as metaphorical border crossings. And to an even greater extent than with the visiting nonperformers, the movement of musicians and works to and from the Warsaw Autumn illuminates the complex interplay of international and transnational dynamics at festival events, for performers and compositions were visible as state proxies in ways other participants were not. Institutional practices reinforced perceived links between musicians, works, and singular, defined national points of origin: for instance, the flags hung each year at the National Philharmonic Hall during the Warsaw Autumn publicly broadcast the state affiliations of the composers on the program. At the same time, collaborations involving performers from different countries had the potential to suggest alternative groupings—ones that did not conform to state borders or the Cold War’s geopolitical oppositions. Perceived affinities between musical works could also suggest the presence of transnational ties. To highlight the dynamic interplay between mobilities that were literal and metaphorical, as well as international and transnational, I will trace the separate paths that brought the Cunningham dance company and Musica Viva Pragensis to Warsaw in 1964. I am interested not just in these ensembles’ individual trajectories, but also in how those journeys intersected with the routes of some of the Warsaw Autumn’s other performers. Thus, I will preface my discussion of the Cunningham company’s festival appearance by taking a look at the other group of Americans that performed at the 1964 Warsaw Autumn: the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra (PSO). Each of these ensembles was traveling as part of an extended, multicountry tour; each of these performances has much to tell us about how festival organizers discovered and imported new music from the West, contributing to the circulation of people, information, ideas, and values across Cold War geopolitical divides. The second half of the chapter then turns to the circulation of new music within the Eastern Bloc. I will juxtapose a discussion of the Warsaw Autumn’s dissemination of official music with an examination of the festival’s first presentation of unofficial Soviet composition: Musica Viva Pragensis’s

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1964 performance of Edison Denisov’s Concerto for Flute, Oboe, Piano, and Percussion. Although the structure of this chapter reproduces Cold War geopolitical divisions, we will see many similarities between the stories from each side. Regardless of where they were looking for new music in the early 1960s, festival organizers privileged the composers and performers they believed to be avant-garde. This interest did not mean that festival planners had abandoned the goal of presenting a comprehensive overview of twentieth-century music. But stylistic pluralism at the Warsaw Autumn had always coexisted with hierarchies of aesthetic value, and this remained the case into the 1960s, when avant-garde music was the festival’s most prestigious import and export. Organizers’ advocacy of abstract, complex, and self-consciously innovative styles of composition and performance therefore challenged some presumptive cultural hierarchies while simultaneously upholding others. More broadly, performances of avant-garde music at the Warsaw Autumn exposed and encouraged the development of cultural affinities that were based on shared aesthetic values of sonic exploration and ongoing technical exploration. In other words, the festival’s mobilization of postwar avant-gardes contributed to the formation and perception of a transnational new-music community, one that bypassed state borders and mitigated the Cold War’s broadly drawn divides. But although festival organizers were motivated in part by a desire to present an accurate composite image of postwar modernity, the resulting overview was often highly contingent—limited by political factors, access to resources, and the performers themselves. Demonstrations of mobility at the Warsaw Autumn also depended, paradoxically, on rooting musicians and musical works in defined points of origin. A M E R IC A N S I N WA R S AW, 1 9 6 4 : T H E P I T T SBU R G H SYM P HO N Y O R C H E S T R A

In the Warsaw Autumn’s first decade, organizers’ curiosity about American music outweighed their access to repertoire and performers. Bringing large Western ensembles to the festival was hugely expensive, and although orchestras from the United States had performed in Poland as part of American government-sponsored cultural diplomatic tours, until 1964 these tours had never included a Warsaw Autumn appearance.6 It was typically more feasible to engage touring chamber ensembles and to feature soloists who had active performance schedules elsewhere in Europe. Limited access to performers meant that festival audiences tended to encounter American composition in smaller works rather than the orchestral repertoire. The 1964 visit by the PSO was therefore a unique opportunity for the Warsaw Autumn to present an alternative view of contemporary American music. The

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orchestra’s eleven-week tour in 1964 took the ensemble to fourteen countries in Europe and the Middle East; it included stops in Paris, Edinburgh, Belgrade, and Tehran. When the festival organizing committees began discussing the PSO’s program in October 1963, they hoped the group would play music by Gunther Schuller, Elliott Carter, Milton Babbitt, and Charles Ives—a lineup that would foreground postwar American modernism in addition to cementing the increasingly widespread perception of Ives as the father of new music in the United States.7 These choices reflected what Warsaw Autumn planners already knew about American music. Schuller and Carter were both on the program in 1962; the 1960 Warsaw Autumn had featured Carter’s String Quartet no. 1.8 That festival organizers wanted to program these composers’ music again in 1964 attests to the persistent prestige in Poland of modernist compositional styles. The request for Ives was part of this larger trend, but likely also sprang from specific acts of advocacy by Americans seeking to shape Polish views on art music from the United States. Carter, for example, had sought to encourage the interest in American culture he discovered during the 1962 Warsaw Autumn by sending his Polish colleagues scores by “some older Americans like Ives, Ruggles, Riegger, and Cowell that did not seem to be known.”9 As Carter explained in his private letter to Paul Fromm, his motivations in selecting these particular composers were very much rooted in Cold War concerns: “I have promised to try and find scores that will support their vision and admiration of us and not just conservative ones that will make us seem too close to the USSR.”10 The repertoire the PSO proposed for its Warsaw Autumn performance was no less entangled with the stratagems of Cold War cultural diplomacy, but their selections represented a very different estimation as to the music that would sway Polish public opinion. Festival organizers were hoping for a series of orchestral works by exclusively American composers, but the PSO initially proposed Szymanowski’s Violin Concerto no. 2, op. 61; Webern’s Six Pieces for Orchestra, op. 6; Hindemith’s Pittsburgh Symphony; and Schuller’s Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee.11 This program was aligned with standard cultural diplomatic practices by including works from the host country (the Szymanowski), the visiting nation (the Schuller), as well as some local color from the PSO’s hometown (the Hindemith). It also conformed to the tendency in Cold War diplomacy to treat European music as an implicit universal—the playing field upon which competing ensembles could test their mettle and thereby assert their preeminence on the world stage. According to Jessica Gienow-Hecht, “during the Cold War, orchestras both east and west of the Iron Curtain played the same music on similar instruments according to the same scores.” She argues that these diplomatic encounters were meaningful precisely because they were not “culturally peculiar.”12 By favoring a roster of mostly European composers, including an acknowledged heavyweight of early twentieth-century modernism, the PSO’s initial Warsaw Autumn program appears

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to have been designed expressly to display the ensemble’s artistic prowess as well as to demonstrate its adherence to international standards of new-music performance. Yet cultural specificity was precisely what festival planners desired from the PSO. Considering that Polish ensembles had already performed the Szymanowski and the Webern at previous Warsaw Autumns, organizers saw little point in hearing these works again in renditions by an American orchestra. The Festival Committee negotiated alternatives with the PSO during the first half of 1964. The Festival Committee readily agreed to replace the Szymanowski with Walter Piston’s Violin Concerto no. 1.13 They were less enthusiastic about the PSO’s proposed substitution for the Webern: a work by Pittsburgh-based Russian-American composer Nikolai Lopatnikoff.14 In that case, they were willing to take Webern’s op. 6, or, failing that, Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra or Verklärte Nacht.15 None of these pieces would be possible, the PSO’s manager explained; the Webern “had to be dropped” from the tour, and it was impractical for the group to spend time learning either Schoenberg work when they could only perform it once during their eleven-week tour. He suggested Aaron Copland’s Billy the Kid as a replacement.16 Festival organizers agreed to the change. With the exception of Schuller’s Seven Studies, the program finalized on 4 July 1964 was a far cry from the one Warsaw Autumn planners had initially hoped the PSO would present.17 As for Ives, his music was on the 1964 festival program, but the visiting American musicians would not be the ones to introduce this composer to Warsaw Autumn audiences: that task fell to the Kraków Philharmonic, which performed Tone Roads no. 3 under the direction of new-music advocate Andrzej Markowski.18 Festival planners were not simply negotiating what music would best represent twentieth-century American culture as they communicated with the PSO. Selecting performers for the Warsaw Autumn, and determining the repertoire they would play, also affected the prestige that might be generated and circulated by festival concerts. Drawing on accounts in Trybuna Ludu, the PZPR’s national daily, the U.S. Department of State proclaimed that the PSO’s appearance in Warsaw was a “triumph” that had contributed positively to the promotion of American culture abroad.19 PSO lore continues to laud the 1964 tour as garnering “the Smoky city a reputation for producing more than steel”; just as important to the furthering of national diplomatic interests, then, was the boost this tour gave to local pride.20 And there certainly was no question in Poland as to the quality of the PSO’s playing. Yet Carter had been right to worry about Polish responses to contemporary American orchestral repertoire. For, according to the New York Herald Tribune, audiences at the 1964 Warsaw Autumn had responded to the American conservatives as if they were virtually interchangeable with the official Soviet composers whose music was also on the program that year.21 Thus, although the PSO’s festival appearance may have boosted the reputation in Poland of American orchestras,

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this performance did much less to disseminate a view that American composers were on the cutting edge. The apparent conservatism of American composition mattered because prestige circulated symbiotically at the Warsaw Autumn. Just as festival exposure could further performers’ and composers’ careers, the players and works on the Warsaw Autumn roster broadcast messages about the institution’s relative standing within postwar new-music networks. Considering the expense of bringing large Western ensembles to the Warsaw Autumn, it is doubtful that the PSO could have performed at the festival without American government funding. That the PSO’s itinerary included a Warsaw Autumn appearance could be understood as a sign of Poland’s strategic importance to the United States more generally—as well as a confirmation of the festival’s specific relevance during the Cold War as a site for cultural diplomatic encounters. By performing Hindemith, Piston, and Copland, however, the PSO’s program was hardly suited to promote the Warsaw Autumn as a vital European center for new-music performance, because these composers’ styles did not enjoy high status among the postwar avant-garde. From the standpoint of the PSO’s technical facility, its Warsaw Autumn performance may have indeed been a triumph. But in terms of convincing festival audiences of the sophistication and relevance of contemporary American composition, the PSO’s program was a diplomatic misfire. A M E R IC A N S I N WA R S AW, 1 9 6 4 : J O H N C AG E , DAV I D T U D O R , A N D T H E M E R C E C U N N I N G HA M DA N C E C OM PA N Y

Engaging the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, on the other hand, had the potential to sate Polish appetites for avant-garde culture from the United States. Especially enticing was the prospect of encountering John Cage, the company’s music director, in a live performance. Trybuna Ludu reminded its readers that Cage was a “famed innovator in the realm of creative techniques” and reported that the Cunningham company’s appearance had been “anticipated with great interest.”22 This interest was so great that, Cunningham dancer Carolyn Brown recalls, the performance “was sold out well in advance,” despite being scheduled for an “odd” noontime slot on the festival’s last day.23 Cage’s visit to Warsaw earned him new fans in Poland (Figure 6). Among the most effusive was critic and musicologist Bohdan Pociej, who rhapsodized in the Catholic publication Tygodnik Powszechny (Universal Weekly) that Cage was “a dreamer, visionary, poet, and musician in one.” Because Cage’s tactics emphasized “creative freedom,” and because the composer wielded this freedom in opposition to “all mechanical schemata” as well as “the unifying tendencies of contemporary civilization,” Cage, for Pociej, was not simply a defender of music’s fundamental

figure 6. John Cage, ZKP President Stefan Śledziński, and composer Bolesław Szabelski at a festival banquet, 1964. Photograph by Andrzej Zborski, Polish Composers’ Union/Warsaw Autumn Archive.

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essence: he was a potential savior of the modern world.24 Stefan Wysocki viewed the Cunningham company’s performance from the opposite extreme. Caustically denouncing “Cage-ism” for its renunciation of individual subjectivity, he fretted about the young musicians who were falling prey to Cage’s siren song. Wysocki nevertheless applauded the event for being true to the Warsaw Autumn’s mission: “It is good that this performance was presented, for the task of our festival is to present all of the trends that are currently pervading the creative world, and this trend is vigorous at the moment (though it may not have a future).”25 Because the American avant-garde was considered relevant in the new-music networks that crisscrossed postwar Europe, Cage’s participation in the Warsaw Autumn ensured that the festival, too, would be considered internationally relevant. Cage and Tudor’s contribution to the Cunningham company’s performance differed markedly from the PSO’s glimpse of twentieth-century American composition. These ensembles also came to Warsaw by different paths. The divergences point to some of the myriad ways that festival organizers were learning about—and subsequently importing—Western music during the early 1960s. As befits an appearance that was made possible by American government funding, the U.S. Embassy in Warsaw helped plan the PSO’s festival concert. Poland’s state-run concert agency, PAGART, was also involved in handling the details of the PSO’s Warsaw Autumn appearance. The Cunningham company likewise worked with PAGART to add stops in Poland to its watershed 1964 world tour. By and large, however, bringing the American avantgarde to the 1964 Warsaw Autumn depended on informal contacts, nonstate communication channels, and personal recommendations—not official communiqués routed via government institutions. When David Vaughan, the Cunningham company’s manager, was putting together the group’s 1964 world tour, he actively sought engagements in Poland, writing first to PAGART and later, at composer (and Repertoire Commission member) Włodzimierz Kotoński’s suggestion, contacting the Warsaw Autumn Festival Office directly.26 Unlike the negotiations with the PSO, Vaughan’s correspondence with Festival Secretary Leokadia Malinowska appears to have taken place without the U.S. Embassy’s intercession. While the Festival Committee, as a rule, translated its letters to the PSO into English, Vaughan and Malinowska communicated almost exclusively in French—a language in which, Vaughan admitted, he did not feel entirely comfortable.27 U.S. government institutions were so little involved with the Cunningham company’s journey to Poland that, Brown remembers, local American diplomats were utterly flabbergasted when the group showed up for their post-festival engagements in the city of Poznań.28 The steps to bring the Cunningham ensemble to the Warsaw Autumn adhered to a larger pattern in which festival organizers used personal contacts, nonstate communication channels, and their ability to travel internationally as the means to seek out and pull the most up-to-date music into Poland. During the 1960s, Lutosławski was an especially important link between Poland and the West. His

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work with the ISCM gave him access to scores from all over the world. An extensive web of personal contacts kept him apprised of emerging developments. One of these contacts, Luigi Nono, ferried new works by Italian composers to Lutosławski in 1960; Lutosławski, in turn, passed these pieces on to the Warsaw Autumn Festival Committee.29 Other members of the Festival Committee and Repertoire Commission used their personal connections in similar ways. Western new-music institutions were essential conduits of information, especially about the music by the postwar avant-garde. Darmstadt was, in this respect, an essential point of reference. Polish musicians participated in the Summer Courses for the first time in 1957; subsequent pilgrimages occurred annually well into the 1960s.30 Nearly all of the works that Polish musicians encountered at Darmstadt in the late 1950s soon appeared on the Warsaw Autumn program.31 When festival planners traveled abroad, they were not simply looking for scores: they were also looking for people. Along with the festival’s official observers and informal tourists, Western performers played vital roles in the cross-border circulation of new music via the Warsaw Autumn. Festival planners viewed these musicians as emissaries of their home countries, regardless of whether they were privately funded or appearing in Poland as part of state-sponsored cultural diplomatic tours. Organizers hoped that these performers would convey information about the local and national new-music scenes to which festival audiences lacked direct access. High-profile Western musicians were also the bearers of specialist knowledge, which enabled them to present the works that their Polish counterparts were not always equipped to perform. The Warsaw Autumn boasted performances in its first decade by many of the same virtuosi who were fixtures at Western European new-music institutions: Italian flautist Severino Gazzelloni, West German cellist Siegfried Palm, and powerhouse American pianist David Tudor, among many others. Even before the Cunningham company’s 1964 tour, the Festival Committee was seeking to lure Tudor back to Warsaw for a repeat of his 1958 performance—this time with Cage’s collaboration.32 But the flow of music, people, and ideas into Poland was not always unimpeded. Scores and parts were not always readily available. At times Warsaw Autumn planners had trouble engaging performers. Some reasons for this were financial. When the festival began, Western performers were typically paid in hard currency. This practice changed in 1963, when MKiS decreed that all of the festival’s international performers were to be paid in złoty, Poland’s nonconvertible currency.33 By 1965, the Festival Committee was complaining that “it is increasingly rare that foreign musicians are willing to appear at our Festival only for złoty.”34 They urged MKiS to set aside a fixed amount of hard currency each year to pay performers from nonsocialist countries. Because Western musicians ferried vital information about contemporary music into Poland, it was important to organizers that they keep this channel open. They were also concerned to remove

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financial impediments because their ability to attract high-profile Western performers was one way that the Warsaw Autumn maintained its status as an institution that was contributing to the development and dissemination of contemporary music. The musicians themselves could erect other barriers that interrupted the influx of information from the West. Pierre Boulez consistently thwarted organizers’ efforts to bring him to the festival in the 1960s. Negotiations with Boulez began in 1960. After returning from that year’s ISCM Festival in Cologne, Lutosławski told the Festival Committee that Boulez and Le Domaine musical’s resident instrumental ensemble could potentially participate in the 1962 Warsaw Autumn; PAGART was already taking steps to arrange the group’s appearance.35 The anticipated performance was pushed to 1964 before ultimately failing to materialize. In the meantime, organizers attempted to engage Boulez as a conductor; they hoped he would lead Poland’s National Philharmonic in a performance of Pli selon pli.36 Boulez reportedly asked that the concert, originally scheduled for 1964, be postponed for a year.37 The Repertoire Commission sought to renew negotiations for the 1965 festival, only to be disappointed once again.38 Pli selon pli would not be heard at the Warsaw Autumn until 1988, and although Boulez’s music has remained a staple of festival programming, he never participated in the Warsaw Autumn in person.39 In Cage’s case, the blocks were political. Seeking to make the most of his 1964 visit to Warsaw, festival planners asked Cage to present a half-recital with David Tudor in addition to participating in the Cunningham company’s performance. Cage and Tudor agreed, and by the end of March 1964, everything appeared to be settled.40 But there was a problem, ZKP President and Festival Committee Chair Stefan Śledziński explained several weeks later. Because the PSO was also appearing at that year’s Warsaw Autumn, organizers had become concerned about maintaining “proper balance” in the program—that is, avoiding the impression that the concerts were biased in favor of American music. Could they perhaps give their recital another year?41 No, Cage parried, using Vaughan as an intermediary. After all, traveling to Poland was no easy matter. He was especially disappointed that he and Tudor would be unable to premiere the new work Cage had commissioned from Christian Wolff especially for the occasion.42 Festival organizers did not want to lose the chance to feature Cage and Tudor in a world premiere, so they devised a makeshift solution: a twenty-minute interlude between the first and second halves of the Cunningham company’s performance.43 Cage and Tudor accepted, proposing a program of Cage’s Variations II and Variations III.44 Not even Cage, then, was immune to the headaches of Cold War cultural diplomacy as it was practiced at the Warsaw Autumn. The irony was that the U.S. Department of State had rejected the Cunningham company’s application for financial support; the company cobbled together funds from a variety of private sources to subsidize its 1964 world tour. Cage was piqued by the lack of recognition that the

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absence of government aid had implied. Lewis L. Lloyd, the dance company’s tour manager, has speculated that it was precisely Cage’s loudly expressed displeasure with the U.S. Department of State’s decision that eased the group’s entry into Czechoslovakia in September 1964.45 But the Warsaw Autumn’s bureaucratic practices were less attuned to such distinctions. Even though, from the standpoint of government aid, the Cunningham company was not traveling to Poland as officially funded cultural ambassadors of the United States, Warsaw Autumn organizers and Polish officials nevertheless viewed these performers as representatives of American culture. And because, like the PSO’s players, Cage and Tudor were American, their appearances had to be contained so as not to upset the festival’s precarious East–West balance. The examples of the PSO and the Cunningham company demonstrate that, when it came to the Warsaw Autumn’s Western performers, the distinction between state and nonstate actors was frequently unclear, so that there was no clear bifurcation between international and transnational forms of cross-border contact. The PSO’s concert could be understood as presenting a bounded image of American music within an international system of cultural exchange. But audience responses to the orchestra’s performance also suggested the existence of transnational affinities that blurred distinctions between American and Soviet contemporary music. Conversely, Cage and Tudor’s contributions to the Cunningham Dance Company’s performance undermined state borders by unsettling singular notions of an “American” music; their collaboration with the Czechoslovak performers of Musica Viva Pragensis further suggested the existence of a transnational new-music community. Yet the Warsaw Autumn’s bureaucratic logic also reinforced national divisions by viewing Cage, Tudor, and the Cunningham company’s dancers as representatives of the United States. These examples also point to an essential contradiction in the festival’s status as a site of cultural mobility. On one hand, the festival contributed to the cross-border mobilization of people, music, and ideas—extending, for example, the reach of the American avant-garde into Cold War Eastern Europe by hosting the Cunningham company, Tudor, and Cage in 1964. At the same time, however, the Warsaw Autumn’s bureaucratic procedures (especially the requirement to ensure balanced coverage of music from the East and the West) confined musicians and musical works in defined points of origin. Cage and Tudor’s difficulties in 1964 demonstrate that such definitions had the potential to be limiting. The festival’s circulation of new music across East–West geopolitical borders therefore involved complexities as well as contingencies. In 1964, Warsaw Autumn planners were not able to get everything they wanted from either the PSO or the Cunningham dance company. In each instance, organizers most desired repertoire that represented the postwar avant-garde or early-twentieth-century modernism. Yet this was also the repertoire that required the most careful management.

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It was no easier to circulate music by the avant-gardes that were appearing within the Eastern Bloc. We have seen that festival planners sought music from the West that they considered to be stylistically advanced and technically progressive. They desired similar music from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. But although Warsaw Autumn planners may have wanted to promote postwar avant-gardes regardless of where they had sprung up, socialist cultural politics affected the information they could obtain about this music and often determined whether performances of it could take place. One complicating factor was the distinction between official and unofficial music that was in force during the 1960s to varying degrees throughout the Eastern Bloc. Negotiating this boundary created fundamental differences between the ways in which festival organizers were able to disseminate new music from the West and the processes by which they circulated contemporary composition from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. We should also keep in mind that the Warsaw Autumn was not just a platform for the exercise of soft power across the Cold War’s large geopolitical divides; the festival was equally an arena for cultural diplomatic maneuvers within the Eastern Bloc. Through the repertoire and performers it sent officially to the Warsaw Autumn, the Soviet Union broadcast messages to the nations of Eastern Europe about modern socialist culture. Like Poland, other Eastern European states also sought to use the festival as a way to further their particular cultural diplomatic agendas and to promote their distinctive visions of socialist modernity. At the Warsaw Autumn, citizens of the Eastern Bloc were often speaking as much to each other as to the outside world. Many of these conversations took place through official channels. A well-developed system of cultural exchanges guaranteed festival organizers a steady stream of compositions and performers representing the official musical cultures of the Eastern Bloc. Yet, in any given year, there was not enough time to present music from every Eastern European country while still providing an overview of new pieces from Poland and the West. The Soviet Union’s place at the top of the Eastern Bloc’s cultural hierarchy meant that there would always be room at the Warsaw Autumn for Soviet performers and compositions. To manage international relations among the “people’s democracies,” Warsaw Autumn planners proposed a rotation system in which the same Eastern European country could not appear on the festival program in successive years.46 Aside from deciding which countries to showcase, there was also the question of what the Eastern European ensembles would play. From the outset, Warsaw Autumn organizers were aware that “new music” had divergent meanings in the East and the West, and that there were also gradations of difference within Eastern

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Europe.47 Initially they opted to give Eastern European musicians free rein to choose their concert programs, as part of their project to present a complete, multifaceted view of postwar composition.48 Festival organizers and Polish cultural officials soon began to question this strategy. By 1961, state administrators were advising Warsaw Autumn planners to help the Eastern European ensembles select suitable repertoire.49 This was because, despite the Warsaw Autumn’s overt selfpositioning as a site for objective comparison, covertly the festival was a means of asserting cultural parity with the West, and so its tacit rules privileged Western definitions of avant-garde music. Socialist-realist compositions were thus virtually guaranteed a poor reception at festival concerts. The Bulgarians chose the Sofia Philharmonic’s repertoire on their own in 1961, which resulted in a string of works whose folksy lyricism and clear indebtedness to nineteenth-century Russian classics hewed closely to an official ideological line.50 The Festival Committee described this concert as an “unfortunate” event, one that had probably “done more harm than good” in advertising contemporary Bulgarian music. “We should no longer allow such bad experiences to happen,” they concluded.51 Far from demonstrating geopolitical unity, presentations of unabashedly socialist realist works at the Warsaw Autumn could contribute to tensions between Poland and its socialist neighbors if these performances led festival observers to conclude that contemporary composition in Eastern Europe was hopelessly backward compared to what was considered to be new music in the West. One question, then, was what socialist music might mean in the 1960s, and who had the power to define it. This question intersected with the larger problem of what state sovereignty would look like in the Eastern Bloc, especially after the upheavals of the mid-1950s had demonstrated the potential for limited expressions of national difference. The Warsaw Autumn’s Polish organizers were not inclined to accept the Soviet Union’s leading role in setting the Eastern Bloc’s cultural agenda. They balked at a Soviet proposal to devote three days of the 1964 Warsaw Autumn to Soviet music, with appearances by leading soloists and performances of “the most distinguished compositions, with an emphasis on Shostakovich.”52 The date was significant: 1964 would mark the twentieth anniversary of the Soviet “liberation” of Nazi-occupied Poland. Highlighting Soviet music at that year’s Warsaw Autumn would therefore have made a larger point about the presumed cultural (and, by extension, political) hierarchies that were at work in Eastern Europe. ZKP’s representatives on the Festival Committee and Repertoire Commission attempted to turn the situation to their advantage. Józef Patkowski cited bureaucratic procedure—the general policy of not repeating works—to argue against adding large amounts of Shostakovich to the 1964 program. Tadeusz Baird reasoned that three concerts—not three full days—could be allotted to Soviet music and performers, provided that the repertoire foregrounded young composers whose music had never been heard in Poland.53 He did not quite get his wish:

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among the Soviet composers featured in 1964, only Estonian Jaan Rääts could conceivably be counted as part of the rising generation. But neither was Soviet music a dominant force that year: instead of the imagined three-day extravaganza, there was only a single midweek concert, when the Moscow Chamber Orchestra performed under Rudolf Barshai’s direction.54 If the goal was to maintain Polish autonomy in the face of Soviet influence, then we might view this episode as a Warsaw Autumn success story. Typically, though, festival planners failed to make much of an impact on the Soviet and Eastern European concert programs. This spottiness resulted, in part, from how the festival was planned. Both PAGART and the BWKZ were linked to sister institutions in the Eastern Bloc. Goskontsert, the state-run Soviet concert agency, was one of them. These institutional connections ostensibly eased cross-border flows of people and information in the service of increased regional cohesion. When it came to the Warsaw Autumn, however, such contacts were just as likely to put roadblocks in festival planners’ way. Organizers had little direct control over which Eastern European performers might appear at the festival. Instead, these arrangements were dictated by the cultural exchange agreements that were negotiated over their heads, between government ministries.55 Contact with Eastern European musicians also typically took place through intermediaries. These circuitous channels of crossborder communication could bring Warsaw Autumn planning to a halt. In March 1961, for example, desperate Festival Committee members begged MKiS to speed up its negotiations with Bulgaria and East Germany, because “the lack of information from both countries has completely paralyzed our work on the festival program.”56 Lack of direct contact meant that there were few opportunities for Warsaw Autumn committee members to influence the festival concert programs of their Eastern European neighbors. Even more importantly, because Warsaw Autumn concerts gave Westerners a glimpse into the Eastern Bloc, cultural officials had an interest in controlling what these observers might see within the festival showcase. Handling music by émigrés therefore required special sensitivity. The festival was not necessarily closed to Poles living in the West. Its programs featured works by members of the diaspora, including Michał Spisak, who had lived in Paris since the 1930s, and Konstanty Regamey, who settled in Switzerland in 1944. Roman Haubenstock-Ramati emigrated from Poland to Israel in 1950; he later returned to Europe and became an Austrian citizen in 1957.57 Like Spisak and Regamey, Haubenstock-Ramati had several Warsaw Autumn performances. For the Polish government, the question was one of émigrés versus defectors. With the exception of a 1958 performance of his Symphony no. 4, defector and regime opponent Roman Palester was blacklisted at the Warsaw Autumn until the late 1970s. Andrzej Panufnik’s works suffered the same fate.58 What to do, then, with a composer like György Ligeti? In the 1960s, Ligeti undoubtedly was on the Western European cutting edge and consequently could

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not be ignored at an institution that purported to present a comprehensive overview of new music. At the same time, his emigration to the West in the wake of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution meant that performances of his music in the Eastern Bloc had the potential to be politically problematic. Thus, although Stockhausen had already presented Artikulation during his 1958 lecture on electronic music, festival organizers had to negotiate with the Hungarian Embassy during the first half of the 1960s to clear subsequent Warsaw Autumn performances of Ligeti’s works. These conversations were not always successful. Festival Secretary Witold Rudziński could not persuade the Hungarian ambassador to approve a performance of Atmosphères in 1961; the piece would not be heard at the Warsaw Autumn until 1985.59 Repertoire Commission member Włodzimierz Kotoński had better luck when he spoke to a Hungarian cultural attaché in 1965: the Helsinki Philharmonic was able to add Apparitions to its festival program.60 The example of Ligeti demonstrates that it was not impossible for music by émigré composers to appear on the Warsaw Autumn program. But mounting these performances required careful maneuvering, and there is the sense that, when it came to the Warsaw Autumn at least, émigré composers remained subject to Eastern European cultural policies even after they had seemingly left Eastern Europe behind. The Soviet Union was especially concerned with controlling its self-presentation at the Warsaw Autumn: strategic selections of performers and repertoire illuminated some facets of Soviet musical life while veiling others. One problem was the group of unofficial composers who had started experimenting with abstract, modernist compositional techniques from the West. Another was pianist Maria Yudina, who became notorious in the early 1960s for her allegiance to modernism both old and new. Peter Schmelz describes her performances of Andrey Volkonsky’s Musica Stricta for solo piano as electrifying audiences in Moscow and Leningrad in 1961. This was not just because Volkonsky’s idiosyncratic serial techniques challenged prevailing Soviet compositional orthodoxy, though the work did play a seminal role in the development of unofficial Soviet music.61 Yudina’s flinty playing also highlighted all that was hard-edged, uncompromising, and therefore potentially oppositional about the piece. A repeat Leningrad performance in November 1961 cemented Musica Stricta’s connection with antiauthoritarian sentiment. Yudina began her recital by playing Webern’s Variations, op. 27; she ended with the Volkonsky. In between, she read poetry by Boris Pasternak and Nikolai Zabolotsky. From this point on, Soviet officials took measures to reduce Yudina’s domestic visibility and freedom of movement. She was first barred from performing in Leningrad; by March 1963, she was unable to concertize or teach anywhere in the Soviet Union, a ban that lasted until the autumn of 1966.62 News of Yudina’s scandalous November 1961 recital quickly traveled to Poland. Just one month after the performance occurred, Warsaw Autumn planners approached the pianist to see if she might be interested in a 1962 festival appear-

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ance. The repertoire they requested was precisely the pieces Yudina had recently played in Leningrad, Volkonsky’s Musica Stricta and the Webern Variations, along with two additions: Szymanowski’s Maski (Masks) and a piano sonata by fledgling Romanian modernist Aurel Stroe, a significant choice given that music from that country had not been performed at the Warsaw Autumn since 1956.63 By late January 1962, the Festival Committee was corresponding with Yudina to hammer out the details of her program.64 They were confident enough to list Musica Stricta as a coming attraction in the festival’s 1962 promotional brochure.65 But there was a catch—Yudina’s participation in the Warsaw Autumn had to be confirmed via official channels, and she was having trouble getting permission to go to Poland. After weighing their options in early March 1962, ZKP’s executive board decided to attempt to influence the situation through diplomatic channels: they sent a plea for help to Poland’s ambassador to the Soviet Union.66 This effort came to naught. In early April, Goskontsert sent a telegram to the Festival Committee with its final decision: Yudina would not be allowed to perform in Warsaw.67 In this instance, the inability of the performer to travel also prevented the planned performance of Volkonsky’s piece at the 1962 festival. In the meantime, the Soviet concert agency had already begun to make alternative arrangements. They proposed violinist Mikhail Vayman, accompanied by pianist Maria Karandashova; Warsaw Autumn planners approved the choice in late March 1962, when negotiations with Yudina were still ongoing.68 The works Vayman and Karandashova performed were not exactly ingratiating. There was little consistent uplift in Prokofiev’s Violin Sonata no. 1 in F Minor, op. 80. The pair also performed Stravinsky’s neoclassic Duo concertant. Gritty sonatas by Galina Ustvolskaya and Boris Klyuzner impressed one American observer as “surprisingly dissonant.”69 The example of Ustvolskaya’s Sonata for Violin and Piano demonstrates that the official Soviet music presented at the Warsaw Autumn in the early 1960s could go beyond the consonant, mellifluous accessibility associated with socialist realism (Example 1). The opening sets the tone for the piece, which unfolds in a continuous movement over approximately twenty minutes. Meter is reduced to a relentlessly plodding quarter-note pulsation. The harmony is saturated with dissonant vertical clashes. The violin repeats a brittle, five-note motive whose pitches are separated from one another through up-bow articulation. While the motive’s pitch material—A-flat and E-flat—might imply a tonic–dominant relationship, this relationship is not supported by the piano. Ustvolskaya’s sonata is acerbic. But from the official Soviet perspective, the important thing was that it was not serial. Unlike the juxtaposition of Webern and Volkonsky that would have occurred in Yudina’s performance, Vayman and Karandashova’s program did not make uncomfortable suggestions about the dependence of new Soviet music on formalist trends from Western Europe. Their self-contained repertoire was limited to composers who were part of the Soviet fold—including the newly rehabilitated

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example 1. Ustvolskaya, Sonata for Violin and Piano, rehearsal 1–4. By permission of MUSIKVERLAG HANS SIKORSKI, Hamburg. Copyright © G. SCHIRMER INC. for USA, Canada, and Mexico. 2

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Stravinsky, whose triumphal homecoming occurred nearly simultaneously with the 1962 Warsaw Autumn. This concert was thus a carefully calibrated exposition of Soviet modernity, one that had been generated from within before its export to Poland. The repertoire Soviet performers brought to the 1962 Warsaw Autumn presumably represented their home country’s official point of view. In Poland, however, these pieces were understood as misrepresenting the more complex realities of

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Soviet musical life. Before the 1962 festival, Wiktor Weinbaum, director of MKiS’s music division, asked composer–critic Stefan Kisielewski and musicologist Zofia Lissa to review a draft of the program. Kisielewski and Lissa had opposing musical tastes and divergent political views. Yet neither could understand why festival organizers had been so unadventurous when it came to the Soviet music scheduled for that year. Kisielewski complained that focusing on composers like Prokofiev was taking the path of least resistance.70 Lissa advocated performing pieces by the fledgling group of Moscow-based radicals (including Volkonsky), because, as she put it, “this would counteract the prevailing view of the ‘backwardness’ of Soviet music.”71 As we have seen, adding such works to the Warsaw Autumn program was easier said than done. Weinbaum admitted in a letter to Minister of Culture Tadeusz Galiński that powerful figures in the Eastern Bloc’s other composers’ unions “do not always agree with the creative explorations of young composers.”72 Outside Poland, that is, modernist experimentation was not always viewed as an appropriate official representation of “socialist” music. M OV I N G N EW M U SIC I N F O R M A L LY I N T H E E A ST E R N B L O C

But official exchanges were not the only way to circulate contemporary music within the Eastern Bloc. Informal contacts opened alternative channels of communication between festival organizers and their colleagues in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Many of these informal connections were forged through tourism. As we saw in the previous chapter, an influx of Soviet tourists attended the Warsaw Autumn in the 1960s. While cultural consumption was an important aspect of their festival visits, the Warsaw Autumn not only provided opportunities for Soviet tourists to absorb modernist music from Poland and the West. As a zone of cross-border contact that brought together people who were unlikely to meet in any other way, the Warsaw Autumn was an excellent place for Soviet musicians to network—to contribute, in other words, to the exchanges of information that were taking place during and between festival performances. In what follows, I will trace the journey of one such traveler—Edison Denisov—to demonstrate how tourism and informal networking created transnational ties that enabled unofficial Soviet music to begin traveling westward across the Polish border. Like Volkonsky, the composer of Musica Stricta, Denisov wrote music using the abstract, serial methods that were officially suspect in the Soviet Union during the 1960s. He attended the Warsaw Autumn for the first time in 1962. Denisov’s aesthetic predilections disqualified him from the official Soviet delegation. Instead, he paid his own way to Warsaw, traveling as a tourist with a group from the Soviet Union of Composers.73 That he was able to go to Poland at all suggests that Denisov’s status was still ambiguous in 1962: too questionable to represent the Soviet

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Union officially, but not so problematic that he was barred from traveling altogether, as he frequently would be in subsequent years. Denisov took full advantage of the opportunities to network at his first Warsaw Autumn. He met Elliott Carter, who was so impressed by the Soviet composer that, in a private letter to Paul Fromm, he hyperbolically described Denisov as a “23-toner from Moscow” and said that he was planning to acquire the score of Denisov’s Piano Variations.74 Denisov also connected with Polish composers— including the members of the Warsaw Autumn organizing committees. After the 1962 Warsaw Autumn, Denisov wrote a private letter to Kazimierz Serocki; he proposed his new work, the Concerto for Flute, Oboe, Piano, and Percussion, as a potential addition to one of the upcoming festival programs. Serocki relayed the idea to the Repertoire Commission, which responded favorably.75 The world premiere of Denisov’s composition took place at the 1964 festival, during a cosmopolitan concert that also featured works by Bulgarian, Polish, British, and Italian composers.76 This was the first time that unofficial Soviet music had been heard at the Warsaw Autumn. Denisov’s sound world and handling of serial techniques would not have been radical for festival audiences in 1964. After an initial tritone leap, the concerto’s source row consists primarily of major and minor thirds. Denisov treats the P0 row form as a theme in a brisk first movement that is aurally reminiscent of Bartók and whose clear formal stages draw on sonata principles of exposition, development, and recapitulation. At the work’s outset, P0 gradually emerges in the piano in three lengthening statements, a process Denisov repeats as the first movement ends. Starting at rehearsal 14 (Example 2), the piano presents the first seven, the first nine, and finally all twelve pitches of P0 as similar processes unfold in the flute (playing I6) and oboe (playing P3). The slow middle movement features a succession of rhapsodic, rhythmically supple cadenzas for the concerto’s four performers, whereas the pointillistic third movement evokes Webern and the postwar serialists. Here Denisov manipulates his row forms using segmentation and reordering, while also engaging in the pitch repetition that was a hallmark of his serial style.77 Although the third movement’s harmonic design is rooted in serial procedures, tonal elements occasionally emerge in the sounding surface, and this is due not least to the row’s intervallic construction. Take, for instance, the work’s closing moments (Example 3). At rehearsal 33, the piano straightforwardly presents R0. The flute and oboe begin the passage by collectively playing RI0 in full. Then, while the piano completes its row, the flute, oboe, and marimba loudly repeat B-flat, E-flat, and G-flat, which are the first three pitches of R0, as well as being the components of an E-flat minor triad. So it was not Denisov’s particular approach to serialism that made the Concerto for Flute, Oboe, Piano, and Percussion newsworthy at the 1964 Warsaw Autumn. What was groundbreaking was that a Soviet composer was using these techniques, and his music was receiving a festival performance.

example 2. Denisov, Concerto for Flute, Oboe, Piano, and Percussion, I, rehearsal 14. Copyright © 1968 by Universal Edition A.G., Wien/UE 14301.

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In some respects, this performance occurred because Denisov had been in the right place at the right time. Through traveling to Poland and communicating directly with Warsaw Autumn planners, Denisov circumvented the official channels that had, to that point, blocked performances of unofficial Soviet music. It also helped that the festival’s Polish organizers were keen to promote the musical avant-gardes that were springing up throughout Eastern Europe. Although a performance of Volkonsky’s Musica Stricta never came to pass, the Repertoire Commission continued to hunt for music by the Soviet Union’s “young composers.”78 Meanwhile, the Festival Committee pledged in 1963 that it would “establish contacts with the People’s Democracies and present their compositions, especially works by young, avant-garde composers.”79 Committee members were perhaps responding to the criticism their programming received in 1962, when peer reviewers in Poland had objected that the Soviet offerings were too staid. Their interest also had a more pragmatic motivation: finding adventurous new music from the Eastern Bloc was part of a broader strategy to ensure that Warsaw Autumn concert programs would remain varied, up-to-date, and provocative, and therefore continue to attract the large audiences that were crucial to ensuring the institution’s legitimacy in socialist Poland.80 But there was a streak of idealism as well. A member of the Repertoire Commission throughout the 1960s, composer Włodzimierz Kotoński has recalled that programming unofficial Soviet music furthered festival organizers’ goal to present as in-depth a picture as possible of contemporary musical life in various countries.81 At the time, Kotoński traveled frequently on cultural exchanges throughout Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. In addition to conducting official business while he was abroad, he also used these trips to find new works that might fit the Warsaw Autumn’s predominantly modernist profile.82 Locating the Eastern Bloc’s avant-gardes was one thing. As we have seen, information might come from the composers themselves; members of the Warsaw Autumn organizing committees also turned official cultural exchanges to their advantage. Performing this music was another matter entirely: it was often easier to transport music scores across borders than it was for musicians to travel. Polish performers gave Warsaw Autumn planners a way to circumvent potential Soviet resistance to presentations of unofficial music. In 1959, ZKP higher-ups discussed using local players as a way to present a wider variety of music from Eastern Europe.83 The Warsaw Autumn Festival Committee returned to this idea in 1963, when it proposed that Polish orchestras might perform works from other socialist countries.84 Two unofficial Soviet composers—Alfred Schnittke and Arvo Pärt— had their festival debuts in just this way. On 28 September 1965, Witold Krzemieński led the Poznań State Symphony Orchestra in the world premiere of Schnittke’s forbiddingly abstract Music for Piano and Chamber Orchestra. One night later, Andrzej Markowski conducted the same ensemble in the Polish premiere of Pärt’s

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Perpetuum Mobile, an audience favorite whose immediately apprehensible buildup of musical tension (and its release) is structured according to a serially ordered formal plan.85 Aside from presenting unofficial Soviet music to an international audience, these performances were noteworthy for two additional reasons. Neither took place during the opening gala or closing concert, the festival’s two most prestigious time-slots and the events that were most likely to have a substantial government presence. Instead of Poland’s premiere symphonic ensemble, the Warsaw-based National Philharmonic, a regional orchestra performed Schnittke’s and Pärt’s compositions. These decisions suggest that festival organizers were concerned to minimize the antagonisms that could result from their promotion of unofficial Soviet composers. Musicians from other Eastern European countries provided additional options. Even during the Stalinist years, musical life in Eastern Europe had not been entirely uniform; the cultural changes of the Thaw further increased the limited possibilities for diversity. Musica Viva Pragensis—the new-music ensemble we encountered collaborating with Cage and Tudor—was one manifestation of the shifts that were occurring in Czechoslovakia. During the late 1940s, Czechoslovak cultural institutions had followed the larger pattern in the emerging Eastern Bloc when they were restructured along Stalinist lines. By April 1962, members of the Union of Czechoslovak Composers were publicly criticizing official policy during their Third Congress.86 Attitudes about the Warsaw Autumn were likewise changing in the atmosphere of relative relaxation and cautious openness to the West. Hudební Rozhledy (Music Review), mouthpiece of official composers’ union views, had published accounts of the festival since 1956; whereas earlier essays deployed standard socialist-realist formulae to lambast the Western—and, soon, the Polish—avant-garde, reviewers from 1962 to 1964 ventured some positive (albeit highly qualified) comments about the Warsaw Autumn.87 Foreign travel enabled Warsaw Autumn planners to keep tabs on the changes that were afoot across Poland’s southern border. A Repertoire Commission member discovered Musica Viva Pragensis when he was traveling in Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia in 1962.88 In keeping with its strategy to support the avant-gardes that were emerging throughout Eastern Europe, the Commission set plans in motion to bring Musica Viva Pragensis to the 1964 festival. The ensemble’s primary task at the Warsaw Autumn would be to perform new music from Czechoslovakia. But Musica Viva Pragensis also enabled festival organizers to supply Cage and Tudor with the small chamber ensemble they had requested for the Cunningham dance company’s performance. And the group’s personnel included the necessary forces for Denisov’s Concerto for Flute, Oboe, Piano, and Percussion. Like the tactic of assigning Pärt and Schnittke to the Poznań State Symphony Orchestra in 1965, having members of the Czechoslovak ensemble play the Denisov appears to have been a calculated move. Warsaw Autumn planners originally

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thought that they would give Denisov’s piece to a group of Western soloists who were scheduled to appear at the festival in 1963.89 It is unclear why this performance did not take place. But the shift is suggestive, for it speaks to some of the complexities of circulating Eastern European and Soviet music via the Warsaw Autumn during the 1960s. In many respects, the festival facilitated movement across boundaries. Denisov and the players of Musica Viva Pragensis traversed two state borders when they converged on Warsaw; acting through informal communication channels, Denisov exported the score of his Concerto for Flute, Oboe, Piano, and Percussion to Poland. Yet delegating Denisov’s concerto to Musica Viva Pragensis preserved Cold War geopolitical divisions in ways that a presentation by Western musicians would not have done. For years to come, ensembles from the West would be unable to perform works by unofficial Soviet composers at the Warsaw Autumn.90 In 1964, the assumed political solidarity among the Eastern Bloc’s musicians was another factor that facilitated the festival’s first glimpse of unofficial Soviet composition. AVA N T- G A R D E T R A N SNAT IO NA L I SM ( A N D I T S R E P E R C U S SIO N S )

The festival’s mobilization of Eastern European and Soviet avant-gardes had several consequences. Paradoxically, one of these effects was to underscore national difference within the Eastern Bloc. In the late 1950s, demonstrations of musical modernism at the Warsaw Autumn were one of the tactics Polish musicians had used to broadcast their cultural distance from the Soviet Union. As political and cultural changes took place elsewhere in Eastern Europe, local new-music scenes responded by taking what had become, by then, an obvious course: a belated, prestige-enhancing turn to Western modernism and the embrace of the Warsaw Autumn in official publications.91 Musica Viva Pragensis was one manifestation of these broader trends, for the group specialized in music that was self-consciously new. And regardless of whether these works had been composed in the East or the West, the pieces tended to embody “newness” in similar ways—by eschewing defined national markers, pushing the boundaries of traditional performance situations, and challenging conventional ways of working with harmony and form. Yet precisely because Musica Viva Pragensis took a transnational approach to its programming, the group signaled that, even though de-Stalinizing political reforms were slow to come to Czechoslovakia, the country’s musical life nevertheless was diverging during the early 1960s from official practices in the Soviet Union, where the injunction to produce new music that was “national in form, socialist in content” was not wholly abandoned during the Thaw. At the same time, musical practices that demonstrated national differences within the Eastern Bloc could also be understood as manifestations of increasingly close transnational ties across the Cold War’s East–West divides. As the Warsaw

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Autumn demonstrated—first through performances of works by the Polish avantgarde, and then by programming an array of new music from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union—composers on both sides of the Cold War’s geopolitical boundaries were exploring similar aesthetic territory. The innovative traits of new Polish music in the late 1950s had cemented its reputation in the West and enabled many Polish composers to take advantage of compositional opportunities abroad. Confronted with the nearly simultaneous mushrooming of local, socialist avant-gardes in the 1960s, Western observers again interpreted the festival’s concert programs as evidence that the “Iron Curtain” was perhaps not so impenetrable after all. In 1965, West German new-music specialist Ulrich Dibelius proclaimed that the “Warsaw Autumn effect was rippling through Poland’s neighbors, rejuvenating musical life in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, the Soviet Union, and beyond.”92 That same year, Elliott Carter cited the diffusion of Polish avant-gardism throughout Eastern Europe as the only phenomenon worth reporting from a festival that was lackluster compared to the one that had so dazzled him in 1962.93 Each of these accounts casts the mobility of modernist musical practices in terms of an eastward expansion of Western cultural influence via a Polish portal. Neither commentator questions the right of the West to set the terms of musical progress; each assumes that an alignment with modernism was, aesthetically at least, to be free. It is important to recognize that the apparent victory of modernism among Eastern European musicians was hardly the outcome of a fair fight, for like many of their counterparts in the West, these composers were also conceptualizing musical progress in terms of technical advancement. In other words, musicians on both sides of the Cold War honored the same criteria of prestige. This seeming paradox was a common phenomenon throughout the Eastern Bloc. It was present in other fields of cultural production: David Crowley has remarked that, when it came to design, “socialist modernity looked just like that found on the other side of the East–West divide.”94 György Péteri argues that this paradox was, in fact, at the core of the entire socialist modernization project, which “followed deliberately and programmatically the universal standards of technological and economic success” (i.e., the standards of Western modernity) while also attempting to maintain a fundamental distinction between the socialist and capitalist systems.95 We might understand the de facto adherence of both sides to Western criteria as a product of skewed power dynamics, in which those on the periphery seek legitimation by adopting the standards of the center.96 The swerve toward modernism in music, however, was not just a matter of importing standards of aesthetic judgment that had been articulated elsewhere, because composers in both the East and the West were heirs to the same Romantic heritage from which modernist definitions of musical value were ultimately derived. Thus, we might also understand Eastern European and Soviet composers’ advocacy of modernism in the 1950s and ’60s as stemming from their perception of a shared cultural history.

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The presence of common aesthetic values ensured that works manifesting modernist musical styles and techniques were mobile at the Warsaw Autumn during the 1960s in ways that other kinds of compositions were not. Works that were neotonal, traditionally constructed, or influenced by socialist-realist aesthetics circulated less readily via the festival, compared to those by musicians affiliated with an avant-garde. Cold War dynamics nevertheless ensured that the aftereffects of mobilizing modernist music were often more ambiguous for the Warsaw Autumn’s Polish organizers and supporters than they were for likeminded musicians and critics in the West. One instance of this took place in 1965, when Zygmunt Mycielski’s review of the Warsaw Autumn made the indecorous suggestion that it was clear that Polish composers “no longer have a monopoly on these things” when modernist music was being written and performed even in scattered locations in the Soviet Union.97 He interpreted the appearance of young Soviet composers— such as Schnittke and Pärt—as final proof that modernist imperatives of compositional progress had triumphed over socialist realism’s preservation of musical traditionalism. Pointing this out in print overstepped the bounds of decorum that governed Polish–Soviet international relations, even when these relations were musical: Mycielski’s review provoked a truculent response in Sovetskaya Muzïka, which was subsequently republished in Ruch Muzyczny.98 The consequences were similarly complex for the Eastern European avantgardists the Warsaw Autumn promoted, especially if these exposés were interpreted as saying something more general about cultural relations within the socialist sphere. The case of Musica Viva Pragensis in 1964 illustrates how festival exposure could have multiple outcomes. The group’s performances received a sympathetic response in the Polish musical press, where critic Bohdan Pociej hailed the new Czechoslovak works as signaling a breakthrough in that country’s musical thought.99 Travel to Warsaw also enabled ensemble member Petr Kotík to forge personal ties with musicians from the West.100 One of the composers Kotík met in Poland was the American Lejaren Hiller; this connection eventually enabled Kotík to leave post-1968 Czechoslovakia when Hiller invited him to participate in SUNY Buffalo’s Creative Associates Program.101 Yet although Warsaw Autumn participation ultimately increased Kotík’s mobility, the most immediate effect was to restrict his range of motion. A Polish reviewer described Music for Three, Kotík’s contribution to the 1964 festival, as an experiment in “sonic extremity,” in which the composer “instructs his string players to coax maximally ‘ugly’ and harsh sounds from their instruments”; the critic went on to note that the work had been “one of the few to provoke a scandal at this year’s Autumn.”102 This was not necessarily a bad thing: the abrasive composition and its turbulent reception had the potential to increase Kotík’s standing among the avant-garde musicians for whom envelope-pushing was a fundamental virtue. Czechoslovak cultural authorities were less convinced, however, that such

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deliberate provocations were an appropriate way to promote the national culture in a closely scrutinized international forum. They barred Musica Viva Pragensis from traveling to Yugoslavia in 1965 to perform at Zagreb’s biennial new music festival; Kotík left the group to keep it from being dissolved altogether.103 Warsaw Autumn exposure likewise had mixed outcomes for unofficial Soviet composers. Through performances of his music, Denisov became increasingly visible outside the Soviet Union during the 1960s. His works continued to sound at the Warsaw Autumn: in 1966 a Slovak ensemble performed Sun of the Incas with French soprano Berthe Kal.104 This work—for soprano, three speakers, and eleven instruments, to texts by the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral—was composed using serial methods, and it circulated widely throughout transnational new-music networks, receiving performances in West Germany, France, the United States, and the United Kingdom. As Denisov’s scores were becoming increasingly mobile, however, the composer’s position in the Soviet Union was becoming ever more fixed. Schmelz notes that, by the mid-1960s, Soviet cultural officials had ceased to view the composer as capable of reform. In other words, Denisov was incontrovertibly unofficial, a designation that affected his chances for promotion at home as well as his ability to travel abroad.105 At the most abstract level, presentations of Soviet and Eastern European modernism at the Warsaw Autumn could enable composers to make metaphorical, symbolic journeys even if they were prevented from crossing borders physically. My thinking on this point is indebted to Joy Calico, who has adopted the concept of “remigrating ideas” to argue that performances of Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw allowed the aged and infirm composer to remigrate symbolically to postwar Europe, even though he remained physically confined to the United States, the country he adopted in 1933. One reason for this, she argues, is that, during a performance, composers are “most significantly present in the aural materiality of their music,” rather than their persons.106 Although Calico is concerned primarily with the particular issue of émigré artists in postwar Europe, her concept of symbolic musical remigration is also useful for thinking about the implications of new-music performance at the Warsaw Autumn. For Eastern European and Soviet composers who experienced travel restrictions, festival performances could constitute a kind of symbolic migration in which, through the medium of their works, these musicians could be understood as participating in the definition and dissemination of modernist aesthetic ideas, and therefore as present in a transnational new-music community whose boundaries were determined by the presence of shared values and knowledge, rather than the presence of national, state, or geopolitical divisions. As a point of contact between East and West, the Warsaw Autumn was one of the most important sites where these symbolic migrations could take place.

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C R O S S - B O R D E R J OU R N EYS , C R O S S - B O R D E R R E L AT IO N SH I P S

There were many ways in which new-music performance at the Warsaw Autumn contributed to the mobilization of cultural products and the formation of crossborder relationships. Mobility via the festival involved the physical movement of people: performers, composers, official observers, tourists, and many others. It entailed the transport of objects: music scores, recordings, and the festival program books. It also involved the circulation of ideas about new music. As we have seen, some forms of cross-border interaction took place at the level of cultural diplomacy, in which musical actors were presumed to be acting as nation-state representatives; other contacts were more informal. The multiplicity of cross-border relationships the Warsaw Autumn facilitated suggests that the same institution might simultaneously be involved in forging both international connections, which reinforce the identities of discrete nation-states, and transnational connections that blur the boundaries between them. The Warsaw Autumn’s success in disseminating postwar musical avant-gardes underscores Poland’s importance in cementing East–West cultural ties. By enabling the cross-border transport of musical works, and providing a platform for traveling performers, the Warsaw Autumn encouraged the formation of cultural connections that mitigated the Cold War’s geopolitical divisions. In part, these connections were formed because the festival provided a space in which concertgoers could engage in supranational modes of self-identification. Direct encounters with compositions and performers were a key element in making these mental leaps. When, for example, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company performed live in Warsaw, festivalgoers did not have to rely on secondhand reports to imagine the group’s avant-garde approach to mingling music, art, and dance. They could observe, evaluate, and debate the performance for themselves, and, in the process, experience themselves as active participants in an unfolding, globe-spanning phenomenon.107 The festival can therefore be understood as playing a role in processes of globalization that Akira Iriye describes as ongoing throughout the twentieth century. While music festivals do not figure overtly in Iriye’s analysis of nonstate international organizations, the history of cultural exchange at the Warsaw Autumn suggests that these institutions have contributed to the formation of an increasingly dense global network of cross-border ties.108 At the same time, the festival was also a catalyst for change within the Eastern Bloc. The Warsaw Autumn provided access to information, a function that was vitally important not just in Poland, but throughout Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Festival performances additionally enabled Eastern European and Soviet musicians to enlarge their audiences. And the Warsaw Autumn’s prestige—both in

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Poland and the West—offered legitimation, which could, in turn, encourage composers and performers to explore (or continue to work in) some musical styles as opposed to others. Polish music thus had an impact that was similar to that of the Polish visual arts: Susan Reid, for example, has argued that exposure to modernist paintings from Poland contributed to Soviet processes of de-Stalinization.109 The meaning of these changes depended on the Cold War’s cultural politics, in which aesthetic strategies resonated in ways that went beyond their significance in specific artworks. But even as the festival enabled people and artworks to travel from one place to another, its organizational procedures rooted them in specific locations—within state borders (East or West) and, more metaphorically, in defined aesthetic regions. The perceived strength of these divisions was, in fact, what made the festival relevant during the Cold War. Thus, borders not only constrain; they can also be enabling. And during the 1960s, the Warsaw Autumn not only facilitated cross-border mobility. The festival also defined boundaries and contributed to maintaining them, even as it invited transgression.

6

The Limits of Exchange

In 1963, Heinrich Strobel, head of the ISCM, approached Kazimierz Serocki when they were both in Donaueschingen for the annual Music Days. Strobel had a proposition: what if the Warsaw Autumn hosted the 1965 ISCM Festival?1 Launched in 1923, the peripatetic ISCM Festival facilitated contact between members of the society’s national sections by providing an international forum in which they could present their works. Interrupted by World War II, the annual festival had resumed in 1946, taking place in cities throughout Western Europe as well as in Haifa, Israel, in 1954.2 Yet it had never taken place in postwar—that is, Cold War— Eastern Europe. Serocki was interested, and he anticipated that his colleagues would be, too. He conveyed Strobel’s idea to the Warsaw Autumn Repertoire Commission, which indicated that it would have to run the plan by the Festival Committee, ZKP’s leadership, and the head of the BWKZ. They also had to obtain diplomatic clearance to host the event.3 Needless to say, realizing the joint festival took longer than expected. The ISCM Festival did not coincide with the Warsaw Autumn until 1968, three years after the date Strobel originally suggested. In the meantime, Poland lost its chance to host the first ISCM Festival in postwar Eastern Europe: that distinction went to Czechoslovakia, which sponsored the event in 1967. Even if its organizers could not claim to have set a precedent, the 1968 joint Warsaw Autumn/ISCM Festival nevertheless had special significance in Poland. The only previous ISCM Festival in the country had been in 1939, when the concerts took place in Warsaw and Kraków. For the members of Poland’s postwar contemporary art-music circles, the 1939 festival was a symbol of all they had lost, and all that the Warsaw Autumn stood to regain. Tadeusz Marek’s essay in the 1956 139

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Warsaw Autumn program book specifically referenced the 1939 ISCM Festival, calling it the start of a tradition that was unjustly derailed by the Nazi occupation and subsequent years of Stalinist isolation but was finally getting back on track with the new international festival of contemporary music.4 Critic Jerzy Waldorff, whose career bridged the interwar and postwar eras, likewise connected the Warsaw Autumn and ISCM events: in one review, he described the first Warsaw Autumn as, in reality, the second in a series of new-music festivals that had begun with the ISCM concerts in 1939.5 The return of the ISCM Festival to Poland in 1968 therefore suggested that Poland had successfully reclaimed its temporarily lost European identity. The past, while certainly not resolved, had been overcome. The joint endeavor between the Warsaw Autumn and the ISCM was also in tune with the ideals of the present. Numerous authors have characterized the 1960s as a period of increased mobility—an era when formerly rigid boundaries were becoming ever more fluid.6 In previous chapters, we have already seen some of the ways that the Warsaw Autumn contributed to movement across borders, whether through facilitating travel or mobilizing avant-gardes from both sides of the Cold War divide. The 1968 Warsaw Autumn/ISCM Festival was yet another sign of this burgeoning transnationalism, because it came about through ongoing relationships that connected festival planners in Poland to their likeminded counterparts elsewhere in the world. Had the concerts gone as planned, the 1968 festival would have been the impetus for further transnational interactions. Like many aspirations of the 1960s, however, ideals of cross-border partnership were only partially realized at the 1968 joint Warsaw Autumn/ISCM Festival. The concert program nearly collapsed under the year’s political pressures, when a significant number of the Western performers and high-profile special guests boycotted the event to protest Poland’s involvement in the five-power invasion that, in August 1968, suppressed the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia. This chapter will examine the organization, dissolution, and aftermath of the ill-starred 1968 Warsaw Autumn/ISCM Festival, to ask what this event can tell us about new-music dissemination in the late 1960s. The specific case of this festival will enable us to revisit one of this book’s primary questions: What did it mean for a music institution in socialist Poland to be “international” as well as “contemporary”? More specifically, what did these terms mean at a moment when Stalinism (and its abandonment during the Thaw) had ceased to be the primary point of political and historical reference? As we will see, the 1968 Warsaw Autumn/ISCM Festival demonstrated both the limits and the potential of 1960s transnationalism. While the variety of music on offer suggested a conception of “new music” that mitigated East–West and national borders, the dearth of Western participants told another story: the world was still significantly divided. The 1968 Warsaw Autumn/ISCM Festival also invites us to think about the ways that new-music institutions mediated encounters between music and politics

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in the late 1960s. The standard version of this story is that young musicians, galvanized by leftist political thought, abandoned the early Cold War’s supposedly apolitical modernism to become more politically active and socially engaged. Amy Beal and Martin Iddon each describe how, after 1968, young, politicized musicians pushed back against the established institutions at the heart of West Germany’s new-music scene, targeting Darmstadt in particular for its insularity, dictatorial administration, and lack of openness to alternative programming.7 In a similar vein, Beate Kutschke argues that, by the late 1960s, new-music festivals had become spaces for sharing political ideas and specific organizing tactics in addition to their long-standing status as sites for more apolitical forms of musical exchange.8 The history of the 1968 Warsaw Autumn/ISCM Festival adds nuance to this narrative. This is not only because Poland’s experiences with state socialism meant that notions of a politicized left, as well as social engagement through music, had different connotations there than they did in Western Europe. It is also because the joint festival provided a zone in which some of the diverse, individual responses to 1968 could come into contact—and collide. For there were many 1968s. Whatever their points of similarity may have been, the events in West Germany were not equivalent to those in France, which were not equivalent to those in Czechoslovakia, and so on.9 The diversity of 1968s further proliferated through the diversity of individual responses to them. Drawing on Eric Drott’s argument that genre mediates music’s capacity for political expression, I will suggest that the Warsaw Autumn shaped the ways in which its participants engaged in political action at the 1968 joint festival (or, conversely, the ways that they sought to disengage from the political realm).10 This was due in part to the Warsaw Autumn’s ongoing status as a site for Cold War cultural diplomacy—in which composers, their works, and performers functioned as representatives of particular nation-states while also serving as envoys from defined geopolitical regions. Just as important were the Warsaw Autumn’s connections to Poland’s communist government, whose approval and resources were required if the concerts were going to take place each year. But although the Czechoslovak crisis may have spurred festival participants to act, and the structure and history of the Warsaw Autumn may have inflected the decisions that they made, there was no one way to perform political action at the 1968 Warsaw Autumn/ISCM Festival. Just as the joint festival turned out to be something rather less than a straightforward manifestation of East–West partnership, the political acts performed under its auspices similarly had only limited—and often ambiguous—effects. THE ISCM IN POLAND

Like the Warsaw Autumn, the Polish Society for Contemporary Music (Polskie Towarzystwo Muzyki Współczesnej, or PTMW) was a forum through which

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Polish musicians negotiated their relationships to a larger world of new-music composition and performance. They launched the PTMW in 1923, one year after the ISCM’s founding in Salzburg. The PTMW encapsulated the tension between nationalism and cosmopolitanism that animated interwar Poland’s musical life. It was significant that the PTMW existed at all: the Russian, Prussian, and Austrian empires had partitioned Poland in the late eighteenth century, and the nation had only recently regained its independence in 1918. On one hand, then, the PTMW was an assertion of national identity on the international stage. Yet the organization also staked a claim to a cosmopolitan identity by enabling Polish musicians to look beyond national borders and participate in the articulation and propagation of modernist aesthetics that was taking place throughout Europe. Works by Polish composers frequently appeared on the programs of the ISCM Festivals that took place annually in the 1920s and ’30s. In terms of sheer numbers of works performed, Karol Szymanowski was as visible a presence at these festivals as Stravinsky, Hindemith, Bartók, and the composers of the Second Viennese School. Szymanowski also contributed to the society’s administration by acting as PTMW president and serving on the international juries that devised the ISCM Festival programs.11 The decision to have Warsaw and Kraków host the ISCM World Music Days in April 1939 was a further sign of Polish involvement in the new-music networks that crisscrossed Europe before World War II. The PTMW ceased operations during the war; as part of their efforts to reconstruct musical life in postwar Poland, a group of musicians (primarily composers) revived it.12 Witold Lutosławski was an active member. In 1947, he represented the PTMW at the ISCM Festival in Copenhagen; a year later, he represented Poland again when the ISCM Festival took place in Amsterdam.13 Like the formation of ZKP, the reconstitution of the PTMW was an attempt to pick up where the war had left off by resurrecting an organization that had been active in the interwar period. But while the paradigm of a national composers’ union was in tune with the calibrations of cultural life that were occurring throughout early–Cold War Eastern Europe, the PTMW was far less compatible with the changes that were taking place as Poland transitioned to state socialism. Through its connections with the ISCM’s other national sections, the PTMW looked toward Western Europe at a moment when Polish musical life was being reoriented toward the Soviet Union. More damningly, the ISCM stood for politically disengaged cosmopolitanism at a time when music in Poland was supposed to be becoming national in form, socialist in content. Passed in 1935, the ISCM’s resolution on artistic freedom claimed a separate, ostensibly neutral space for music and stated that the organization’s activities should be strictly apolitical. The society’s Article 3, instituted in 1937, indicated that the ISCM had an obligation to champion complex compositions in modernist styles.14 Neither of these stances was aligned with the cultural policies instituted to promote socialist realism in Poland. Perhaps inevitably, the PTMW

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ceased operations, by official decree, during the Stalinist deep freeze of the early 1950s. Polish musicians sought to reactivate the PTMW once again in October 1957, when the post-Stalin Thaw was at its peak temperature. Led by composer Grażyna Bacewicz and conductor Czesław Lewicki, an organizing committee sent a formal request for reactivation to the Social-Administrative Office of the Presidium of the National Council of Warsaw. This was a chance to correct the mistakes of the past, because, the committee reminded the authorities, the dissolution of the PTMW in 1951 had been a symptom of that era’s “erroneous cultural policy.” The PTMW Organizing Committee was also motivated by concerns for the future: reactivating the society would give composers yet another channel to disseminate their works internationally. If the PTMW were reconstituted quickly, it could even nominate works by Polish composers for performance at the upcoming 1958 ISCM Festival in Strasbourg.15 The organizing committee’s request was granted within the month.16 The decision to approve the PTMW’s reactivation in 1957 was a manifestation of the increased possibilities for contact with the outside world that were available to musicians in post-1956 Poland. The ISCM welcomed PTMW members back into the fold: the international selection jury chose Artur Malawski’s Piano Trio for performance in Strasbourg, and a coalition of composers prepared a report on musical activities in postwar Poland for presentation at the 1958 ISCM General Assembly.17 But the political— and especially the economic—climate of Cold War Eastern Europe erected significant barriers to the PTMW’s full participation in ISCM events. The PTMW’s primary source of income was membership dues, which hardly sufficed to cover the cost of sending performers and delegates to annual ISCM gatherings. From the outset, the reactivated PTMW relied on outside resources to make ends meet. The PTMW Organizing Committee initially appealed to ZKP’s executive board for aid, a move that was intended only as a stopgap measure until the group could secure its own funding sources.18 They sought these funds from MKiS. As the PTMW Organizing Committee explained to Minister of Culture Tadeusz Galiński in 1958, “The PTMW’s continued existence and development depends on an allocation from the Ministry”; they were willing to accept ministerial support either as a “direct subsidy” funneled directly to the PTMW or as “indirect funds” routed to the PTMW through an intermediary organization, such as ZKP or SPAM, the professional organization in Poland for performing musicians.19 The PTMW was not financially self-sustaining at any point in the late 1950s. Barely three years after approving the PTMW’s reactivation, the Interior Affairs Office of the Presidium of the National Council of Warsaw dissolved it, temporarily ending the organization’s existence as an independent entity.20 The office made its decision during a period in which the PZPR was looking to curtail the cultural trends it perceived as antithetical to socialism. The timing of the PTMW’s

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figure 7. Members of the selection jury for the 1964 ISCM festival in Copenhagen. From left: Witold Lutosławski, Eigel Kruttge, Mogens Andersen, Claude Rostand, Alexander Goehr, and Karl-Birger Blomdahl. Courtesy of Polska Agencja Prasowa.

dissolution could thus imply that the political center viewed the organization as a threat. Maja Trochimczyk presents this interpretation in her account of the 1968 Warsaw Autumn/ISCM Festival: she states that the PTMW was “outlawed” in 1960 and implies that, by extension, its supporters became renegades working against the Polish regime.21 This characterization of the PTMW’s dissolution oversimplifies a complex situation. Polish party-state authorities could have prevented the group from functioning altogether after 1960: they could have withheld funds, or refused to grant PTMW members permission to travel internationally to ISCM events. But they did not. Although the PTMW no longer had a separate legal status, compositions from Poland continued to sound at the ISCM’s annual festivals, and Polish musicians continued to take part in the society’s activities (Figure 7). This was possible because, from 1960 until the PTMW’s formal reactivation in 1977, the organization carried out its functions under the aegis of ZKP. Moreover, the PTMW’s supporters were hardly renegades. They were figures such as Lutosławski—in other words, some of the most central players in Poland’s official musical life, many of whom also occupied authoritative positions in the ZKP leadership. In many respects, then, the

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PTMW’s official dissolution in 1960 and the group’s absorption into ZKP merely formalized a preexisting, ongoing relationship of dependency. According to Bacewicz, when the PTMW was dissolved, it was still at the same “organizational stage” it had occupied since 1957, lacking the bank account and legal documents that would have confirmed the section’s status as a viable, separate entity.22 And the PTMW Organizing Committee had itself suggested that the group might receive state financial allocations via ZKP. At the same time, the PTMW’s absorption into ZKP brought an internationally oriented, self-professedly apolitical organization into the cultural apparatus of the Polish state, thereby increasing opportunities for official intervention and government oversight. The fate of the PTMW therefore demonstrates the difficulty in socialist Poland of finding a space for cultural production—especially cultural production that required substantial financial resources and the ability to travel internationally—outside the structures of the state. B R I N G I N G T H E I S C M F E ST I VA L T O WA R S AW

Although they didn’t spell out the gains explicitly, both the ISCM and the Warsaw Autumn stood to benefit from a cohosting arrangement. The ISCM relied on the host cities’ local infrastructure to mount its festivals; this was infrastructure that the Warsaw Autumn could supply. Because the Warsaw Autumn, as a rule, included performers and compositions from the socialist world, its concerts could also offer ISCM festivalgoers glimpses of music-making in countries where the ISCM was not (or was no longer) operational. The ISCM, with its well-developed networks and procedures for accessing new compositions from its member nations, likewise offered Warsaw Autumn planners a way to increase and diversify their offerings. Less tangibly (but even more importantly), the ISCM offered prestige—confirmation that the Warsaw Autumn was a prime player in the postwar new-music world. Organizers of the 1968 Warsaw Autumn/ISCM Festival initially projected a series of sixteen concerts. The ISCM would plan six of the performances; Warsaw Autumn committees would handle the remaining ten. The ISCM relied on established protocol to determine its 1968 festival program: an international selection jury, chaired by Lutosławski and comprising representatives from Sweden, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Spain, convened in Warsaw in mid-January 1968.23 They made their choices from a pool of candidate works that the ISCM’s national sections had submitted. The resulting Eurocentric program included multiple compositions from the selection jury members’ home countries, as well as pieces representing Argentina, Austria, France, Great Britain, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, West Germany, and the United States.24 In the meantime, plans for the 1968 Warsaw Autumn were ongoing, with composer and longtime festival planner Włodzimierz Kotoński at the helm of the

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Repertoire Commission. But while the ISCM selection jury’s work was eased by the society’s well-oiled submission procedures, the members of the Warsaw Autumn’s organizing bodies were having a harder time deciding what to program for 1968. The need to make up for lost time at the earliest festivals had given Warsaw Autumn planners a reliable way to orient themselves in relation to the music of the recent (and not-so-recent) past. Catching up with Western modernism had also mitigated the risks involved with Warsaw Autumn programming. Organizers could be confident that Polish audiences would be keen to hear acknowledged “contemporary classics” from the first half of the twentieth century, and eager to sample music by the established leaders of the Western avant-garde. By the late 1960s, however, the stock of previously unheard “contemporary classics” was dwindling, and the postwar avant-garde was no longer nearly so exotic as it had been. Now that the time had been made up, the question was how to go forward, a tricky proposition when, as one Festival Committee member put it, “masterpieces of contemporary music aren’t created every day.”25 Warsaw Autumn planners were keeping tabs on new works and emerging musical developments through their personal contacts with musicians in other places, reports from ZKP members who were traveling abroad, and their own international journeys.26 Despite organizers’ access to information, however, their action plan for the 1968 Warsaw Autumn program suggests that they were loath to take too great a leap into the unknown. In a departure from their standard procedure, the Festival Committee suggested repeating some of the “contemporary classics” that had already been heard at previous Warsaw Autumns.27 Rather than seeking out music by new (hence untested) composers, the Repertoire Commission’s strategy was to aim for completeness in their presentation of music by the established and rising stars of the Western European avant-garde. Their wish-list for the 1968 concerts thus included recent works by Luciano Berio, Mauricio Kagel, Helmut Lachenmann, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Iannis Xenakis that had not yet received Warsaw Autumn performances.28 Programming difficulties spanned the East–West geopolitical divide: administrators at new-music institutions in West Germany had been grappling with similar problems since the early 1960s.29 But Warsaw Autumn planners did face challenges that were unique to the socioeconomic context in which they were operating: a managed economy in the socialist Second World. Hard currency was one of these problems. Even in a typical year, festival organizers’ limited access to hard currency constrained their ability to attract Western performers. The Festival Committee was aware that similar limitations would be in play in 1968.30 What they did not fully anticipate was just how expensive it would be to host the ISCM Festival in Warsaw. The ISCM’s spotlight seemed to call for big-name performers, buzz, and publicity. Yet most of the additional costs had to be shouldered at the local level, which in turn siphoned hard currency away from the Warsaw Autumn.

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Accommodating the ISCM, in other words, not only expanded the Warsaw Autumn’s horizons: the cohosting arrangement also constrained organizers’ latitude in putting together the 1968 Warsaw Autumn program. The shrinking participation of American trombonist Stuart Dempster illustrates this dynamic. In summer 1967, organizers engaged Dempster, a champion of experimental music, to play a full recital at the 1968 Warsaw Autumn. The program was to consist of works that Barney Childs, Jacob Druckman, Pauline Oliveros, and Berio had composed especially for Dempster to perform.31 Several months later, in February 1968, the Warsaw Autumn secretary contacted Dempster with bad news: because the ISCM concerts had “forced” festival organizers “to meet many expenses in foreign currency that were previously unexpected in our budget,” they were going to have to cancel his concert.32 Dempster whittled down his program in response: he agreed to play a half-recital for a reduced fee, and he obtained a grant to cover his travel expenses to Warsaw.33 This episode is telling not just because it demonstrates that the ISCM concerts affected what Warsaw Autumn planners could do in 1968, even though the organization of each festival apparently took place on separate tracks. More broadly, this episode suggests that, no matter how permeable cultural boundaries between East and West may have become during the 1960s, economic disadvantages continued to erect considerable barriers to Eastern European musicians’ full participation in transnational new-music networks. If the financial strain of mounting the 1968 Warsaw Autumn/ISCM Festival pointed to ongoing divisions between Europe’s cultural economies, money woes also fomented tension between the Polish institutions whose coordination was essential for the event to take place. The Warsaw Autumn committees, whose members were drawn primarily from ZKP, accused PAGART of mishandling its logistical duties: contacting performers, drawing up contracts, and negotiating financial terms.34 The concert agency had been approaching potential performers at such late dates that many of them could not schedule a 1968 Warsaw Autumn appearance. PAGART also appeared to be making promises to ensembles that, Repertoire Commission members fretted, they would not be able to keep: the hard-currency fees that Les Percussions de Strasbourg were demanding, in particular, seemed to be beyond organizers’ means.35 The commission was so frustrated with PAGART that, in April 1968, its members planned to tell MKiS that neither they, nor ZKP at large, could be “held responsible for the twelfth Warsaw Autumn.”36 PAGART, in turn, blamed its apparent ineptitude on MKiS. The problem, a PAGART representative informed the Warsaw Autumn Festival Committee, was not inadequate stores of hard currency; the problem was PAGART’s lack of timely access to these funds. MKiS procedures stipulated that each hard-currency allotment for the Warsaw Autumn’s performances had to be approved on a caseby-case basis. PAGART could not begin negotiating with Western musicians until these allocations had been made. And when MKiS dawdled in making its

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decisions, as it had in early 1968, PAGART’s work was correspondingly delayed. Thus MKiS, not PAGART, was the ultimate source of the Warsaw Autumn’s financial troubles.37 By this point, festival planners had additional reasons to be annoyed with MKiS officials. As of mid-April, MKiS had not commented on the repertoire list that the Festival Committee had submitted several weeks earlier for official approval. Nor had MKiS cleared the committee’s proposed list of international guests, a necessary first step to issuing formal invitations and arranging travelers’ visas.38 Yet although administrative delays may have created friction among the Warsaw Autumn’s various planners, these delays were not necessarily obstructionist. The delays in 1968 were part of an ongoing pattern of bottlenecks, hiccups, and other bureaucratic headaches that had affected Warsaw Autumn planning from the very start. But they also reflected the circumstances of the historical moment: from the party-state’s perspective, there were far more pressing issues during the first half of the year than approving the Warsaw Autumn’s funding, repertoire, and guest list. Since late January, Polish society had been torn apart by civil unrest that exposed rifts between the party-state and Polish intellectual and social elites. The catalyst was the cancellation of an incendiary production of Adam Mickiewicz’s Dziady (Forefather’s Eve) that had opened in Warsaw in late November 1967. Polish cultural authorities felt that the production played up the drama’s anti-Russian sentiments too unambiguously, and they banned further performances after 30 January 1968. Warsaw University students protested in response. Intellectuals condemned the ban, too. By March, students were protesting on university campuses throughout Poland; their complaints had gone far beyond the specific instance of the Dziady cancellation to target the more general failings of Polish policy. To clamp down on the disorder, the PZPR disparaged the students as petulant “banana youth” in thrall to Western culture, addicted to luxury goods, and sponging off the socialist state.39 The PZPR also insinuated that Zionists, intent on toppling the Polish government, were behind the unrest. The latter tactic was just one element in a more far-reaching campaign that the PZPR launched in the wake of the March events to control protesting elites and neutralize intraparty strife. The nearly thirty thousand Jews who remained in Poland circa 1968 became the targets of harassment and anti-Semitic propaganda. Party-state agencies purged Jews from their ranks. While the PZPR did not mandate deportation, it created such a climate of repression and fear that many Polish Jews concluded that emigration was their only option. Nearly thirteen thousand Polish citizens of Jewish descent left the country between 1968 and 1971. The majority of these emigrants had lived in the large cities, where many of them had played important roles in Polish society as members of the intelligentsia or as government functionaries.40 The March events have come to be remembered as a moment of disillusionment, when one segment of Polish society realized just how much cultural life in Poland

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had been diminished since the reforms of October 1956 had quickened hopes for change.41 It is important to bear in mind, however, that the immediate impact of the March events was considerably more localized. Student activists in Poland did not receive widespread social support; the 1968 protests (and their aftermath) were most meaningful for Polish cultural and intellectual elites. While protesting students and intellectuals certainly were not cut off from events that were taking place elsewhere in Europe, unrest in Poland did not receive the same degree of international attention as the events in Czechoslovakia would later in the year. What is especially striking is just how insulated the Warsaw Autumn appears to have been from the shocks that were reverberating throughout Poland during the first half of 1968. This is not to say that planning the 1968 festival was entirely trouble-free. As we have seen, organizers confronted financial barriers as they sought to accommodate both the Warsaw Autumn and the ISCM. Warsaw Autumn planners also grappled with a repertoire-selection model that seemed to be losing its ability to generate varied, high-quality concert programs. But by late summer these problems appeared to have been solved. MKiS had finally approved the festival’s repertoire and official guest list.42 Rather than dwelling on difficulties that seemed to have been surmounted, members of Polish art-music circles anticipated the increased visibility and enhanced cross-border connections that were sure to come with the Warsaw Autumn/ISCM Festival. One sign of this anticipation was a dual-language special issue that Ruch Muzyczny produced to commemorate the event. The publication’s release was timed so that it could be purchased while the Warsaw Autumn/ISCM Festival was ongoing. It presented a series of essays that Ruch Muzyczny’s editors had commissioned to school Polish audiences in the Western European trends they would encounter at festival performances: experimental pianist John Tilbury contributed a piece on Great Britain’s avant-garde performance scene, Swedish musicologist Ove Norwall traced Ligeti’s compositional development post-Atmosphères, and Sven-Erik Werner, of the Danish Radio, presented an overview of new music from Denmark.43 So that these texts would speak as directly as possible to Ruch Muzyczny’s domestic readership, they were published in Polish translation. The issue opened with a series of French-language essays that addressed the festival’s non-Polish participants. Organizers were expecting visitors from Eastern and Western Europe, North and South America, Asia, and the Middle East. Presuming that many of these attendees would be unfamiliar with Polish art music, the articles touted the achievements of contemporary musical life and highlighted Poland’s historical ties to Western Europe. Witold Lutosławski wrote about the modern orchestra; Anna Skrzyńska penned a promotional piece on the Polish Radio’s Experimental Studio; Tadeusz Kaczyński introduced readers to Józef Koffler, Poland’s first dodecaphonist; and Mirosław Perz discussed early music in Poland in relation to its larger European context.44 For those in the know (and reading between the lines), the

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inclusion of the Koffler article could be interpreted symbolically, since the essay highlighted a Jewish progenitor of contemporary Polish composition in a year when the PZPR was fomenting anti-Semitism. As political action went, however, the Koffler piece was subtle; those who were unaware of Poland’s domestic politics in 1968 could easily have missed its potential import. Overall, the more explicit message of the Ruch Muzyczny special issue was that, as far as 1968’s turbulent politics were concerned, art music in Poland remained a space apart. A P O R O U S B OYC O T T

In the end, the special issue of Ruch Muzyczny preserved a glimpse of what might have been, because the program it announced changed significantly in the weeks just before the festival. The trigger for these changes was the invasion of Czechoslovakia on 20–21 August by five members of the Warsaw Pact. Led by the Soviet Union, the invasion used military force to arrest the accelerating reforms of the Prague Spring, which had begun in January with the appointment of Alexander Dubček as head of the Czechoslovak Communist Party (KSČ). Under Dubček’s leadership, the KSČ lifted censorship, rehabilitated the victims of Stalinist-era repression, facilitated opportunities for open political debate, and took steps to modernize Czechoslovakia’s ailing command economy.45 Dubček called this socialism “with a human face”; mindful of Hungary’s fate in 1956, he insisted that internal reform would not weaken Czechoslovakia’s commitment to the Warsaw Pact.46 But where Dubček saw reform, other Eastern European leaders saw counterrevolution. Worried that events in Czechoslovakia would spill over into an already unstable Poland, PZPR First Secretary Gomułka was among the Prague Spring’s harshest critics. He excoriated Czechoslovak artists and intellectuals for their roles in agitating for reform; he readily deployed Polish troops to aid the Soviet-led invasion.47 Unlike the March events in Poland, the August events in Czechoslovakia received significant international attention, and the Polish military’s participation in the invasion posed difficult questions for the Western musicians who were supposed to take part in the rapidly approaching ISCM/Warsaw Autumn Festival. Did the ISCM have an obligation to respond? The organization’s policies indicated that it did not. In the 1930s, the ISCM had advocated the separation of music and politics as part of its efforts to resist the cultural policies of both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.48 In more recent years, the society had continued to demonstrate a capacity for separating musical activity from political life. Francisco Franco was still in power when the 1965 ISCM Festival took place in Spain; the 1967 concerts had been in socialist Czechoslovakia. But 1968 was different. Poland’s involvement in the Czechoslovak crisis forced the issue of whether the ISCM’s past procedures still sufficed to meet the moral demands of the present political moment.

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The national sections from Scandinavia were divided on this issue. The Danish section’s strategy was to continue to distinguish the actions of musicians from the actions of states. This did not mean that the section was wholly disengaged from politics: in late August the group lodged a formal protest against the Polish government for its role in the “occupation” of Czechoslovakia and in the resulting “suppression of the freedom of speech.” But it did not think that boycotting the 1968 ISCM Festival would be the most effective means of condemning Poland’s role in the invasion. As Danish section members explained in a letter to Lutosławski, they were still intending to participate in the upcoming ISCM Festival, because, in their opinion, a boycott would only further inhibit “the free exchange of views.” The same rationale, they explained, had been the basis for their decision to send delegates to Spain for the ISCM Festival in 1965.49 The Swedish section advocated the opposing strategy. In a departure from ISCM precedent, they sought to use the festival itself as a platform for political action. Its members had no interest in participating in an event they understood to be ethically compromised: they thought the 1968 ISCM Festival should not take place at all. The group sent a telegram to their Polish colleagues in which they described the upcoming concerts as “questionable” in light of current events. They urged the Poles “to reflect seriously on cancellation.”50 The Swedish section likewise exerted pressure on the ISCM leadership.51 ISCM President Strobel resisted these demands: in early September, he announced that the festival would take place in Warsaw as scheduled.52 Not everyone agreed that the show should go on: just before the festival began, the Norwegian, Swiss, and Swedish sections announced their cancellations in quick succession.53 Gunnar Bucht, head of the Swedish Society for Contemporary Music in 1968, later explained his section’s actions as motivated by a desire to demonstrate sympathy for and solidarity with the citizens of Czechoslovakia.54 Drawing larger conclusions from the example of Poland, Bucht urged the ISCM Presidential Council in October 1968 to plan future festivals “only in countries which are generally regarded as respecting basic human rights.”55 The more immediate effect of the boycott was to throw the ISCM Festival program into disarray. In many cases, the withholding of people and resources was tantamount to canceling works on the ISCM Festival program. Polish festival organizers did not have access to a nineteen-millimeter projector, and as part of the boycott the Swedish section refused to supply one; Karl-Birger Blomdahl’s experimental film Altisonans consequently had to be dropped from the festival schedule. Messiaen’s Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum was canceled for similar reasons: no orchestra in Poland had the three sets of cowbells required to perform the piece, so organizers were left with no local alternatives when the Danish Timpana Percussion Ensemble announced its cancellation. While in theory there were conductors who would have been willing to lead a performance of Jacques Guyonnet’s The Approach to the Hidden Man after the Swiss composer announced

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that he would be boycotting the festival, the difficulty of the score’s graphic notation made it impossible for any of the potential replacements to learn the piece in time.56 And yet the 1968 ISCM Festival did not fall apart entirely. Not every performer participated in the boycott: American conductor Mario di Bonaventura, Italian conductor Gianpiero Taverna, and Japanese soprano Ayakoto Kato all decided to appear during the festival concerts.57 Even when the boycott blocked the movement of people, it did not necessarily block the movement of scores. The Swedish section had loudly advocated the festival’s cancellation before withdrawing its delegation, yet it did not withdraw the works by Swedish composers that were scheduled for the ISCM Festival program. This ambiguity in the nature of the boycotts meant that, in some instances, festival organizers were able to engage Polish musicians to fill the gaps. New-music ensemble Warsztat Muzyczny (Musical Workshop) ensured that a performance of Karl-Erik Welin’s Manzit for clarinet, cello, trombone, and piano could take place regardless of the withdrawal by the Swedish ensemble that was originally going to play the piece.58 Polish mezzo-soprano Anna Malewicz-Madey saved the festival performance of Ligeti’s Requiem by stepping in for the absent Jeanne Deroubaix.59 Polish organizers ultimately salvaged five of the six originally scheduled ISCM concerts. Even those who refused to attend the 1968 ISCM Festival did not necessarily experience the boycott as clear-cut. Instead, they negotiated a variety of competing loyalties—to other musicians (including those in Cold War Eastern Europe), to professional organizations, and to their political convictions. The example of Klaus Huber provides a sense of some of the boycott’s ambiguities at the level of individual experience. On 18 September 1968, Huber sent a personal letter to ZKP General Secretary Andrzej Dobrowolski in which he expressed his regret that, because of the Swiss section’s boycott, he was not going to be able to attend that year’s festival. He asked Dobrowolski to send him a full report (plus recording, if possible) of the upcoming festival performance of Tenebrae, his new work for orchestra. He also asked Dobrowolski to pass along his greetings to Mario di Bonaventura, who would be conducting Tenebrae. And Huber sent his hellos to Edison Denisov, who had received permission to travel from the Soviet Union to Poland for that year’s Warsaw Autumn/ISCM Festival concerts, where his Crescendo e diminuendo for harpsichord and twelve stringed instruments (1965) was going to be performed by the Sofia Soloists Chamber Ensemble under the direction of its founder, Bulgarian composer Vassil Kazandjiev.60 As Huber’s letter suggests, an individual’s participation in the boycott did not necessarily mean a total lack of contact with musicians in Poland, nor did it imply indifference to what was going to happen during the festival concerts. Huber’s message to Dobrowolski instead attests to the relationships that existed during the 1960s between musicians working in various locations, both East and West, and it

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simultaneously demonstrates how festivals such as the Warsaw Autumn contributed to the formation and the maintenance of personal and professional ties. But these connections did not exist in a vacuum. As the events of 1968 made clear, nation-state paradigms—such as the ones manifested by the ISCM sections—still had the power to limit the ongoing, border-spanning transnational bonds that had formed between musicians in different countries. Poland’s involvement in the Prague Spring’s suppression made interactions between Polish festival organizers and Czechoslovak musicians particularly fraught. Czechoslovakia was supposed to have been represented by two works on the 1968 ISCM Festival program. Only one of these pieces was performed in 1968: Polish vocalist Irena Torbus-Mierzwiakowa substituted for the Czechoslovak soloist who was originally supposed to sing the world premiere of Tadeáš Salva’s Canticum Zachariae, a work for soprano and chamber orchestra.61 There were additional difficulties with Musica Viva Pragensis, the Czechoslovak new-music ensemble that had made such a splash at the 1964 Warsaw Autumn and that had been engaged to perform in Warsaw again at the ISCM Festival in 1968. Two pieces on the festival program depended on Musica Viva Pragensis: Crystals, by Czech-born Israeli composer Jacob Gilboa; and a cantata by Czech composer Zbyněk Vostřák, who from 1963 to 1973 was also the ensemble’s conductor. Both works would have underscored the increasingly dense web of aesthetic affinities that linked practitioners of “new music” throughout the world, for each composer had recently changed his style under the influence of the Western avantgarde. Stockhausen and Pousseur were the crucial points of reference in Gilboa’s case, whereas in Vostřák’s they were Boulez, Cage, Stockhausen, and Varèse. Performing a work by an Israeli composer would have had additional significance in Warsaw: following the Soviet Union’s lead, Poland had broken off diplomatic relations with Israel in response to the Six-Day War of June 1967, and thus the inclusion of Gilboa’s work on the ISCM Festival program could have been understood as a sign of resistance to Polish government policy.62 But neither performance came to pass. Marek Kopelent, the ensemble’s artistic director, contacted the Warsaw Autumn Festival Office in early September 1968 to inform them that Musica Viva Pragensis was not going to be able to participate in the upcoming ISCM Festival. The reasons, he assumed, were not difficult to surmise. In the midst of the turmoil, the group had not learned either of the works it was scheduled to perform. Moreover, several members of Musica Viva Pragensis were traveling outside Czechoslovakia when the invasion occurred, and they were opting to extend their stays abroad.63 By the time Kopelent’s letter arrived at the Festival Office on 13 September, Musica Viva Pragensis’s cancellation was already old news: Pragokoncert, the state-run Czechoslovak concert agency, had informed ZKP on 5 September that the group would not be participating in the festival because it had been disbanded.64

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Even if Musica Viva Pragensis had been intact and adequately prepared, it is doubtful that the ensemble could have appeared in Warsaw in September 1968. Reporting the invasion’s aftermath, a Polish cultural attaché in Prague informed the PZPR Central Committee’s Culture Department that “some of the creative unions are suggesting that their members decline to participate in artistic events organized in the five states, and are even pressuring them not to do so.”65 It is likely that Musica Viva Pragensis would have come under similar pressure. What is striking about Kopelent’s letter is that, unlike some of the Western musicians who canceled, he did not specify whether the ensemble’s absence was politically motivated; he instead emphasized the logistical factors. It is even more noteworthy that Kopelent still wanted to attend the 1968 festival even though Musica Viva Pragensis would no longer be performing. Kopelent had prior festival experience and an existing relationship with Warsaw Autumn organizers: in addition to being Musica Viva Pragensis’s artistic director, he was a composer whose Webern-influenced String Quartet no. 3 had been warmly received at the Warsaw Autumn in 1964. He proposed attending the 1968 festival in his role as a music editor at the Supraphon publishing house, and he asked Festival Secretary Maria Kłopotowska to reserve accommodations in Warsaw for him.66 Kopelent appears not to have traveled to Poland that September, at least not officially; his name is not on the list of international festival visitors published in Ruch Muzyczny.67 Nevertheless, his request is significant because it demonstrates that boycotts were not the only ways that the festival’s musicians—even those who seemingly had the most reason to protest— responded to the ongoing political situation. The ISCM’s boycott of its 1968 festival in Warsaw was therefore filled with holes. Some figures traveled to Poland, while others did not. Some performances took place, whereas others fell apart. Strobel’s compromise solution reflected the murkiness of the situation: the 1968 festival would take place in Warsaw, but the ISCM Congress would be moved westward to Baden-Baden, ostensibly a more politically palatable location. At the level of the organization as a whole, the closest the ISCM came to a unified position was through the total absence of its leadership from the 1968 festival concerts. The boycott went beyond the ISCM’s festival events: Western performers booked for the 1968 Warsaw Autumn also canceled their performances to protest Poland’s role in the Czechoslovak crisis. The London-based Vesuvius Ensemble boycotted the Warsaw Autumn, as did the Het-Residentie Orkest from the Hague.68 Cathy Berberian likewise refused to appear. By 1968, Berberian had developed ties with Warsaw Autumn organizers: she had already performed at the festival twice and would take part in three more festivals in the 1970s.69 Her recitals in the 1970s were a critical splash, for she offered her listeners pleasure, something that was not always amply supplied by that decade’s festival concerts. Reviewers luxuriated in the sound of her voice and mimetic facility, momentarily forgetting one of the War-

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saw Autumn’s maxims: that it showcased pieces of music, not virtuosic musicians. She was a “phenomenon,” Jerzy Waldorff gushed in 1974, “one of those performers who, even if you gave them nothing but a comb to play on, would produce a masterpiece of artistic interpretation.”70 A later reviewer extolled the intertwining of serious and popular genres in Berberian’s 1977 recital, “From Monteverdi to the Beatles,” claiming that it captured the essence of the cultural moment.71 Ultimately, then, Berberian’s cancellation in 1968 did not destabilize her long-term relationships with musicians in Poland. It was, however, meaningful in the moment, because her actions tore holes in the Warsaw Autumn program, and because her rationale pointed to the vicissitudes of state sponsorship of the arts. Berberian’s explanation of her decision suggests that, like the participants in the ISCM boycotts, she was weighing various personal, professional, and political commitments. In an extensive letter to the Warsaw Autumn Festival Office, she emphasized that her actions were not motivated by a lack of “affection for the Polish people” or by personal animosity toward her contacts in ZKP. But she could not ignore the recent actions of the Polish military, nor could she give “tacit approval” to the occupation of Czechoslovakia “by my presence at the festival.” Lest the Warsaw Autumn’s Polish organizers feel singled out unfairly, she explained that “any action of violation of human liberties is intolerable to me (no matter how noble the motives presented may be). . . . I have also protested the war in Vietnam (even though I have a USA passport) and will not perform for any governmentsponsored concerts in the States.”72 Thus, the questions for Berberian were the same ones the Danish and Swedish sections of the ISCM had asked: whether appearing at a state-sponsored event implied support for the government that was supplying the funds, and, in this particular instance, whether the Warsaw Autumn could be meaningfully separated from the political structures in which it was enmeshed. Trochimczyk has criticized Western performers’ boycotts of the 1968 festival as naively misguided, based on a fundamental misapprehension of the relationship (or, as she would put it, the difference) between Polish musicians and the Polish party-state apparatus.73 Yet, in her letter, Berberian demonstrated a clear-eyed awareness of one of the Warsaw Autumn’s most fundamental dynamics, in which composers, performers, audience members, and musical works were consistently understood to be standins for states and representatives of political systems, regardless of whether these individuals were conscious of these roles or whether they desired them. While Berberbian ultimately maintained her relationships with Warsaw Autumn organizers, her boycott of the 1968 concerts did affect the festival significantly in the short term, not least because her cancellation inspired other musicians to follow her example. Italians Sylvano Bussotti and Romano Amidei withdrew to support Berberian’s position, as well as to express their solidarity with the “truly progressive forces in Polish culture,” which, in their view, had been

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figure 8. Josephine Nendick performing Milton Babbitt’s Philomel at the 1968 Warsaw Autumn. Photograph by Andrzej Zborski, Polish Composers’ Union/Warsaw Autumn Archive.

undermined by the five-power invasion and subsequent occupation of Czechoslovakia.74 Bussotti’s approach to the boycott is worth noting because he refused to be present at the 1968 Warsaw Autumn, either in the form of his person or in the form of his music: he instructed the Festival Committee to strike La Passion selon Sade from the program, a stipulation that obviated the possibility of finding last-minute substitutes for Berberian and Amidei. But just as the ISCM boycott was not uniform, some of the Warsaw Autumn’s Western participants opted not to cancel their performances. Stuart Dempster gave his half-recital of experimental works for solo trombone, and Lothar Faber performed Bruno Maderna’s Second Concerto for oboe and orchestra. Soprano Josephine Nendick (Figure 8) gave the Polish premiere of Milton Babbitt’s Philomel during Józef Patkowski’s presentation of recently composed electronic music, which also included works by Bogusław Schäffer (Symfonia: Muzyka elektroniczna), Stockhausen (Telemusik), Vittorio Gelmetti (Treni d’onda a modulazione di intensità), and Luc Ferrari (Hétérozygote). Pianists Gérard Frémy and John Tilbury collaborated with Polish composer and pianist Zygmunt Krauze in audience-riling presentations of Terry Riley’s Keyboard Studies (in a version for two pianos), Stockhausen’s Plus-Minus (arranged by Tilbury for organ, piano, and percussion), and Morton Feldman’s Two Pieces for Three Pianos. With the exception of Dempster, each of these performers had previous Warsaw Autumn experience.

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figure 9. John Tilbury performing John Cage’s Water Music in Warsaw, 1964. Photograph by Andrzej Zborski, Polish Composers’ Union/Warsaw Autumn Archive.

Tilbury had especially well-developed connections with Polish musical circles: he studied at the Warsaw Conservatory in the early 1960s, and he played a pivotal role in the development of experimental music in Poland, both through his presentations of music by British and American experimental composers and through his role as an important early collaborator with the Polish musicians of the newmusic ensemble Warsztat Muzyczny (Figure 9).75 That Tilbury opted to perform in Warsaw in September 1968 suggests that a musician’s location on the political spectrum did not necessarily dictate a single, defined path of action with respect to his festival appearances. Bussotti, Amidei, and Tilbury were all affiliated with the political Left, but they did not uniformly boycott the 1968 Warsaw Autumn. Regardless of whether or not musicians decided to appear at the 1968 Warsaw Autumn/ISCM Festival, the choice entailed taking a position on the relationship between music and politics, and, more specifically, on the role of socialist state support in the promotion of new music. Symbolically charged from the outset, the Warsaw Autumn in 1968 seemed to demand some kind of politically motivated reaction from its participants. But it was not wholly clear what the festival might represent in the late 1960s. Was it still a zone of aesthetic liberalism within the Eastern Bloc? Did it remain a sign of Polish rebellion against the cultural strictures of Stalinism? Had it become part of the establishment, a shop-window for a repressive, aggressive regime? Or could the festival offer its participants a momentary

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escape from politics altogether, a place in which they could imagine a different— and better—world? As we have seen in this section, festival participants provided various answers to these questions, both as individuals and as part of networked groups. Only one thing was certain: doing nothing was not an option. P O L I T IC A L AC T IO N A N D I T S R A M I F IC AT IO N S

That the international boycott had not been watertight made little difference to the critics who uniformly denounced Westerners’ cancellations as an unacceptable incursion of politics into the supposedly sacrosanct arena of music performance. Ludwik Erhardt lambasted the ISCM leadership for using the festival and Congress to express a position that, to his mind, had nothing to do with music. By holding an artistic event hostage to political purposes, he complained, the boycotters had engaged in “totalitarian reasoning, the consequences of which we know.”76 Writing in late-1960s Poland, Erhardt could not (or would not) go so far as to say that art music existed on a wholly separate plane, cut off from everyday reality and the more intangible realms of human thought and feeling. But, his review implied, it did exist on a higher one. And if there was anything worth protesting at the 1968 festival, he argued, it was the tarnishing of timeless artistic values with the ephemeral muck of anything extramusical—especially politics. Józef Kański, reflecting on the festival in the PZPR’s national daily, claimed that the Western participants had, in fact, done just that: they had opposed the ISCM’s position through both the symbolism of their presence in Warsaw and the sharply worded complaint they had sent to the ISCM leadership.77 We would expect Polish critics—especially those in the employ of the main party newspaper—to condemn actions whose purpose was to criticize Poland’s involvement in the Prague Spring’s suppression. But West German Eigel Kruttge, identified in Ruch Muzyczny as cochair of the German Society of Contemporary Music, also damned Westerners for their politically motivated cancellations.78 One of the festival observers in 1968, Kruttge published a review in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik in which he lauded ZKP for managing to pull off the event in such adverse circumstances. He understood their efforts to be a sign of Polish loyalty to one of the ISCM’s central tenets: the nonpartisan, disinterested promotion of new music. On the other hand, he claimed, those who boycotted had shortsightedly betrayed one of their organization’s fundamental principles.79 So the critics (both Polish and non-) thought the boycott was wrong. Commentators in Poland also insisted it had not mattered. Erhardt asserted that, for the musicians who went to Warsaw, soaked up the atmosphere, and networked, the festival had persisted in 1968 as a site for convivial international exchange.80 Kański similarly touted the Warsaw Autumn’s uniquely friendly atmosphere as conducive to the formation of “creative artistic contacts.”81 Jerzy Waldorff reported that, even

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with the boycotts, the festival scene had been more lively than usual that year. In addition to visitors from East and West Germany, England, France, Sweden, and the United States, there were also representatives from Syria and Lebanon. Between performances, the concert hall corridors had been awash in a hubbub of languages, including Finnish, Romanian, Spanish, and Japanese.82 If, according to the critics, the absence of some individuals had not hampered cross-border contact in 1968, the disappearance of some works from the festival program had also done little to prevent the Warsaw Autumn from fulfilling its annual mission: presenting a reasonably nuanced portrait of contemporary music. Erhardt and Kański both claimed that, in terms of the festival’s overall stylistic contours, the program changes had had only a negligible impact. And they did have a point. Even with the program changes, the 1968 festival showcased what had become the expected range of styles and compositional approaches. Even without Bussotti’s La Passion selon Sade, there was an example of avant-garde musical theater in Leoncjusz Ciuciura’s Spirale I for baritone and percussion. Works by Per Nørgård, Ton de Leeuw, and Toru Takemitsu explored timbre in idiosyncratic ways.83 The Sofia Soloists presented examples of a fledgling Bulgarian modernism, while also, with Denisov’s Crescendo e diminuendo, providing a glimpse of unofficial Soviet composition. Meanwhile, the visiting USSR State Symphony Orchestra gave top-notch renditions of official Soviet music, including Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 10 in E Minor, op. 93.84 The stylistic diversity was matched by the international diversity of the works on the program. The flags hung at the National Philharmonic concert hall broadcast that the 1968 Warsaw Autumn/ISCM Festival was bringing together new music from Asia, both sides of Europe, and North and South America.85 And the festival audience once again displayed its fabled reactivity. The year’s offerings included riotously received presentations of American experimental works for keyboard: the hushed, seemingly interminable stasis of Feldman’s Two Pieces for Three Pianos pushed many listeners’ patience past the breaking point, and, goaded by critic Jerzy Waldorff ’s sarcastic running commentary, they revolted, rendering the performance almost completely inaudible.86 But whatever Polish critics may have said to the contrary, performer boycotts did skew the 1968 festival’s stylistic and geopolitical balance. Unlike the works on the ISCM roster, for which festival organizers scrambled to find Polish substitute performers, the programs of the Timpana Ensemble, Het-Residentie Orkest, and Vesuvius Ensemble simply disappeared from the Warsaw Autumn program. Since these groups had been scheduled to present works by Berio, Boulez, Xenakis, and Cage, the result was a truncated portrait of the Western avant-garde compared to the one that festivalgoers had originally been promised.87 Western performers’ participation as conductors, soloists, and collaborators with small Polish chamber groups did little to counter the impression of geopolitical imbalance. In terms of its musicians, the 1968 installment of the Warsaw Autumn was the most geopolitically

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lopsided ever: despite the limits that currency and travel restrictions perennially imposed, the previous festivals had always included at least one large Western ensemble. In 1968, performers from Eastern Europe far outnumbered those from the West: there was the usual variety of Polish ensembles (both large and small), as well as sizeable visiting groups from the Soviet Union and Bulgaria. Thus, the repertoire and the performers sent conflicting messages at the 1968 Warsaw Autumn/ ISCM Festival. While the pieces on offer suggested the presence of a new-music community that, despite the political turmoil, spanned East–West borders, the ensembles were a palpable reminder that Cold War divisions were still very much in force. The imbalance in performers mattered because the Warsaw Autumn was never just about the music. It was also about the people who converged in Warsaw and the relationships they forged at festival events. Just as important was the Warsaw Autumn’s role as a site for the conferral and circulation of cultural value, in which judgments as to which composers’ works were worth performing, what ensembles worth inviting, and which observers worth hosting not only confirmed and contributed to shaping the relative prestige of styles, composers, and culture brokers, but also established and affirmed the Warsaw Autumn’s relative status as one newmusic institution among many in the postwar world. In these respects, the total absence of the ISCM president and board from the 1968 festival assumed an outsized importance. For ZKP, the ISCM leadership’s decision was a source of “surprise” and “regret” because, as they put it in their post-festival report, the concerts had been planned “in an exceptionally difficult situation, at tremendous organizational cost.”88 Some of the burden had indeed been financial, since the Polish Society of Contemporary Music, acting through ZKP, had to use its own funds to pay the Polish performers who filled in at the last minute. But the sting was not simply monetary. True, some of the protestors had made sure to distinguish their antipathy for the recent actions of the Polish military from their affection for their Polish colleagues. For those on the receiving end of the protests, however, the cancellations nevertheless felt like a slight. The 1968 joint Warsaw Autumn/ISCM Festival was supposed to have been a manifestation of Polish partnership with one of the most internationally visible, prestigious newmusic organizations on the European continent. Yet, rather than confirming the Warsaw Autumn (and, by extension, the Polish musicians involved in planning it) as an equal partner in postwar new-music networks, the ISCM board’s refusal to travel to Poland instead suggested that the 1968 festival was not wholly legitimate, even though, technically, it was still taking place. Far from being able to transcend geopolitics, then, the Warsaw Autumn in 1968 had remained mired in Eastern Europe—a second-rate institution for the Second World. At least that was the takeaway message for many Polish musicians involved with the 1968 festival. Wounded by the boycotts, members of the PTMW retaliated in

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kind by refusing to attend the 1968 ISCM Congress once it had been moved to Baden-Baden.89 Decades later, Lutosławski was still taking it personally. In 1968 he was the chair of the ISCM Festival’s international selection jury; the Warsaw Autumn premiere of his Paroles tissées was one of the events that had fallen victim to Western performer boycotts. In 1992, when the ISCM Festival returned to Warsaw, Lutosławski started the festivities by using his opening speech as an opportunity to publicly condemn ISCM’s actions in 1968. He denigrated that year’s boycotts as a misguided application of “communal responsibility.”90 The ISCM’s protestors had been wrong to view Polish musicians as complicit with the state; instead, Lutosławski implied, the boycotters should have perceived the distance that separated Polish artists from the Polish government. The terms of his argument not only suggested that the realms of state and society could be neatly sundered, but also that, when it came to a government-sponsored music institution such as the Warsaw Autumn, the artistic side of the equation was the one that really mattered. M A K I N G N EW M U SIC , DAY B Y DAY

Yet the events of 1968 demonstrated that such distinctions could never be cut so cleanly. The problems of the joint Warsaw Autumn/ISCM Festival exposed the limits of 1960s transnationalism, as well as the ambiguities involved in using newmusic institutions as sites of political action. They also revealed the limits of the autonomy of the musical actors who were operating in socialist Poland. By the late 1960s, ZKP members—who constituted the core of the Warsaw Autumn leadership—had long prized their relative independence from Polish cultural authorities. While there were certainly constraints that had remained in place after the Thaw, so long as composers and musicologists avoided overt political antagonism in their work—and, when it came to the Warsaw Autumn, so long as planners could maintain the illusion of their lack of bias—they had substantial latitude of action. For these reasons, musicians in Poland had ample motivation to resist the yoking of music and politics that had long been the norm in Eastern Europe and was becoming increasingly pervasive throughout Western Europe circa 1968.91 Ultimately, though, they were unsuccessful in carving out a wholly separate sphere for music. When five of the Warsaw Pact’s member states invaded Czechoslovakia in late August 1968, their actions were widely understood to be a violation of Czechoslovak sovereignty, an assault that exposed the fiction that any kind of meaningful national independence could be maintained within the Eastern Bloc. Western boycotts of the 1968 Warsaw Autumn/ISCM Festival had a similar effect when it came to the power dynamics undergirding official musical life in Poland, because the cancellations highlighted ties to the socialist state that some may have preferred to forget. The irony is that such ties had been crucial for the Warsaw Autumn’s existence in the first place. But what was an enabling condition in the mid-1950s did not

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necessarily remain so in 1968. The topsy-turvy politics of that year transformed enabling factors into constraints and vice versa. Since the mid-1950s, socialist state support had facilitated the Warsaw Autumn, both through official approval of the repertoire and through the disbursement of material resources toward festival endeavors. Without such backing, the Warsaw Autumn could never have been a unique zone of transnational contact in Cold War Europe. In 1968, however, the very state support that had, for over a decade, enabled cross-border contact to take place via the Warsaw Autumn instead became an impediment to mobility, when Western participants pointed to the festival’s state sponsorship as justification for their decisions to boycott. The Warsaw Autumn’s established role as an arena for cultural diplomacy could likewise constrain as well as enable. The festival’s potential for staging East–West confrontation was an integral part of what had initially attracted Polish government authorities to the Warsaw Autumn idea in the mid1950s. However, the thought that performers, composers, observers, and pieces of music might represent nation-states, and that a musician’s participation might be understood as a referendum on Polish government policy, came to work against festival planners in 1968, when the Polish military’s role in suppressing the Prague Spring had discredited the Polish government in the eyes of many of the Warsaw Autumn/ISCM Festival’s participants. Similarly, for Warsaw Autumn planners, joining forces with the ISCM was neither wholly constraining nor entirely enabling. The partnership expanded their options even as it limited them; the collaboration demonstrated the degree to which new-music institutions in Poland had become integrated with similar institutions throughout the world, while also revealing the distance and economic inequalities that still separated the socialist East from the capitalist West. Taken together, these examples demonstrate the dynamism of the factors that affected the creation, performance, and dissemination of contemporary music in socialist Poland. A factor that, at one moment, might enable the cross-border dissemination of new music, could, at other times, and in convergence with other conditions, be an impediment to mobility and exchange. No factor was ever solely enabling, or only constraining. Instead, these properties were fluid and apt to morph over time, and—as the example of the Warsaw Autumn’s partnership with the ISCM suggests—a set of conditions could both create opportunities and set limits. Which leads me to my ultimate point. While the events of the 1968 Warsaw Autumn/ISCM Festival may have been intense, they were also rather mundane. For although other Warsaw Autumns may have lacked the political drama and heightened international stakes of 1968, they were shaped just the same by the continual interplay of constraints and possibilities. Managing performers, locating funds, negotiating with administrators, accessing materials, changing the program in response to cancellations, and articulating a conception of “contemporary music” through repertoire selection that was driven as much by pragmatism as by

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idealism—these tasks may have been especially tricky in 1968, but they were hardly exceptional. They were the ongoing, day-to-day, social reality of making new music at the Warsaw Autumn Festival. And not only there. During the 1950s and ’60s the Warsaw Autumn was a contact zone where, because of the festival’s location on the cultural fault line between Eastern and Western Europe, the values of contemporary music were especially contested. At the same time, the Warsaw Autumn was also part of a larger network of institutions in which various actors haggled over what “new music” might be. These negotiations involved compositional decisions, to be sure. They also involved programming choices, audience responses, critical commentary, and exchanges of material goods, as well as chance encounters that could lead to future commissions and collaborations. Being aware of these interactions reminds us that “new music” has never been a stable concept. Rather, “new music” is something that has been made—and continually remade—by socially implicated actors acting in response to a wide variety of motivations, constraints, and possibilities. Newmusic festivals, Warsaw’s included, have been among the most important sites where this making and remaking have taken place.

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Epilogue

By way of closing, I offer some reflections on continuity and change. When the Warsaw Autumn began in 1956, it marked a shift in the art world that created and sustained contemporary music in socialist Poland. Composers, musicologists, performers, critics, government officials, arts administrators, audiences, and many others interacted to create an institution that offered new opportunities for mobilizing resources, disseminating musical works, and engaging in cross-border contact in the face of the Cold War. As we have seen throughout this book, the festival allowed some aesthetic outlooks to flourish, while rendering others less viable. We have also seen a variety of social, economic, political, technological, and cultural factors affect the ways the Warsaw Autumn functioned in the 1950s and ’60s. When these conditions started to change, the festival changed too, which prompted the definitions of “new music” presented in its concerts and discourse to correspondingly fluctuate. William Quillen has persuasively demonstrated that, no matter what Russian composers and musicologists may say (and even believe) to the contrary, shifts in funding patterns, institutional structures, law, and demographics are shaping the ways that art music in post-Soviet Russia is being composed, performed, distributed, and consumed.1 Long before state socialism collapsed in Poland in 1989, the Warsaw Autumn was already starting to morph in response to similar factors. At the most basic level, these shifts involved the Warsaw Autumn’s personnel. Tadeusz Baird, among the Warsaw Autumn’s initiators, stopped working on the Repertoire Commission in 1969. As he explained in a 1971 interview: “Like everything past the first blush of youth, the festival has sunk into the monotony of everyday life. . . . The Warsaw Autumn’s conceptual-organizational model, which 165

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served the festival well during its first decade, has become outdated. . . . There is an urgent need to change the festival, to come up with new ways of choosing the repertoire.”2 For Baird, the original formula—an overview of recent composition, paired with a dose of the contemporary classics—was no longer working. When his calls for change fell on deaf ears, he submitted his resignation. Other members of the Repertoire Commission soon followed his lead, disrupting an organizational core that had remained stable for over a decade. Kazimierz Serocki ended his work with the commission in 1973; Witold Lutosławski and Włodzimierz Kotoński left a year later, not to return until the early 1980s. Composers typically quit not out of frustration, but to spend more time on their own work. As an active commission member until 1991, Józef Patkowski was a source of institutional continuity in the face of change. If the earlier group consisted of a small number of composers and musicologists who were involved with the festival continuously for extended periods of time, the Repertoire Commission Patkowski led starting in 1974 was larger and less stable.3 By decade’s end, its ranks had swelled from six to twelve members. Among them was musicologist Tadeusz Kaczyński, who was, like Patkowski, an ardent promoter of postwar Polish music. The composers brought with them an eclectic range of interests, from Zygmunt Krauze, then cultivating an idiosyncratic brand of minimalism, to Bogusław Schäffer, the most faithful Polish adherent to avant-garde ideals. There was also Wojciech Kilar, born within a year of Krzysztof Penderecki and Henryk Mikołaj Górecki, and who was, like them, shifting toward traditional conceptions of form and consonance in the 1970s after abandoning his youthful avantgarde persona.4 Unlike their predecessors, this wave of organizers joined the Repertoire Commission with international careers that were already thriving—careers that were shaped by the festival itself. By this time, Polish musicians had become integrated into the cultural life of the West to a degree unimaginable when the festival first began. Rarely was there full attendance at Repertoire Commission meetings; too many of its members lived and worked abroad for months at a time, enjoying an ability to live in two worlds that was beyond the realm of possibility for many Polish citizens. Along with personnel changes, postmodern aesthetic shifts—themselves socially embedded—affected the Warsaw Autumn in the 1970s. Polish composers’ resurrection of folk music was among the most disruptive of these. Folk music had been dormant in Polish musical life since the Thaw, when it became a taboo symbolizing all that was tainted and misguided in the Stalinist era. Like reclamations of expressivity and consonance in the West, Polish annexations of folk music in the 1970s were a vote of no confidence in Cold War culture.5 What these challenges meant for the Warsaw Autumn, however, was less clear. Just as postmodernism was meaningful insofar as it articulated a relationship to modernism, and revivals of Polish folk music gained their significance in comparison to socialist realism, the connotations

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of the Warsaw Autumn had relied on a cultural paradigm that locked modernism and socialist realism in an antagonism of mutual dependence. The festival’s alternatives to entrenched Cold War divisions were resonant insofar as these divisions remained in force elsewhere. Threats to modernism as a master narrative therefore had the potential to put the festival’s symbolic context at risk. The cultural conditions that had originally made the festival meaningful were already starting to crumble in the 1970s. Soon the Cold War’s political and economic barriers also collapsed, taking with them the rationale that had buttressed the Warsaw Autumn for decades. While it is tempting to view 1989 as the year that changed everything, there were important continuities over that epochal divide. Empty halls troubled commentators well before the advent of political change, and by 1988 not even professional critics were bothering to attend all of the annual concerts.6 Complaints that the repertoire was growing stagnant had plagued organizers at least from the mid-1960s.7 Financial woes reanimated the struggles of 1963 and 1971, when MKiS threatened to turn the Warsaw Autumn into a biennial: in 1994, Minister of Culture Kazimierz Dejmek once again proposed that the festival happen once every two years.8 Although ZKP thwarted the plan, festival organizers had to scramble for funds when the 1995 budget was slashed in half.9 The crisis of the early 1990s was not, therefore, entirely unprecedented. The difference was that there were now no guarantees. The festival had already been forced to redefine its relevance starting in the 1970s, but in the absence of a political raison d’être that could buffer economic uncertainty, all bets were off as to whether it would survive. Organizers had to develop new marketing strategies to attract audiences, since they could no longer rely on the Warsaw Autumn’s political cachet and the seemingly self-evident cultural capital of high art in Polish society.10 By the mid-1990s, ZKP’s executive board was considering a thorough overhaul of the festival’s organizational configuration: changing the collective model to a structure managed by a director alone. The prospect triggered intense debate. Did they really, some composers asked, want to abandon a forty-year tradition?11 ZKP ended up opting for both continuity and change: appointing a festival director, while also maintaining the Repertoire Commission. What did the Warsaw Autumn still have to offer? This question was bound up with ideas about how the festival should be run. For composers whose careers were almost as old as the institution itself, the festival was important for its legacy of freedom, for its tradition, and for creating a space in which Polish music could thrive.12 For composer Krzysztof Knittel, festival director from 1995 to ’98, the Warsaw Autumn had the potential to shed its light on composition in different places, a strategy that arose in part from financial necessity. As he recalls, “The Polish Ministry of Culture did not provide adequate funding to organize the festival, so we had to begin looking for financial help abroad in order to save the Warsaw Autumn.”13

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Knittel suspects he was appointed festival director precisely because he was successful in finding new forms of monetary support. The sources of the festival’s funding in the late 1990s, in turn, affected the view of contemporary music on display. The 1997 concerts relied heavily on French and German funds; unsurprisingly, the performances showcased music from France, Germany, and Poland. Knittel’s biggest coup was in 1998, when he landed a subsidy from the Nordic Council’s seemingly bottomless resources for cultural promotion. “Północ” (North) was the result: a Warsaw Autumn highlighting music from Scandinavia, in a series of concerts that met with an ecstatic audience and critical response. The excitement these concerts generated marked a turning point in the festival’s post-1989 history. The Warsaw Autumn’s situation stabilized in the late 1990s and remains secure as of 2016. Composer and double-bassist Tadeusz Wielecki has served as festival director since 1999.14 A ten-person Program Commission, appointed by ZKP’s executive board, still performs the bulk of day-to-day planning—an arrangement unique among European music festivals. The festival is supported by funds from the City of Warsaw as well as the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage. Public initiatives in Poland to support new composition are enabling the Warsaw Autumn to commission more works than ever before. Organizers augment domestic funds via partnerships with foreign sponsors. Poland joined the European Union in 2004; the Warsaw Autumn is involved with initiatives such as the Réseau Varèse, a new-music support network funded by the European Commission. Among the Warsaw Autumn’s patrons in 2014 were the Austrian Cultural Forum in Warsaw, the Deutscher Musikrat, and the Embassy of the Netherlands in Warsaw.15 The challenge for the Warsaw Autumn in early-twenty-first-century Poland is to appeal to an increasingly globalized local population. Today’s critics and composers are mobile and connected, as much citizens of Europe as they are of their home country. For thirty-something Jan Topolski, musicologist, critic, and founder of the new-music magazine Glissando, “this access to information, unbelievable just ten or twenty years ago, gives us freedom—and power. To criticize.” At a 2007 conference, with director Wielecki and other festival planners in attendance, he condemned the Warsaw Autumn’s panoramic formula as useless in understanding contemporary composition. Just as irksome was the festival’s emphasis on “new classical” works to the exclusion of trends such as improvisation and interactive art. The “former window on the world,” he warned, was in danger of becoming little more than a “window on the past.”16 Topolski’s point was that its programming strategies were threatening to make the festival obsolete. And yet the past is an important factor shaping the definition and dissemination of new music at the Warsaw Autumn today. The concerts regularly include modernist landmarks alongside more recently composed works. Festival organizers actively engage in self-reflexive explorations of the institution’s own history. One example of this occurred in 2013, when the Warsaw Autumn

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marked the centenary of Lutosławski’s birth by reproducing the concert program (Lutosławski’s Symphony no. 3 and Piano Concerto) as well as the soloist (pianist Krystian Zimerman) of a performance that had taken place at the festival in 1988. Why are the planners of a contemporary-music festival revisiting the past? One motive is preservation—keeping twentieth-century music, especially from Poland, in the performing repertory. Another rationale is the project of canon formation that has been part of the Warsaw Autumn from the very beginning. Providing a panorama of contemporary music likewise remains a stated priority: the 2015 Warsaw Autumn website continues to bill the festival as “pluralistic, positively eclectic.”17 That said, the Repertoire Commission has taken a more forthrightly curatorial role in recent years. Nation-state paradigms remain an important focus, not least because national cultural organizations continue to play a crucial role in Warsaw Autumn funding. The 2005 “Eastern Waves” festival, for example, showcased composers from Japan and Korea, as well as Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine; funding organizations that year included the Russian Federal Agency of Culture and the Korean Culture and Arts Foundation.18 Other years have coalesced around more loosely defined themes, such as pianism (2010), the voice (2012), and works for nonstandard instruments (2014). The theme of the 2011 festival—politically engaged music—suggests that festival organizers are increasingly (albeit very cautiously) willing to admit some links between pieces of contemporary music and the societies in which they exist.19 Current festival promotional literature, on the other hand, makes no secret of planners’ mission to draw new audiences into the fold. The Warsaw Autumn, Wielecki explains, is a nongovernmental organization that works “pro bono publico,” that is, for the betterment of society, not for financial gain. The Program Commission thinks that it is “essential” to counter the stereotype that contemporary music is “hermetic, for a narrow group of specialists, and cut off from reality.” While he claims that these concerns are unique to the organizers who are working “in the new social-economic situation,” such sentiments, as we have seen, would have been right at home in socialist Poland.20 The difference, of course, is that before 1989 they were politically mandated. Now they are what it takes to keep the Warsaw Autumn economically afloat. As part of their efforts to create a socially engaged new music, festival organizers have been mounting outreach initiatives since the early 2000s to appeal to audience members who have little invested in standard concert life. While, according to Wielecki, young people still believe that music matters, he notes that these listeners have been raised on the Internet and recordings rather than traditional concertgoing.21 The solution, then, has been to take the festival out to its public. No longer do festival attendees tread a staid path between the National Philharmonic Concert Hall and the Fryderyk Chopin University of Music in the center of town. Gallery spaces, a converted vodka factory, the Polish Radio’s concert hall in south Warsaw, the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews: all have been Warsaw

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Autumn venues in recent years. The growing diversity in performance spaces has been facilitated by ongoing developments in Warsaw’s urban infrastructure: the festival has been able to “go out on the town” (to use Wielecki’s words) not least because there are now more places in town to go to.22 An even newer venture is the Mała Warszawska Jesień (Little Warsaw Autumn), a contemporary-music concert series for children that began in 2011. Finally, the festival continues to define new music by what it is not. Since 1956, Warsaw Autumn concert programming has inscribed—and reinscribed—a hardand-fast boundary between “art” music and “popular” culture. Current marketing strategies attempt to lure young audiences with an aura of edgy exclusivity. Promotional literature on the 2015 festival website extols an “elite of young people, who are not afraid of difficult things, who want to distinguish themselves from the hordes of consumers of popular youth culture.” As for the Warsaw Autumn itself, Wielecki claims that it “has retained its credibility as a place for cultivating art that is disinterested, independent, and unburdened by commercialism.”23 In other words: no matter the political and economic system, to engage with contemporary music at the Warsaw Autumn is to be free. We can understand this statement as an expression of self-interest: after all, in the cultural economy of new music, freedom from the market is itself a marketable claim. Yet the implications of Wielecki’s description potentially go beyond this. During the Cold War, the festival’s advocacy of modernism was understood by many to be a form of political opposition; during the early twenty-first century, that same advocacy is now being positioned as a form of economic opposition to the mores of consumer capitalism. Such oppositional thinking is part of the legacy of modernist aesthetic theories on the relation of art to society. And the thought that unabashedly elite, self-consciously complex, and technically innovative music should be protected from commercial markets was a driving force behind many of the new-music institutions founded in the twentieth century. But the idea that artists should be freed from market forces was also a foundational principle of socialist cultural policy in Cold War Poland. That Warsaw Autumn planners are positioning their institution as explicitly anticommercial—that is, implicitly anticapitalist—not only suggests the ongoing persistence of modernist habits of mind, but also intimates that the socialist experience may be continuing to shape Polish culture and society in ways that may not always be overt or immediately recognizable. As the Warsaw Autumn nears its seventh decade, it is indeed still much as it was: Eurocentric, collectively organized, and focused on time-honored concert formats and composed pieces of art music. While there are, of course, exceptions in the programming from year to year, the festival is now primarily a home for a thoroughly institutionalized musical modernism. It has proved to be resilient in the face of social and political changes that took away its original symbolic import. Such is its centrality in Polish musical life that even protests, like Topolski’s, cannot

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escape the festival as a point of reference, and the very fact of its institutional longevity is now one of the most powerful arguments in favor of its continued existence. Katherine Verdery has challenged the notion of transition when it comes to talking about post-socialist states: in her mind, transition implies directional change according to a Western paradigm, in which the path from socialism— bankrupt morally, politically, and quite literally—leads inevitably to market capitalism. Transition, that is, implies teleology. She prefers the term transformation, to allow for the possibility of change that does not decide in advance what its endpoint will be.24 But whether open-ended or not, both terms imply departure— embarkation on a process of change. And while the Warsaw Autumn has not been unaffected by the pressures of operating in a market economy and navigating a shifting political landscape, its basic identity—its organizational structure and the aims of those who plan it—perpetuates some features of a world that has supposedly been lost to history. Today, the festival is as much a force for stability in Polish musical life as it was a sign of change when it began in 1956. In place of transition, the Warsaw Autumn offers tradition. What this tradition will say to a new generation remains to be seen.

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appendix one

Concert Program of the Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music, 10–21 October 1956

(*) Polish premiere. (**) World premiere. 1 0 O C T O B E R , 8 : 3 0 P. M .

Olivier Messiaen, Les Offrandes oubliées (*) Karol Szymanowski, Stabat Mater Dmitry Shostakovich, Symphony no. 10 in E Minor, op. 93 (*) National Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra and Choir Bohdan Wodiczko, conductor Maria Kunińska, soprano Krystyna Szczepańska, alto Andrzej Hiolski, baritone 1 1 O C T O B E R , 8 : 3 0 P. M .

George Enescu, Suite no. 1 in C Major, op. 9 Witold Lutosławski, Little Suite Richard Strauss, Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche Aram Khachaturian, Symphony no. 2 (“Symphony with a Bell”) “George Enescu” Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra George Georgescu, conductor

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appendix one 1 2 O C T O B E R , 8 : 3 0 P. M .

Andrzej Dobrowolski, Symphony no. 1 Darius Milhaud, Concertino de primtemps (*) Bolesław Szabelski, Symphony no. 3 Wojciech Kilar, Little Overture Silesian State Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra Karol Stryja, conductor Tadeusz Wroński, violin 1 3 O C T O B E R , 5 : 1 5 P. M .

Piotr Perkowski, Warsaw Overture Stanisław Wisłocki, Piano Concerto Mario Zafred, Symphony no. 4 (“In onore della resistenza”) (*) Igor Stravinsky, The Firebird (suite) Silesian State Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra Stanisław Skrowaczewski, conductor Władysław Kędra, piano 1 3 O C T O B E R , 8 : 3 0 P. M .

Arthur Honegger, Symphony no. 2 (“Symphonie pour cordes”) Artur Malawski, Symphonic Variations Bohuslav Martinů, Symphony no. 3 (*) Igor Stravinsky, Fireworks Vitězslav Novák, Jihočeská suita, op. 64 Brno State Philharmonic Břetislav Bakala, conductor 1 4 O C T O B E R , 5 : 1 5 P. M .

Tadeusz Baird, Colas Breugnon Nikolai Miaskovsky, Symphony no. 27 (*) Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky, Symphony no. 5 in E Minor, op. 64 USSR State Symphony Orchestra Konstantin Ivanov, conductor 1 4 O C T O B E R , 8 : 3 0 P. M .

Béla Bartók, Concerto for Orchestra Kazimierz Serocki, Sinfonietta

Concert Program, 10–21 October 1956 Igor Stravinsky, Ebony Concerto (*) Arthur Honegger, Pacific 231 Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra Jan Krenz, conductor 1 5 O C T O B E R , 5 : 1 5 P. M .

Antoni Szałowski, Overture for Strings Tadeusz Szeligowski, Epitaph in memoriam Karol Szymanowski Stanisław Skrowaczewski, Night Music Igor Stravinsky, Petrushka (suite) Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra Stanisław Wisłocki, conductor 1 5 O C T O B E R , 8 : 3 0 P. M .

Béla Bartók, String Quartet no. 5 (*) László Lajtha, String Quartet no. 7 (*) Bolesław Woytowicz, String Quartet no. 2 Tátrai String Quartet 1 6 O C T O B E R , 5 : 1 5 P. M .

Arthur Honegger, Sonatine for two violins Béla Bartók, 44 Duets for two violins (nos. 37, 28, 44, 33, 39, 34, 29, and 41) Bohuslav Martinů, Sonatina for two violins and piano Maurice Ravel, Chansons madécasses Karol Szymanowski, Six Kurpian Songs Stanisław Wiechowicz, Harvest Cantata Tadeusz Szeligowski, Sailor’s Song, Angels Sweetly Sang Stanisław Wiechowicz, Little Eyes Desire, From the Other Side of the River Irena Dubiska and Eugenia Umińska, violin Sergiusz Nadgryzowski, piano Maria Załęska, mezzosoprano Aleksander Ciechański, cello Aleksander Peresada, flute Polish Radio Choir, directed by Tadeusz Dobrzański and Alojzy Kluczniok 1 6 O C T O B E R , 8 : 3 0 P. M .

Theodor Berger, La parola (*)

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appendix one Arnold Schoenberg, Piano Concerto, op. 42 (*) Witold Lutosławski, Concerto for Orchestra Wiener Symphoniker Michael Gielen, conductor Alfred Brendel, piano 1 7 O C T O B E R , 5 : 1 5 P. M .

Bolesław Woytowicz, Symphony no. 2 (“Warsaw”) Jan Novák, Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra (*) Leoš Janáček, Sinfonietta Brno State Philharmonic Břetislav Bakala, conductor Eliska Novákova and Jan Novák, piano 1 7 O C T O B E R , 8 : 3 0 P. M .

Igor Stravinsky, Jeu de cartes Zygmunt Mycielski, Symphony no. 1 (“Polish”) Benjamin Britten, Spring Symphony, op. 44 (*) Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra and Choir Kraków Kraków Philharmonic Boys’ Choir Jerzy Gert, conductor Zofia Stachurska, soprano Irena Winiarska, alto Andrzej Bachleda, tenor 1 8 O C T O B E R , 5 : 1 5 P. M .

Hans Erich Apostel, Variations on a Theme by Joseph Haydn (*) Zbigniew Turski, Violin Concerto no. 1 Johannes Brahms, Symphony no. 4 in E Minor, op. 98 Wiener Symphoniker Michael Gielen, conductor Zlatko Topolski, violin 1 8 O C T O B E R , 8 : 3 0 P. M .

Jean Martinon, String Quartet no. 1, op. 43 (*) Jean-Louis Martinet, Variations for String Quartet (*) Grażyna Bacewicz, String Quartet no. 4

Concert Program, 10–21 October 1956 Alban Berg, Lyric Suite (*) Parrenin String Quartet 1 9 O C T O B E R , 5 : 1 5 P. M .

Michał Spisak, Suite for String Orchestra Teodor Rogalski, Three Rumanian Dances (*) Stefan Kisielewski, Concerto for Chamber Orchestra Arthur Honegger, Symphony no. 3 (“Symphonie liturgique”) “George Enescu” Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra Mircea Basarab, conductor 1 9 O C T O B E R , 8 : 3 0 P. M .

Georges Auric, Overture (*) André Jolivet, Symphony no. 1 (*) Michał Spisak, Bassoon Concerto Grażyna Bacewicz, Concerto for String Orchestra Henri Dutilleux, Symphony no. 1 (*) Orchestre National de la RTF Jean Martinon, conductor René Plessier, bassoon 2 0 O C T O B E R , 5 : 1 5 P. M .

Stanisław Skrowaczewski, Symphony for Strings Henry Barraud, Offrande à une ombre (*) Bolesław Szabelski, Concerto Grosso Pierre Capdevielle, Overture to Bergerac’s Le Pédant Joué (*) Igor Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring Orchestre National de la RTF Jean Martinon, conductor 2 0 O C T O B E R , 8 : 3 0 P. M .

Grażyna Bacewicz, Overture Kazimierz Sikorski, Symphony no. 3 (“In the form of a concerto grosso”) Sergey Prokofiev, Romeo and Juliet (Suite no. 2), op. 64 Dmitry Shostakovich, Violin Concerto no. 1 in A Minor, op. 99 (*) USSR State Symphony Orchestra

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appendix one Nikolai Anosov, conductor David Oistrakh, violin 2 1 O C T O B E R , 8 : 3 0 P. M .

Artur Malawski, Symphony no. 2 (“Dramatic”) Tadeusz Baird, Cassazione per orchestra (**) Karol Szymanowski, Symphony no. 3, op. 27 (“Song of the Night”) National Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra and Choir Witold Rowicki, conductor Stefania Woytowicz, soprano

appendix t wo

Biographical Notes

The following notes provide biographical information on some of the lesser-known Polish figures involved with planning the Warsaw Autumn in the 1950s and 1960s. tadeusz baird (1928–81): Baird began studying composition with Bolesław Woytowicz and Kazimierz Sikorski in Warsaw during World War II. His training was interrupted when he was captured as a German prisoner of war after the 1944 Warsaw Uprising. During the immediate postwar years he remained in Germany, receiving treatment for spinal tuberculosis in Cologne. He resumed his studies at the Warsaw Academy of Music upon his return to Poland in 1947. With fellow young composers Jan Krenz and Kazimierz Serocki, Baird formed Grupa ’49 (The 1949 Group) to develop and advocate socialist realism in Poland. Yet the commitment did not last, and, influenced by Alban Berg, Baird developed an idiosyncratic, lyrical approach to serialism. One of the Warsaw Autumn’s initiators, Baird was a Repertoire Commission member until 1969. He taught at the Warsaw Academy of Music from 1974 to 1981. andrzej dobrowolski (1921–90): Dobrowolski was a composer and music theorist who trained at the State Higher School of Music in Kraków from 1945 to 1951. He taught music theory in Kraków from 1947 until 1954, when he took a position at the State Higher School of Music in Warsaw. Dobrowolski left Poland in 1976 to become a professor at the Hochschule für Musik in Graz. Electroacoustic composition was an important part of Dobrowolski’s output; he produced several works for tape at the Polish Radio’s Experimental Studio. He served as General Secretary of the Polish Composers’ Union from 1954 to 1969 and was a member of the Warsaw Autumn Repertoire Commission until 1976. jerzy jasieński (1913–2008): Jasieński was a pianist, critic, and arts administrator. He studied music and law in Vilnius. In 1949 he began working at the Polish Ministry of Culture and Art, where he directed the Department of Artistic Events and Celebrations and 179

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served in the Central Administration of Operas, Philharmonics, Music Institutions, and Dramatic Theaters. He was the vice-president of the Warsaw Music Society from 1968 to 1991. In the 1980s he was vice-director of PWM and director of the music publisher’s score library. In the 1960s Jasieński directed the Teatr Polski (Polish Theatre) and the Teatr Wielki (Grand Theatre) in Warsaw. włodzimierz kotoński (1925–2014): A composer and pedagogue, Kotoński studied at the State Higher School of Music in Warsaw from 1945 to 1951. His early career coincided with the promotion of socialist realism in Poland; at the time, he conducted ethnographic research on Polish folk music in addition to composing works of his own. He rapidly changed his style during the post-Stalin Thaw, participating in the Darmstadt Summer Courses from 1957 to 1961 and becoming one of the pioneers of electroacoustic music in Poland. He created his first tape pieces at the Polish Radio’s Experimental Studio and later worked at electronic music centers in Cologne, Paris, Baden-Baden, and Bourges. A prominent composition teacher, he held positions from 1967 to 1995 at the Warsaw Music Academy, where he also directed the school’s electronic music studio. He served in the Polish Composers’ Union leadership almost continuously from 1954 to 1967. Until 1974 he was a member of the Warsaw Autumn Repertoire Commission. From 1983 to 1989 he chaired the Polish Society for Contemporary Music. józef patkowski (1929–2005): The musicologist and composer was an important advocate for new music in Poland. Patkowski studied musicology and physics at the University of Warsaw. In 1957 he founded the Polish Radio’s Experimental Studio, the first electronic music center in Eastern Europe; he served as the studio’s director until 1985. With musicians Zygmunt Krauze, Tomasz Sikorski, Zbigniew Rudziński, and John Tilbury, Patkowski organized Warsztat Muzyczny (Musical Workshop), a new-music concert series that took place in the early 1960s. From 1959 to 1969 his radio program, Horizonty Muzyki (Horizons of Music), educated Polish audiences about developments in contemporary art music. Patkowski taught musicology at Warsaw University, the Music Academy in Katowice, and the Music Academy in Kraków, where he also founded an electronic music studio in 1974. He was a member of the Warsaw Autumn Repertoire Commission from 1960 to 2000. kazimierz serocki (1922–81): A pianist and composer, Serocki trained in Łódź from 1947 to 1951. He traveled to Paris in 1947 and 1948 for composition lessons with Nadia Boulanger. In France he also encountered René Leibowitz’s writings on serialism. During Poland’s postwar Stalinization he founded Grupa ’49 with Tadeusz Baird and Jan Krenz to promote the cause of socialist realism. Like many composers of his generation, Serocki changed his style in the mid-1950s, and his dedication to avant-garde ideals persisted until the end of his career. His primary creative output was orchestral compositions that explore texture and timbre. One of the Warsaw Autumn’s initiators, he served on the Repertoire Commission until 1973. kazimierz sikorski (1895–1986): Sikorski was a composer, music theorist, and pedagogue. He received his composition training at the Chopin High School of Music in Warsaw, earned a degree in philosophy and law from Warsaw University, and studied musicology at Lwów University. Sikorski spent the years 1925–27 in Paris, where he was a pupil of Nadia Boulanger; he returned to France for a short period in 1930 to continue his studies

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with her. In Poland he was an influential composition teacher and held important posts in Łódź, Poznań, and Warsaw. From 1957 to 1966 he was rector of the Warsaw Academy of Music. He served as president of the Polish Composers’ Union from 1954 to 1959. witold rudziński (1913–2004): The composer, musicologist, and pedagogue trained at the Vilnius Conservatory from 1931 to 1936. He held teaching positions in Vilnius (1939–42), Łódź (1945–47), and Warsaw (1957–94), where he taught composition and music theory at the State Higher School of Music. As an administrator he served as head of the Polish Ministry of Culture and Art’s Music Department (1947–48), director of the Warsaw State Opera and Philharmonic Orchestra (1948–49), and general secretary of the Warsaw Autumn (1960–62). Rudziński was an active proponent of socialist realism in the late 1940s and early 1950s; in the 1960s his music began to feature some avant-garde traits. Notable as a composer of opera, he also authored several books, including monographs on Stanisław Moniuszko (1954), Bartók’s compositional technique (1964), and musical rhythm (1987). wiktor weinbaum (1915–99): A musician and lawyer, Weinbaum was employed from 1947 to 1967 at the Polish Ministry of Culture and Art. He directed the Ministry’s Music Department as well as its Central Administration of Music Institutions. Weinbaum was general director of the Fryderyk Chopin Society in Warsaw from 1967 to 1982.

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n otes

I N T R O D U C T IO N

1. Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds, revised edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), xxiv. 2. Eric Drott, “The End(s) of Genre,” Journal of Music Theory 57/1 (2013): 10. 3. Carol J. Oja, Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 155–200. 4. My thinking on this point resonates with the “production of culture” perspective that has been articulated by Richard Peterson and other sociologists of culture. A useful overview of the perspective is Richard A. Peterson and N. Anand, “The Production of Culture Perspective,” Annual Review of Sociology 30 (2004): 311–334. For an incisive application of the production of culture perspective to musicological scholarship, see William Quillen, “Winning and Losing in Russian New Music Today,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 67/2 (2014): 487–542. 5. Georgina Born, Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 6. Benjamin Piekut, “Indeterminacy, Free Improvisation, and the Mixed Avant-Garde: Experimental Music in London, 1965–1975,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 67/3 (2014): 769–823. 7. Martin Iddon, New Music at Darmstadt: Nono, Stockhausen, Cage, and Boulez (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 8. Luis E. Herrera, “The CLAEM and the Construction of Elite Art Worlds: Philanthropy, Latinamericanism, and Avant-Garde Music” (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2013). 9. Prominent examples in the musicological scholarship on the Cold War are Martin Brody, “ ‘Music for the Masses’: Milton Babbitt’s Cold War Music Theory,” Musical Quarterly 183

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Notes to Pages 3–5

77 (1993): 161–192; Mark Carroll, Music and Ideology in Cold War Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Jennifer DeLapp-Birkett, “Aaron Copland and the Politics of Twelve Tone Composition in the United States,” Journal of Musicological Research 27 (2008): 31–62; Danielle Fosler-Lussier, Music Divided: Bartók’s Legacy in Cold War Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Peter J. Schmelz, Such Freedom, If Only Musical: Unofficial Soviet Music during the Thaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); and Anne C. Shreffler, “Ideologies of Serialism: Stravinsky’s Threni and the Congress of Cultural Freedom,” in Music and the Aesthetics of Modernity: Essays, ed. Karol Berger and Anthony Newcomb (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 217–245. 10. Richard Taruskin, “Afterword: Nicht blutbefleckt?” Journal of Musicology 26/2 (2009): 280. 11. Fosler-Lussier makes a similar point in Music Divided, 165. 12. Geographical terminology is exceptionally fraught in Europe, especially when it comes to describing Poland’s particular location. Precisely because the designation “Eastern Europe” was (and remains) freighted with Cold War connotations, I will be using it throughout this study. 13. Alastair Williams, “Post-war Modernism: Exclusions and Expansions,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 139/1 (2014): 193–197. 14. Iddon, New Music at Darmstadt, xiii. 15. Schmelz, Such Freedom, If Only Musical. 16. Laura Silverberg, “Between Dissonance and Dissidence: Socialist Modernism in the German Democratic Republic,” Journal of Musicology 26/1 (2009): 44–84. 17. See, for example, Andrzej Chłopecki, Liner Notes, Polska kolekcja ‘Warszawskiej Jesieni’ 1956–2005/Polish Collection of the Warsaw Autumn 1956–2005 POLMIC 001–010, 2007, compact disc; Danuta Gwizdalanka, “ ‘Warszawskie Jesienie’ w cieniu polityki,” in Muzyka i polityka (Kraków: Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, 1999), 228–245; Olgierd Pisarenko, “Warszawska Jesień,” in 50 lat Związku Kompozytorów Polskich, ed. Ludwik Erhardt (Warsaw: Związek Kompozytorów Polskich, 1995), 181–198; and a series of recollections by Krzysztof Droba, Olgierd Pisarenko, Krzysztof Baculewski, Andrzej Chłopecki, Tadeusz Wielecki, Krzysztof Szwajgier, Marta Szoka, and Wojciech Ziemowit Zych, “Pamiętam, była ‘Jesień’ . . . ” in Ruch Muzyczny 51/18–19 (2007): 16–31. 18. These sources include Tadeusz Kaczyński and Andrzej Zborski, Warszawska Jesień/ Warsaw Autumn (Kraków: Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, 1983); 50 lat Warszawskiej Jesieni/50 Years of the Warsaw Autumn (Warsaw: Związek Kompozytorów Polskich and Międzynarodowy Festiwal Muzyki Współczesnej “Warszawska Jesień,” 2007), Multimedia DVD; and Krzysztof Droba, Warszawska Jesień. Kalendarium subiektywne pięćdziesięciu festiwali (Warsaw: Warszawska Jesień, 2007). 19. Cynthia E. Bylander, “The Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music, 1956–1961: Its Goals, Structures, Programs, and People” (Ph.D. diss., The Ohio State University, 1989). 20. Anthony Kemp-Welch, Poland under Communism: A Cold War History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 12–16. 21. The proceedings of this conference were published as “Konferencja Kompozytorów w Łagowie Lubuskim w dniach od 5.VIII do 8.VIII.1949. Protokół,” Ruch Muzyczny 5/14 (1949): 12–31.

Notes to Pages 5–7

185

22. Notable studies of Poland’s Stalinization include John Connelly, Captive University: The Sovietization of East German, Czech, and Polish Higher Education, 1945–1956 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Padraic Kenney, Rebuilding Poland: Workers and Communists, 1945–1950 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997); and David Tompkins, Composing the Party Line: Music and Politics in Early Cold War Poland and East Germany (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2013). 23. Benjamin Piekut makes a similar point in “Actor-Networks in Music History: Clarifications and Critiques,” Twentieth-Century Music 11/2 (2014): 205. Becker’s model of the “art world” and actor-network theory (as adumbrated by Piekut) both encourage a robustly empirical approach to the study of social interaction, and each grants that nonhuman entities can have real-world effects. Because Becker’s art worlds ultimately come back to people (and the ways they use and think about objects), his model avoids some of actor-network theory’s more controversial claims of nonhuman agency. 24. This endeavor has involved musicologists as well as cultural historians. See Marina Frolova-Walker, Stalin’s Music Prize: Soviet Culture and Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016); Laurie S. Koloski, “Painting Kraków Red: Politics and Culture in Poland, 1945–1950” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1998); Kyrill Kunakhovich, “In Search of Socialist Culture: Art and Politics in Kraków and Leipzig, 1918–1989” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2013); Kiril Tomoff, Creative Union: The Professional Organization of Soviet Composers, 1939–1953 (Ithaca: Cornell University, 2006). 25. Becker, Art Worlds, 35–36. 26. Stephen Greenblatt, “Cultural Mobility: An Introduction,” in Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Ines G. Županov, Reinhard Meyer-Kalkus, Heike Paul, Pál Nyíri, and Friederike Pannewick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 4. 27. Ibid., 5. 28. György Péteri, “Nylon Curtain: Transnational and Transsystemic Tendencies in the Cultural Life of State-Socialist Russia and East-Central Europe,” Slavonica 10/2 (2004): 115. 29. Fosler-Lussier, Music Divided, xvi. 30. On “soft power,” see Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power (New York: Basic Books, 1990). There are numerous studies of cultural diplomacy during the Cold War. Notable titles include Walter L. Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997); Yale Richmond, Cultural Exchange and the Cold War: Raising the Iron Curtain (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003); Yale Richmond, Practicing Public Diplomacy: A Cold War Odyssey (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008); and Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: New Press, 2000). A growing body of literature specifically examines music as a tool of Cold War cultural diplomacy. See Emily A. Ansari, “Aaron Copland and the Politics of Cultural Diplomacy,” Journal of the Society for American Music 5/3 (2011): 335–364; “Special Forum. Musical Diplomacy: Strategies, Agendas, Relationships,” Diplomatic History 36/1 (2012); Penny M. Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004); Danielle Fosler-Lussier, “Cultural Diplomacy as Cultural Globalization: The University of Michigan Jazz Band in Latin America,” Journal of the Society for American Music 4/1 (2010): 59–93; and Danielle Fosler-Lussier, Music in America’s Cold War Diplomacy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015).

186

Notes to Pages 8–14

31. Anne E. Gorsuch and Diane P. Koenker present useful reflections on periodization in their “Introduction: The Socialist 1960s in Global Perspective,” in The Socialist Sixties: Crossing Borders in the Second World, ed. Anne E. Gorsuch and Diane P. Koenker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 1–21. 32. James F. English, The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 13. C HA P T E R 1

1. My account of the 1956 Polish October Revolution draws on the following sources: Anthony Kemp-Welch, Poland under Communism: A Cold War History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 76–104; Paweł Machcewicz, Rebellious Satellite: Poland 1956 (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2009), 158–189; and Andrzej Paczkowski, The Spring Will Be Ours: Poland and the Poles from Occupation to Freedom, trans. Jane Cave (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 269–275. 2. Revolt in Hungary began on 23 October 1956, and Hungarian resistance continued until 10 November. For comparative studies of the 1956 events in Hungary and Poland, see Mark Kramer, “The Soviet Union and the 1956 Crises in Hungary and Poland: Reassessments and New Findings,” Journal of Contemporary History 33/2 (1998): 163–214; and Johanna Granville, “Reactions to the Events of 1956: New Findings from the Budapest and Warsaw Archives,” Journal of Contemporary History 38/2 (2003): 261–290. 3. Hanns Jelinek, Anleitung zur Zwölftonkomposition, nebst allerlei Paralipomena. Appendix zu Zwölftonwerk, op. 15 (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1952–1958); Hermann Pfrogner, Die Zwölfordnung der Töne (Zurich: Amalthea-Verlag, 1953). In his conversation with Izabella Grzenkowicz, Baird did not indicate how he obtained these books. Izabella Grzenkowicz, Tadeusz Baird: Rozmowy, szkice, refleksje (Kraków: Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, 1998), 30. 4. Grzenkowicz, Rozmowy, szkice, refleksje, 30. For an overview of Baird’s approach to dodecaphony in Cassazione, see Iwona Lindstedt, Dodekafonia i serializm w twórczości kompozytorów polskich XX wieku (Lublin: Polihymnia, 2001), 152–154. 5. Jerzy Waldorff, “Sezon rozpocięty,” Świat (28 September 1958): 11. 6. ZKP 11/9. Seppo Nummi, “Polska krew: Od Chopina do Gomułki.” The typescript provides a Polish translation of an article that was originally published in Finnish. 7. Krzysztof Baculewski, The History of Music in Poland, vol. VII: The Contemporary Era. Part 1: 1939–1974, trans. John Comber (Warsaw: Sutkowski Edition, 2006), 79; Adrian Thomas, Polish Music since Szymanowski (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 83–91. 8. While similar in name, ZKP was not modeled on the Union of Soviet Composers. David Tompkins, Composing the Party Line: Music and Politics in Early Cold War Poland and East Germany (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2013), 96. 9. Andrzej Chodkowski, “Na początku był Kraków,” in 50 lat Związku Kompozytorów Polskich, ed. Ludwik Erhardt (Warsaw: Związek Kompozytorów Polskich, 1995), 39–47. 10. Baculewski, The History of Music in Poland, 120–121. 11. Tompkins, Composing the Party Line, 167–169.

Notes to Pages 14–19

187

12. For nuanced accounts of the commissioning process, see Tompkins, Composing the Party Line, 136–142; and Adrian Thomas, “File 750: Composers, Politics, and the Festival of Polish Music (1951),” Polish Music Journal 5/1 (2002). 13. Tompkins, Composing the Party Line, 169. 14. AAN MKiS CZTOiF, 2738. Plan pracy Centralnego Zarządu Oper, Filharmonii i Instytucji Muzycznych na 1953 roku, 1–3. 15. ZKP 12/22. Protokół surowy obrad rozszerzonego Plenum Zarządu Głównego Związku Kompozytorów Polskich, 16–17 December 1953, 3–4. 16. Ibid., 21. 17. AAN KC PZPR WK, 237/XVIII-120. Notatka w sprawie przygotowań do FMP, 11 October 1954, Jerzy Jasieński to Tadeusz Książek, 53–57. 18. Thomas, Polish Music since Szymanowski, 85. 19. AAN KC PZPR WK, 237/XVIII-143. Protokół z narady poświęconej II Festiwalowi Muzyki Polskiej, 22 November 1954, 175–180. 20. ZKP 12/22. Protokół surowy obrad rozszerzonego Plenum Zarządu Głównego Związku Kompozytorów Polskich, 16–17 December 1953, 2. 21. Dariusz Stola, Kraj bez wyjścia? Migracje z Polski 1949–1989 (Warsaw: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, 2012). See also Dariusz Stola, “Opening a Non-Exit State: The Passport Policy of Communist Poland, 1949–1980,” East European Politics and Societies 29/1 (2015): 96–119. 22. Andrzej Panufnik, Composing Myself (London: Methuen, 1987), 192–204, 213–222. For an extensive discussion of Panufnik’s defection to the United Kingdom, see Beata Bolesławska, Panufnik (Kraków: Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, 2001), 166–204. 23. ZKP 12/7. VII Walny Zjazd, 24–26 April 1954, Stenogram, 21–22. 24. AAN KC PZPR WK, 237/XVIII-148. Letter [no date], MKiS to BWKZ, 163–165. 25. Thomas, Polish Music since Szymanowski, 9–10. 26. AAN KC PZPR WK, 237/XVIII-120. Jerzy Jasieński to Tadeusz Książek, 80. 27. AAN KC PZPR WK, 237/XVIII-120. Uwagi w sprawie przygotowań do FMP w 1955, 82. 28. ZKP 12/22. Protokół Nr. II/55 z zebrania rozszerzonego Plenum Zarządu Głównego ZKP, 14 April 1955. 29. ZKP 12/8. VIII Walny Zjazd, 4–6 June 1955, Tadeusz Baird, “II Festiwal Muzyki Polskiej—referat sprawozdawczy,” 14. 30. Lech Dzierżanowski, “Jak to się zaczęło,” Ruch Muzyczny 51/18–19 (2007): 10. 31. Cynthia E. Bylander, “The Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music, 1956–1961: Its Goals, Structures, Programs, and People” (Ph.D. diss., The Ohio State University, 1989), 92–93. 32. My translation is based on a transcription of Sikorski’s account that appears in Dzierżanowski, “Jak to się zaczęło,” 10. 33. ZKP 12/22. Plan pracy Związku Kompozytorów Polskich na 1955 rok. 34. ZKP 12/8. VIII Walny Zjazd, 4–6 June 1955, Zygmunt Mycielski, “O twórczości muzycznej dziesięciolecia,” 17–18. 35. Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994). Refer also to Maria Todorova, “The Trap of Backwardness: Modernity, Temporality, and the Study of Eastern European Nationalism,” Slavic Review 64/1 (2005): 140–164.

188

Notes to Pages 20–25

36. Lisa Cooper Vest, “The Discursive Foundations of the Polish Musical Avant-Garde at Mid-century: Aesthetics of Progress, Meaning, and National Identity” (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 2014), 25–139. 37. Danielle Fosler-Lussier, Music Divided: Bartók’s Legacy in Cold War Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 28–29. For an example of the agency generated by claims of backwardness in 1970s France, see Eric Drott, Music and the Elusive Revolution: Cultural Politics and Political Culture in France, 1968–1981 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 213–216. 38. Translated and quoted in Martin Iddon, New Music at Darmstadt: Nono, Stockhausen, Cage, and Boulez (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 24. 39. ZKP 12/8. VIII Walny Zjazd, 4–6 June 1955, Tadeusz Baird, “II Festiwal Muzyki Polskiej—referat sprawozdawczy,” 15. 40. ZKP 12/8. VIII Walny Zjazd, 4–6 June 1955, Stenogram, 6. 41. Ibid., 248–249. 42. Ibid., 6. 43. Grzenkowicz, Rozmowy, szkice, refleksje, 106–107. 44. ZKP 12/23. Protokół Nr. II/3/55 z zebrania Plenum Zarządu Głównego Związku Kompozytorów Polskich, 13 June 1955. 45. ZKP 11/1. Lista gości zagranicznych na I Międzynarodowy Festiwal Muzyki Współczesnej w Warszawie. See also Bylander, “The Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music,” 141. 46. ZKP 11/1. Projekt listy uczestników spotkań z delegacjami zagranicznymi. 47. ZKP 12/23. Protokół z III Plenarnego zebrania Zarządu Głównego ZKP, 2 December 1955. 48. ZKP 11/1. Letter. 29 March 1956. H. J. Waage to Kazimierz Sikorski. 49. Tadeusz Kaczyński and Andrzej Zborski, Warszawska Jesień/Warsaw Autumn (Kraków: Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, 1983), 269–271. 50. Dzierżanowski, “Jak to się zaczęło,” 13; Bylander, “The Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music,” 115. 51. Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht, “The World Is Ready to Listen: Symphony Orchestras and the Global Performance of America,” Diplomatic History 36/1 (2012): 17–28. 52. ZKP 12/23. Protokół z III Plenarnego zebrania Zarządu Głównego ZKP, 2 December 1955. 53. Ibid. 54. Bylander, “The Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music,” 126. 55. ZKP 12/23. Protokół z III Plenarnego zebrania Zarządu Głównego ZKP, 2 December 1955. 56. ZKP 11/1. Lista utworów polskich na I MFMW. 57. ZKP 12/23. Protokół Nr. II/3/55 z zebrania Plenum Zarządu Głównego Związku Kompozytorów Polskich, 13 June 1955. 58. Thomas, Polish Music since Szymanowski, 86; Bylander, “The Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music,” 154. 59. Fosler-Lussier, Music Divided, 53–57 and 167–169. 60. Iddon, New Music at Darmstadt, 24–26; Fosler-Lussier, Music Divided, 29.

Notes to Pages 26–32

189

61. Thomas, Polish Music since Szymanowski, 88. 62. ZKP 11/1. Materiał na posiedzenie Prezydium Rady Kultury w dniu 10.V.1956 r. 63. ZKP 11/1. Undated document. Projekt listu do KWKZ w Rumunii. 64. Bylander, “The Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music,” 132–133. 65. Lucjan Kydryński, “O dziwnych utworach i ciekawym festiwalu,” Przekrój (30 September 1956): 3 and 14. 66. Jerzy Jasieński, “Warszawska Jesień,” Trybuna Ludu (8 October 1956). 67. Ibid. 68. Tadeusz Marek, essay in Program I-ego Międzynarodowego Festiwalu Muzyki Współczesnej Warszawa 10–21 października 1956, ed. Tadeusz Marek (Warsaw: Komitet Organizacyjny I-ego Międzynarodowego Festiwalu Muzyki Współczesnej, 1956), 27. 69. Ludwik Ludorowski, “Pierwszy koncert ‘Warszawskiej Jesieni,’ ” Sztandar Ludu (17 October 1956). 70. Jerzy Młodziejowski, “Warszawska Jesień Muzyczna,” Ziemia i Morze (3 November 1956). 71. Stefan Wysocki, “O festiwalu z dygresami,” Sztandar Młodych (20–21 October 1956). 72. Ludwik Erhardt, “Z Festiwalu” Express Wieczorny (19 October 1956). 73. Ludwik Erhardt, “Wątpliwości,” Express Wieczorny (20–21 October 1956). 74. Zdzisław Sierpiński, “Zamierzenia a efekty,” Życie Warszawy (24 October 1956). 75. Jan Boehm, “Pofestiwalowe refleksje,” Warmia i Mazury (15 December 1956). 76. Jerzy Waldorff, “Po ‘Jesieni Warszawskiej’—zachwyty, zawody, niepokoje,” Świat (1956): 16. 77. Boehm, “Pofestiwalowe refleksje.” 78. Bogusław Schäffer, “Utwory obce wykonane na I Międzynarodowym Festiwalu Muzyki Współczesnej,” Ruch Muzyczny 1/1 (1957): 23. 79. Schäffer’s books played a crucial role in disseminating information on twentiethcentury music and thus were fundamental to establishing his importance in Poland. They include Mały informator muzyki XX wieku (Kraków: Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, 1958) and Nowa Muzyka. Problemy współczesnej techniki kompozytorskiej (Kraków: Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, 1958). 80. Erhardt, “Wątpliwości.” 81. Sierpiński, “Zamierzenia a efekty.” 82. Ibid. 83. Jerzy Waldorff, “Wielka przegrana,” Świat (4 November 1956). 84. Ludwik Erhardt, “Festiwałowe obrachunki,” Express Wieczorny (25 October 1956). 85. ZKP 12/23. Protokół z posiedzenia rozszerzonego plenum Zarządu Głównego Związku Kompozytorów Polskich, 1 December 1956, 3–4. 86. Ibid., 5. 87. Ibid., 15 and ZKP 12/23. Protokół z posiedzenia rozszerzonego plenum Zarządu Głównego Związku Kompozytorów Polskich, 2 December 1956, 6. 88. ZKP 12/23. Protokół z posiedzenia rozszerzonego plenum Zarządu Głównego Związku Kompozytorów Polskich, 1 December 1956, 16. 89. Ibid., 17–18. 90. ZKP 11/1. Protokół z posiedzenia Plenum Rady Kultury i Sztuki, 10 May 1956.

190

Notes to Pages 32–35

91. Bylander, “The Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music,” 174. C HA P T E R 2

1. Jan P. Lee, “Musical Life and Sociopolitical Change in Warsaw, Poland: 1944–1960” (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1979), 440. 2. For details on the founding and early history of the Polish Radio’s Experimental Studio, refer to Lisa Cooper Vest, “The Discursive Foundations of the Polish Musical AvantGarde at Mid-century: Aesthetics of Progress, Meaning, and National Identity” (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 2014), 188–195. 3. Bogusław Schäffer, “Nowe drogi muzyki współczesnej,” Ruch Muzyczny 1/1 (1957): 7–18; “Nowe drogi muzyki współczesnej (dokończenie),” Ruch Muzyczny 1/2 (1957): 15–23. 4. Bohdan Pilarski, “Wrażenia, fakty i refleksje,” Ruch Muzyczny 1/6 (1957): 13–21. 5. Janusz Zathey, “Darmstadt—Mekka nowej muzyki,” Ruch Muzyczny 1/13 (1957): 25–28. 6. Stefan Kisielewski, “Utwory polskie na Międzynarodowym Festiwalu Muzyki Współczesnej,” Ruch Muzyczny 1/1 (1957): 21–23; Bogusław Schäffer, “Utwory obce wykonane na I Międzynarodowym Festiwalu Muzyki Współczesnej,” Ruch Muzyczny 1/1 (1957): 23–25; Michał Spisak, “O Warszawskiej Jesieni Muzycznej,” Ruch Muzyczny 1/1 (1957): 25–27. 7. Ruch Muzyczny 1/5 (1957) featured several articles on jazz. 8. 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), 293. 9. Fred K. Prieberg, “Warsaw Autumn Festival Demonstrates Freedom of Polish Artists,” Musical America (12 November 1958): 38. 10. Fred K. Prieberg, “Besuch in Polen,” Melos: Zeitschrift für neue Musik (February 1959): 46. 11. See, for example, Witold Lutosławski’s speech at the 1957 ZKP General Assembly. It has been republished in Lutosławski on Music, ed. and trans. Zbigniew Skowron (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2007), 231–232. 12. Anthony Kemp-Welch, Poland under Communism: A Cold War History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 128. 13. Barbara Fijałkowska, Polityka i twórcy (1948–1959) (Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1985), 409–440. 14. Maryjane Osa argues that, in consolidating its power, Gomułka’s reformist regime implemented levels of repression that were higher than those of the Stalinist era. She bases her assessment on data taken from Charles L. Taylor, principal investigator, World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators III: 1948–1982 (computer file), 2nd ICPSR ed. (Ann Arbor: Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 1985). She uses incidents of political sanction, which in the data set may range anywhere from journalistic censorship to execution of regime opponents, as an indicator of levels of repression. Osa, Solidarity and Contention: Networks of Polish Opposition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 30. 15. Piotr Piotrowski, Znaczenia modernizmu: W stronę historii sztuki polskiej po 1945 roku (Poznań: Dom Wydawniczy Rebis, 1999), 70–79; Piotr Piotrowski, In the Shadow of

Notes to Pages 35–41

191

Yalta: Art and the Avant-Garde in Eastern Europe, 1945–1989, trans. Anna Brzyski (London: Reaktion Books, 2009), 81–83. 16. Paczkowski, The Spring Will Be Ours, 294. 17. ZKP 12/23. Protokół z zebrania plenarnego Zarządu Gł ZKP w dn 14 listop 1958. 18. Eberhard Rebling, “Ein offenes Wort an unsere polnische Freunde,” Music und Gesellschaft 8/7 (1958): 11. 19. Zygmunt Mycielski, “Ciężka artyleria,” Przegląd Kulturalny 8/38 (18 September 1958): 6. 20. Lisa Cooper Vest discusses Ruch Muzyczyny’s struggles at length in “The Discursive Foundations of the Polish Musical Avant-Garde,” 202–226. 21. ZKP 12/23. Protokół z posiedzenia Zarządu Głównego ZKP i Komisji Festiwalowej II Festiwalu Międzynarodowego Muzyki Współczesnej, 4 October 1957, 5–6. 22. ZKP 12/23. Protokół z posiedzenia rozszerzonego plenum Zarządu Głównego Związku Kompozytorów Polskich, 1 December 1956, 1. 23. ZKP 12/23. Protokół z posiedzenia Zarządu Głównego ZKP i Komisji Festiwalowej II Festiwalu Międzynarodowego Muzyki Współczesnej, 4 October 1957, 15. 24. Ibid., 37. 25. ZKP 12/23. Protokół z posiedzenia rozszerzonego plenum Zarządu Głównego Związku Kompozytorów Polskich, 2 December 1956, 2. 26. Ibid., 33–34. 27. ZKP 12/23. Protokół z posiedzenia Zarządu Głównego ZKP i Komisji Festiwalowej II Festiwalu Międzynarodowego Muzyki Współczesnej, 4 October 1957, 17. 28. ZKP 12/23. Stenogram z obrad Plenum Zarządu Głównego Związku Kompozytorów Polskich, 5 April 1957, 31. 29. Andrzej Chłopecki, Liner Notes, Polska kolekcja ‘Warszawskiej Jesieni’ 1956–2005/ Polish Collection of the Warsaw Autumn 1956–2005 POLMIC 001–010, 2007, compact disc, 109. 30. Tadeusz Marek, preface in Program II Międzynarodowego Festiwalu Muzyki Współczesnej, Warszawa 1958, ed. Tadeusz Marek (Warsaw: Komitet Organizacyjny II Międzynarodowego Festiwalu Muzyki Współczesnej, 1958), 3. 31. Tadeusz Marek, preface in Program III Międzynarodowego Festiwalu Muzyki Współczesnej, Warszawa 1959, ed. Tadeusz Marek (Warsaw: Komitet Organizacyjny III Międzynarodowego Festiwalu Muzyki Współczesnej, 1959), 5. 32. Marek, preface in Program II Międzynarodowego Festiwalu Muzyki Współczesnej, 3. 33. Marek, preface in Program III Międzynarodowego Festiwalu Muzyki Współczesnej, 4. 34. Ludwik Erhardt, “ ‘Jesień’ za pasem,” Express Wieczorny (1 June 1959). 35. Krzysztof A. Mazur, “Dziś zaczyna się Warszawska Jesień Muzyczna,” Dziennik Bałtycki (12 September 1959). 36. Erhardt, “ ‘Jesień’ za pasem.” 37. Zdzisław Sierpiński, “Latem o ‘Jesieni,’ ” Życie Warszawy (7 August 1959). 38. Peter Heyworth, “Astride Two Worlds,” The Observer (27 September 1959). 39. David Cairns, “Warsaw’s Two Worlds,” The Spectator (2 October 1959). 40. ZKP 11/4. Stenogram z posiedzenia Komitetu Festiwalowego II Międzynarodowego Festiwalu Muzyki Współczesnej, 30 August 1958, 60. 41. Ibid., 67.

192

Notes to Pages 42–48

42. Ibid., 43. 43. ZKP 12/23. Protokół z posiedzenia rozszerzonego Plenum Zarządu Głównego Związku Kompozytorów Polskich, 17 October 1958, 5. 44. ZKP 11/4. Stenogram z posiedzenia Komitetu Festiwalowego II Międzynarodowego Festiwalu Muzyki Współczesnej, 30 August 1958, 32 and 45. 45. Joy H. Calico, Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw in Postwar Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 112–135. 46. ZKP 11/4. Stenogram z posiedzenia Komitetu Festiwalowego II Międzynarodowego Festiwalu Muzyki Współczesnej, 30 August 1958, 13–14. 47. ZKP 12/23. Protokół z posiedzenia rozszerzonego Plenum Zarządu Głównego Związku Kompozytorów Polskich w dniu 17 października 1958 r., 4. 48. Tadeusz Kaczyński and Andrzej Zborski, Warszawska Jesień/Warsaw Autumn (Kraków: Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, 1983), 271–272. 49. Everett Helm, “The Poles Applauded the Radical Music of Webern,” San Francisco Chronicle (19 October 1958). 50. Excerpts from Keldysh’s articles on the 1958 Warsaw Autumn published in Sovetskaya Muzïka nos. 1 and 2 (1959) were reprinted in Polish translation in Program III Międzynarodowego Festiwalu Muzyki Współczesnej, ed. Tadeusz Marek (Warsaw: Komitet Organizacyjny III Międzynarodowego Festiwalu Muzyki Współczesnej, 1959), 135–136. 51. Arthur Jacobs, “Avant-Garde Series in Warsaw,” The New York Times (27 September 1959). 52. Zdzisław Sierpiński, “Zamierzenia i efekty,” Życie Warszawy (22 September 1959). 53. Józef Kański, “Ostatnie koncerty i ogólne refleksje,” Trybuna Ludu (24 September 1959). 54. Arthur Jacobs, “Open Minds in Warsaw,” Daily Telegraph and Morning Post (19 September 1959). 55. Adrian Thomas, Górecki (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 18–24. 56. Kaczyński and Zborski, Warszawska Jesień, 273–274. 57. [Unsigned], “Controversial Chamber Music in Warsaw,” The Times (23 September 1959). 58. Yelena Grosheva and Konstantin Sakva, “Yeshcho o ‘Varshavskoy Osyeni’ 1959 goda,” Sovetskaya Muzïka (1 January 1960), 156. 59. Michał Bristiger, “Narodziny nowego słuchu muzycznego (Na marginesie ‘Warszawskiej Jesieni’),” Polityka (10 October 1959): 7. 60. Bohdan Pilarski, “Orfeusz na nowej drodze. ‘Warszawska Jesień’ 1959,” Przegląd Kulturalny 43 (22 October 1959): 6. 61. Bohdan Pociej, “Świt awangardy,” Ruch Muzyczny 4/1 (1960): 24. 62. Ibid., 10. 63. Bristiger, “Narodziny nowego słuchu muzycznego.” 64. ZKP 12/23. Protokół z zebrania Plenum Zarządu Gł. ZKP, 29 June 1959, 3. 65. “Zarządzenie Nr. 214 Ministra Kultury i Sztuki z dnia 22 grudnia 1959 r. w sprawie międzynarodowych festiwali muzyki współczesnej w Polsce.” Document reprinted in Cynthia E. Bylander, “The Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music, 1956–1961: Its Goals, Structures, Programs, and People” (Ph.D. diss., The Ohio State University, 1989), 584–585.

Notes to Pages 48–51

193

66. ZKP 11/4. Stenogram z posiedzenia Komitetu Festiwalowego II Międzynarodowego Festiwalu Muzyki Współczesnej, 30 August 1958, 54–61; ZKP 12/23. Protokół z posiedzenia rozszerzonego Plenum Zarządu Głównego Związku Kompozytorów Polskich, 17 October 1958, 4; Sierpiński, “Zamierzenia i efekty.” 67. ZKP 12/23. Protokół z posiedzenia rozszerzonego Plenum Zarządu Głównego Związku Kompozytorów Polskich, 17 October 1958, 9. 68. Ibid., 11. 69. Bylander, “The Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music,” 294–295. 70. ZKP 12/23. Stenogram z obrad Plenum Zarządu Głównego Związku Kompozytorów Polskich, 5 April 1957, 50–62. 71. ZKP 12/23. Protokół z posiedzenia rozszerzonego Plenum Zarządu Głównego Związku Kompozytorów Polskich, 17 October 1958, 11. 72. Vest, “The Discursive Foundations of the Polish Musical Avant-Garde,” 164–169. 73. Bylander, “The Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music,” 584. My translation. 74. Ibid., 278–280. 75. ZKP 12/23. Protokół z zebrania Plenum Zarządu Głównego ZKP, 29 June 1959, 3. 76. Rowicki had long been an authoritative figure in Polish musical life. See David Tompkins, Composing the Party Line: Music and Politics in Early Cold War Poland and East Germany (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2013), 224. 77. Alina Sawicka-Baird, “Władze naczelne ZKP,” in 50 lat Związku Kompozytorów Polskich, ed. Ludwik Erhardt (Warsaw: Związek Kompozytorów Polskich, 1995), 17–23. 78. Tompkins, Composing the Party Line, 104–108. According to Jan Stęszewski, ZKP president from 1973 to 1979, the Qualifying Commission employed similar strategies in later decades. He described these actions as ethically motivated. Jan Stęszewski, “Refleksje na temat osobowości kompozytora i jego udziału w życiu muzycznym,” in Witold Lutosławski i jego wkład do kultury muzycznej XX wieku, ed. Jadwiga Paja-Stach (Kraków: Musica Iagellonica, 2005), 162–163. 79. For more information on Baird’s life and works, refer to Izabella Grzenkowicz, Tadeusz Baird: Rozmowy, szkice, refleksje (Kraków: Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, 1998); Krystyna Tarnawska-Kaczorowska, Tadeusz Baird: Głosy do biografii (Kraków: Musica Iagellonica, 1997), and the website maintained by the Polish Music Information Centre: www .baird.polmic.pl/index.php/en/. The literature on Lutosławski’s compositional style is diverse. Some of the most helpful studies of his approach include Martina Homma, Witold Lutosławski: Zwölfton-Harmonik, Formbildung “aleatorischer Kontrapunkt”. Studien zum Gesamtwerk unter Einbeziehung der Skizzen (Cologne: Bela Verlag, 1996); Steven Stucky, Lutosławski and His Music, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); and Charles Bodman Rae, The Music of Lutosławski, 3rd edition (London: Omnibus Press, 1999). 80. The English-language literature on Serocki is limited. One of the best resources is the website maintained by the Polish Music Information Centre: www.serocki.polmic.pl /index.php/en/. 81. Małgorzata Gąsiorowska, Liner Notes, Włodzimierz Kotoński—Awangarda, Polskie Nagrania, PNCD 1521, 2013, compact disc.

194

Notes to Pages 51–61

82. ZKP 12/23. Protokół z zebrania plenarnego Zarządu Głównego ZKP (III), 18 November 1959, 1. 83. Vest, “The Discursive Foundations of the Polish Musical Avant-Garde,” 266–285. 84. More information on Koffler can be found in Michał Gołąb, Józef Koffler: Compositional Style and Source Documents, trans. Maksymilian Kapelański, Marek Żebrowski, and Linda Schubert (Los Angeles: USC Polish Music Center, 2004). 85. Martin Iddon, New Music at Darmstadt: Nono, Stockhausen, Cage, and Boulez (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), xx. 86. ZKP 12/23. Protokół z posiedzenia Zarządu Głównego ZKP i Komisji Festiwalowej II Festiwalu Międzynarodowego Muzyki Współczesnej, 4 October 1957, 38. 87. I have written about these debates at greater length in Lisa Jakelski, “Górecki’s Scontri and Avant-Garde Music in Cold War Poland,” Journal of Musicology 26/2 (2009): 205– 239. 88. MKiDN. Ministerstwo Kultury i Sztuki Wydz. Konkursów i Festiwali (47). Stenogram posiedzenia Sekcji Muzycznej Rady Kultury w sprawie IV Festiwalu “Warszawska Jesień” 1960 r., 2, 24. 89. Ibid., 28. 90. Ibid., 32–33. 91. Piotrowski, Znaczenia modernizmu, 70–79; Piotrowski, In the Shadow of Yalta, 81–83. 92. MKiDN. Ministerstwo Kultury i Sztuki Wydz. Konkursów i Festiwali (14). VI MFMW “Warszawska Jesień” (Projekt programu i uwagi do projektu programu) 1961–1962 r. Założenia programowe VI Międzynarodowego Festiwalu Muzyki Współczesnej “Warszawska Jesień,” 1–3. 93. Ibid. 94. Ibid., 4. 95. Ibid., 1–3. 96. Ibid. 97. ZKP [uncataloged document]. “Działalność Komitetu Międzynarodowego Festiwalu Muzyki Współczesnej w okresie VI ‘Warszawskiej Jesieni’ 1962 roku,” 2. 98. The Festival Committee requested 556,000 zł to plan the 1962 Warsaw Autumn. Only 421,000 zł was approved, a sum that was raised to 451,000 zł after festival secretary Leokadia Malinowska negotiated with the MKiS Music Group. Organizers also had problems accessing these funds, since they were not transferred to the ZKP Executive Board at once or in full. ZKP [uncataloged document]. “Działalność Komitetu Międzynarodowego Festiwalu Muzyki Współczesnej w okresie VI ‘Warszawskiej Jesieni’ 1962 roku,” 1. 99. ZKP 11/75. Protokół z zebrania Prezydium Komitetu Festiwalowego, 11 March 1963. 100. ZKP 11/75. Protokół z zebrania Komisji Programowej, 7 November 1962. 101. ZKP [uncataloged document]. “Sprawozdanie z przebiegu prac Komitetu Festiwalowego za czas od 1. czerwca 63 r.—14. lutego 64 r.,” 4. 102. Paczkowski, The Spring Will Be Ours, 286–292; Ben Slay, The Polish Economy: Crisis, Reform, and Transformation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 32. 103. AAN KC PZPR WK, 237/XVIII-207. Tezy do dyskusji w sprawie oceny twórczości muzycznej, 34–35.

Notes to Pages 61–68

195

104. Tadeusz Kaczyński, “Jesień 1966—Drugie rozpoznanie,” Ruch Muzyczny 10/23 (1966): 14. C HA P T E R 3

1. My account of this performance is based on the following sources: Franco Donatoni, “Program Note for Per orchestra,” inVIIe Festival International de Musique Contemporaine Automne de Varsovie. Varsovie 21–29, IX, 1963, ed. Ludwik Erhardt (Warsaw: Związek Kompozytorów Polskich, 1963), 42; Stefan Kisielewski, “Siódma Jesień,” 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), 75–76; and Józef Kański, “Polskie sukcesy. Włosi i egzotyka. Filharmonia Drezdeńska,” Trybuna Ludu (27 September 1963). 2. ZKP 11/75. Protokół z zebrania Komisji Programowej, 11 October 1962. 3. Stefan Wysocki, “Szkoda Jesieni,” Kultura (6 October 1963), 3. 4. Kisielewski, “Siódma Jesień,” 75. 5. Kański, “Polskie sukcesy.” 6. Jerzy Waldorff, “Remanent,” Świat (13 October 1963), 10. 7. 50 lat Warszawskiej Jesieni/50 Years of the Warsaw Autumn (Warsaw: Związek Kompozytorów Polskich and Międzynarodowy Festiwal Muzyki Współczesnej “Warszawska Jesień,” 2007), multimedia DVD. 8. Kisielewski, “Siódma Jesień,” 75. 9. Waldorff, “Remanent,” 10. 10. Zygmunt Mycielski, “O zadaniach Związku Kompozytorów Polskich,” Ruch Muzyczny 5/14 (1949): 9–10. 11. “Konferencja Kompozytorów w Łagowie Lubuskim w dniach od 5.VIII do 8. VIII.1949. Protokół,” Ruch Muzyczny 5/14 (1949): 12–31. See especially the comments by Zofia Lissa (pp. 13–14, 23), Bolesław Woytowicz (p. 15), Józef Chomiński (p. 21), Witold Rudziński (p. 11), and Tadeusz Baird (p. 28). 12. David Tompkins, Composing the Party Line: Music and Politics in Early Cold War Poland and East Germany (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2013), 167–169. 13. Lisa Cooper Vest, “Educating Audiences, Educating Composers: The Polish Composers’ Union and Upowszechnienie,” Musicology Today 7 (2010): 226–242. 14. ZKP 12/23, Protokół z zebrania Plenum Zarządu Gł. ZKP, 26 June 1959, 3–4. 15. ZKP 12/23. Protokół z posiedzenia rozszerzonego plenum Zarządu Głównego Związku Kompozytorów Polskich, 1 December 1956, 8. 16. Cynthia E. Bylander, “The Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music, 1956–1961: Its Goals, Structures, Programs, and People” (Ph.D. diss., The Ohio State University, 1989), 584. 17. ZKP 12/23. Protokół z posiedzenia Zarządu Głównego ZKP i Komisji Festiwalowej II Festiwalu Międzynarodowego Muzyki Współczesnej, 4 October 1957, 19–20. 18. Ibid., 17. 19. Ibid. 20. MKiDN. Protokół z posiedzenia Sekcji Muzyki /VII/ Rady Kultury, 9 October 1959, 6.

196

Notes to Pages 68–73

21. Ibid, 8. 22. ZKP 11/74. Protokół z zebrania Prezydium Komitetu Festiwalowego, 5 October 1962. 23. ZKP 11/75. Protokół z zebrania Komitetu Festiwalowego, 12 October 1963; ZKP [uncataloged document]. “Sprawozdanie z działalności Komitetu Festiwalowego Międzynarodowego Festiwalu Muzyki Współczesnej ‘Warszawska Jesień’ w okresie V Warszawskiej Jesieni (1961 r.),” 4. 24. ZKP [uncataloged document]. “Działalność Komitetu Międzynarodowego Festiwalu Muzyki Współczesnej w okresie VIII ‘Warszawskiej Jesieni’ 1964 roku,” 6. 25. ZKP [uncataloged document]. “Działalność Komitetu Międzynarodowego Festiwalu Muzyki Współczesnej w okresie VI ‘Warszawskiej Jesieni’ 1962 roku,” 4. 26. 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), 336. 27. Danuta Jackiewicz, “ ‘Rozfilharmonizowana’ Warszawa: dzieje gmachu Filharmonii Warszawskiej,” in 100 lat Filharmonii w Warszawie 1901–2001 ed. Maria Bychawska and Henryk Schiller (Warsaw: Fundacja Bankowa im. Leopolda Kronenberga Filharmonia Narodowa, 2001), 78 and 93. 28. The “wedding cake” skyscrapers are Kotelnicheskaya Embankment Building, the main building of Moscow State University, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of the Construction of Heavy Industry (now called the Red Gates Administrative Building), Kudrinskaya Square Building, Hotel Leningradskaya, and Hotel Ukraina. 29. For a description of the construction of the Palace of Culture and Science, and a discussion of ambivalent Polish reactions to the building, refer to David Crowley, Warsaw (London: Reaktion Books, 2003), 38–47. 30. Ibid., 171–173. 31. MKiDN. Stenogram z posiedzenia Rady Kultury, Sekcji Muzyki, 29 October 1960, 18. 32. MKiDN. Ministerstwo Kultury i Sztuki Wydz. Konkursów i Festiwali (14). VI MFMW “Warszawska Jesień” (Projekt programu i uwagi do projektu programu) 1961–1962 r. Letter. 9 June 1962. Wiktor Weinbaum to Tadeusz Galiński. 33. AAN KC PZPR WK, 237/XVIII-207. Tezy do dyskusji w sprawie oceny twórczości muzycznej, 34–37. 34. For more on this shift, see James H. Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 35. Interview with Zygmunt Krauze, 6 June 2008 (Warsaw, Poland). 36. ZKP 12/23. Protokół z posiedzenia rozszerzonego Plenum Zarządu Głównego Związku Kompozytorów Polskich, 17 October 1958, 1. 37. Fed., “Warszawa,” in Międzynarodowe Festiwale Muzyki Współczesnej “Warszawska Jesień” 1962 i “Warszawska Jesień” 1963—fragmenty recenzji (biuletyn na prawach rękopisu) (Warsaw: Związek Kompozytorów Polskich, 1964), 3. Polish translation of an article that first appeared in Der Opernfreund (November 1962). 38. Jan Szelepscényi, “Warszawska Jesień—wiosną nowej muzyki,” in Międzynarodowe Festiwale Muzyki Współczesnej “Warszawska Jesień” 1962 i “Warszawska Jesień” 1963—fragmenty recenzji (biuletyn na prawach rękopisu) (Warsaw: Związek Kompozytorów Polskich, 1964), 8. Polish translation of an article that first appeared in Kulturny život (3 November 1962).

Notes to Pages 73–80

197

39. ZKP [uncataloged document]. “Działalność Komitetu Międzynarodowego Festiwalu Muzyki Współczesnej w okresie VI ‘Warszawskiej Jesieni’ 1962 roku—najogólniejsze podsumowanie festiwalu VI ‘Warszawska Jesień,’ ” 1. Emphasis in original. 40. Stefan Śledziński, “Dziesięć ‘Warszawskich Jesieni,’ ” in X Międzynarodowy Festiwal Muzyki Współczesnej “Warszawska Jesień” Warszawa 17–25 września 1966 (Warsaw: Związek Kompozytorów Polskich, 1966), 6. 41. Photograph in X Międzynarodowy Festiwal Muzyki Współczesnej “Warszawska Jesień” Warszawa 17–25 września 1966, 146. 42. Michael S.-Y. Chwe, Rational Ritual: Culture, Coordination, and Common Knowledge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 43. Tadeusz Marek, ed., Program II Międzynarodowego Festiwalu Muzyki Współczesnej. Warszawa 27.IX-5.X.1958, (Warsaw: Komitet Organizacyjny II Międzynarodowego Festiwalu Muzyki Współczesnej, 1958), 38. 44. It is conventional to repeat Survivor in performance. Joy Calico traces this convention to the work’s premiere by Kurt Frederick and the Albuquerque Civic Orchestra on 4 November 1958. Calico, Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw in Postwar Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 10. 45. Everett Helm, “Current Chronicle—Poland,” The Musical Quarterly 45/1 (1959): 111– 112. 46. Everett Helm, “The Poles Applauded the Radical Music of Webern,” San Francisco Chronicle (19 October 1958). 47. Calico, Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw in Postwar Europe, 123–129. 48. Tadeusz Marek, preface in Program III Międzynarodowego Festiwalu Muzyki Współczesnej Warszawa 1959, ed. Tadeusz Marek (Warsaw: Komitet Organizacyjny III Międzynarodowego Festiwalu Muzyki Współczesnej, 1959), 3. 49. Kisielewski, “Siódma Jesień,” 75. 50. Krzysztof Baculewski, reminiscence in Krzysztof Droba et al., “Pamiętam, była Jesień . . .” Ruch Muzyczny 51/18–19 (2007): 24. 51. “Publiczność znów aktywna,” Dorota Szwarcman Blog, accessed 1 July 2015, http:// szwarcman.blog.polityka.pl/2007/09/26/publicznosc-znow-aktywna/. 52. Paweł Socha, “Publiczność współczesnej muzyki poważnej: analiza socjologiczna na przykładzie publiczności Międzynarodowego Festiwalu Muzyki Współczesnej ‘Warszawska Jesień.’ ” (M.A. thesis, University of Wrocław, 1999), 65. 53. Laura Silverberg, “Between Dissonance and Dissidence: Socialist Modernism in the German Democratic Republic,” The Journal of Musicology 26/1 (2009): 44–84. 54. Jerzy Waldorff, “Premier bił brawo!” Stolica (12 October 1958). 55. Paczkowski, The Spring Will Be Ours, 295–300. 56. Joachim Olkuśnik, “Impresje i doświadczenia,” Współczesność (16–31 October 1959). 57. Helm, “The Poles Applauded the Radical Music of Webern.” 58. Martin Iddon, New Music at Darmstadt: Nono, Stockhausen, Cage, and Boulez (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), xx. 59. Everett Helm, “Contemporary Music Festival in Warsaw,” The Music Review (November 1958). 60. Amy C. Beal, New Music, New Allies: American Experimental Music in West Germany from the Zero Hour to Reunification (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 64–104.

198

Notes to Pages 80–87

61. Kronikarze, “Na Jasnej, róg Sienkiewicza.” Trybuna Robotnicza (11–12 October 1958). 62. Stefan Kisielewski, “Spotkanie języków czyli Warszawska Jesień,” 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), 64. Originally published in Tygodnik Powszechny 40 (1962). 63. Ibid. 64. Kazimierz Rozbicki, “O Warszawskiej Jesieni, gwizdach i konserwatyzmie,” 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), 68. Originally published in Tygodnik Kulturalny 43 (1962). 65. Harvard University, Houghton Library, b. 90M-52 [Shelved as MS Storage 90]. Letter, September 1962, Elliott Carter to Paul Fromm. I am grateful to Rachel Vandagriff for sharing this material with me. 66. Kisielewski, “Spotkanie języków czyli Warszawska Jesień,” 61. 67. Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989), 16. 68. Interview with Zygmunt Krauze. Quotation authorized 20 July 2009. 69. Tadeusz A. Zieliński, “Odkrycia i wydarzenia,” in Warszawska Jesień 1964 i 1965—fragmenty recenzji (biuletyn na prawach rękopisu) (Warsaw: Związek Kompozytorów Polskich, 1966), 32–33. Excerpted from an article first published in Ruch Muzyczny (November 1964). 70. Adolf Dygacz, “Refleksje po ‘Warszawskiej Jesieni,’ ” in Warszawska Jesień 1964 i 1965—fragmenty recenzji (biuletyn na prawach rękopisu) (Warsaw: Związek Kompozytorów Polskich, 1966), 56. Excerpted from an article first published in Trybuna Robotnicza (16–17 October 1965). C HA P T E R 4

1. David Gable, “Paul Fromm and American Musical Life,” in A Life for New Music: Selected Papers of Paul Fromm, ed. David Gable and Christoph Wolff (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), xvii. 2. Harvard University, Houghton Library, b. 90M-52 [Shelved as MS Storage 90]. Letter, September 1962, Elliott Carter to Paul Fromm. 3. Ibid. 4. Harvard University, Houghton Library, b. 90M-52 [Shelved as MS Storage 90]. Letter, 6 November 1962, Paul Fromm to Elliott Carter. 5. For a condensed overview of Fromm’s activities, see Gable, “Paul Fromm and American Musical Life,” ix–xviii. Rachel Vandagriff ’s recent study provides a more detailed account of Fromm’s patronage of contemporary music. Vandagriff, “The History and Impact of the Fromm Music Foundation, 1952–1983” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2015). 6. Elliott Carter, “Letter from Europe,” Perspectives of New Music 1/2 (1963): 195–205. 7. Eric G. E. Zuelow, “The Necessity of Touring beyond the Nation: An Introduction,” in Touring beyond the Nation: A Transnational Approach to European Tourism History, ed. Eric G. E. Zuelow (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 3.

Notes to Pages 87–94

199

8. Igor Tchoukarine, “Yugoslavia’s Open-Door Policy and Global Tourism in the 1950s and 1960s,” East European Politics and Societies 29/1 (2015): 169. 9. Carter, “Letter from Europe,” 195. 10. Stephen Greenblatt, Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 250. 11. Steven Vertovec, Transnationalism (London: Routledge, 2009), 3. 12. Ibid. 13. ZKP 11/74. Witold Rudziński, “Działalność Komitetu Międzynarodowego Festiwalu Muzyki Współczesnej Warszawska Jesień—1960 r.” 14. ZKP 11/15. Letter, 17 July 1961, Yugoslav Composers’ Union to ZKP; Letter, 1 September 1961, Chinese Composers’ Union to ZKP; Letter [undated], ZKP to Vietnamese Composers’ Union; Letter [undated], ZKP to Mongolian Composers’ Union; Letter [undated], ZKP to Korean Composers’ Union. 15. ZKP [uncataloged document]. “Sprawozdanie z przebiegu przygotowań do VI Międzynarodowego Festiwalu Muzyki Współczesnej ‘Warszawska Jesień,’ ” 2. 16. ZKP [uncataloged document]. “Sprawozdanie z działalności Komitetu Międzynarodowego Festiwalu Muzyki Współczesnej ‘Warszawska Jesień’ w okresie V Warszawskiej Jesieni (1961 r).” 17. ZKP 11/74. Protokół z zebrania Prezydium Komitetu Festiwalowego, 20 April 1962. 18. ZKP [uncataloged document]. “Działalność Komitetu Międzynarodowego Festiwalu Muzyki Współczesnej w okresie VII ‘Warszawskiej Jesieni’—1963 roku. (Sprawozdanie Sekretarza Festiwalu),” 10. 19. ZKP 11/32. Letter, 8 August 1966, Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne to the Warsaw Autumn Festival Office. 20. ZKP 11/32. List of the BWKZ’s invited guests to the 1966 Warsaw Autumn Festival; Lista gości BWKZ na “Warszawska Jesień” /kraje Demokracji Ludowej/. 21. ZKP 11/74. Witold Rudziński, “Działalność Komitetu Międzynarodowego Festiwalu Muzyki Współczesnej Warszawska Jesień—1960 r.” 22. Everett Helm, “Current Chronicle—Poland,” The Musical Quarterly 45 (1959): 112. 23. Everett Helm, “The Poles Applauded the Radical Music of Webern,” San Francisco Chronicle (19 October 1958). 24. Tchoukarine, “Yugoslavia’s Open-Door Policy,” 171. 25. AAN MKiS CZIM, 3248. Letter, 8 November 1958, Everett Helm to Warsaw Autumn Festival Committee. 26. MKiDN. Ministerstwo Kultury i Sztuki Wydz. Konkursów i Festiwali (42). Protokół z posiedzenia Sekcji Muzyki /VII/ Rady Kultury, 9 October 1959, 3. 27. Carter, “Letter from Europe,” 202–203. 28. Ibid., 203. 29. Elliott Carter to Paul Fromm, September 1962. 30. Danielle Fosler-Lussier, “Music Pushed, Music Pulled: Cultural Diplomacy, Globalization, and Imperialism,” Diplomatic History 36/1 (2012): 60. 31. “Na horyzoncie—Kongres Kultury Polskiej. Włodzimierz Kotoński w-prezes Związku Kompozytorów Polskich,” Współczesność (30 March–12 April 1966), 2. 32. Interview with Włodzimierz Kotoński, 13 June 2008 (Warsaw, Poland).

200

Notes to Pages 94–98

33. Ruth Seehaber, “ ‘ . . . eine Brücke schlagen . . . ’ Deutsch-polnische Musikbeziehungen in den 1960er Jahren,” in Muzykalia VIII. Zeszyt Niemiecki 2 (Warsaw: Stowarzyszenie de Musica, 2009), 4. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid., 5–6. 36. Ibid. 37. AKP, Spuścizna Kazimierza Serockiego, Korespondencja polska: instytucje. Letter, 11 October 1960, Zofia Wiśniewska to Kazimierz Serocki; Letter, 6 December 1960, Zofia Wiśniewska to Kazimierz Serocki. 38. Wolfram Schwinger, Krzysztof Penderecki, His Life and Work: Encounters, Biography, and Musical Commentary, trans. William Mann (London: Schott, 1989), 27. 39. Donal Henahan, “Religiously, a Free Spirit. Politically?” The New York Times (23 February 1969). 40. Seehaber, “ ‘ . . . eine Brücke schlagen . . .,’ ” 3–4. 41. Everett Helm, “Black Forest Town Magnet for Avant-Garde,” The New York Times (30 October 1960). 42. Andrzej Paczkowski, The Spring Will Be Ours: Poland and the Poles from Occupation to Freedom trans. Jane Cave (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 313–314; Anthony Kemp-Welch, Poland under Communism: A Cold War History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 177–180. 43. Annika Frieberg, “Catholics in Ostpolitik? Networking and Nonstate Diplomacy in the Bensberger Memorandum, 1966–1970,” in Searching for a Cultural Diplomacy, ed. Jessica Gienow-Hecht and Mark Donfried (New York: Berghahn, 2010), 113–119. 44. Orędzie biskupów polskich do biskupów niemieckich: materiały i dokumenty (Warsaw: Polonia, 1966); Paczkowski, The Spring Will Be Ours, 304–311. 45. Frieberg, “Catholics in Ostpolitik?,” 115. 46. AKP, Spuścizna Tadeusza Baird, Korespondencja Bairda (Listy itp.), Listy do T. Bairda (osoby prywatne). Letter, 6 December 1965, George Szell to Tadeusz Baird. 47. AKP, Spuścizna Tadeusza Baird, Korespondencja Bairda (Listy itp.), Listy do T. Bairda (osoby prywatne). Contract, 1 January 1968, between J&W Chester Limited (London) and Tadeusz Baird. 48. Alan Rich, “Poland’s Far-Out Is Finding an Audience,” The New York Times (12 August 1962). 49. Danuta Gwizdalanka and Krzysztof Meyer, Lutosławski: Droga do mistrzostwa, Tom 2 (Kraków: Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, 2004), 91. 50. Irina Nikolska, Conversations with Witold Lutosławski, trans. Valeri Yerokbin (Stockholm: Melos, 1994), 72. 51. ZKP 12/99. Protokół z narady roboczej—sprawy propagandy muzyki polskiej za granicą, 26 June 1965, 1. 52. Ibid., 2. 53. Zarządzenie Ministra Finansów nr. 402 z dnia 14 sierpnia 1958 roku w sprawie zezwolenia na dysponowanie częścią zagranicznych środków płatniczych uzyskiwanych przez osoby fizyczne z niektóre prace wykonywane w obrocie z zagranicą. Reprinted in Związek Kompozytorów Polskich: biuletyn informacyjny 37 (January–June 1966), 51–53. 54. Gwizdalanka and Meyer, Droga do mistrzostwa, 90–91.

Notes to Pages 99–102

201

55. AKP, Spuścizna Kazimierza Serockiego, Korespondencja polska: instytucje. Letter, 16 April 1968, Jan Paździora to Kazimierz Serocki. 56. Zarządzenie Ministra Finansów nr. 132—z dnia 9 sierpnia 1960 r. w sprawie zezwolenie na dysponowanie zagranicznymi środkami płatniczymi uzyskiwanymi w niektórych praw autorskich w obrocie z zagranicą. Reprinted in Związek Kompozytorów Polskich: biuletyn informacyjny 37 (January–June 1966), 47–53. 57. Nikolska, Conversations, 72–73. 58. ZKP 12/99. Protokół z narady roboczej—sprawy propagandy muzyki polskiej za granicą, 26 June 1965, 3. 59. Interview with Włodzimierz Kotoński. 60. Nikolska, Conversations, 72–73. 61. “Internal export” shops would not become widespread in Poland until the 1970s, when they were used to drain hard currency out of circulation. Financed by foreign loans, a brief period of economic prosperity in the early 1970s made access to foreign currency more widespread among Polish citizens. This could be spent at PEWEX (short for Przedsiębiorstwo Eksportu Wewnętrznego), a chain of hard-currency shops that offered otherwise unobtainable Western goods, as well as domestically manufactured products that typically were for export only. During the 1970s and ’80s, the Baltona Foreign Trade Company served a similar function to PEWEX, providing access to Western goods for those who could pay in hard currency. 62. Interview with Włodzimierz Kotoński. 63. ZKP 12/140. Letter, 19 April 1966, Stefan Śledziński and Andrzej Dobrowolski to Jan Konopka. AKP, Spuścizna Kazimierza Serockiego, Korespondencja polska: instytucje. Letter, 2 April 1968, Zofia Wiśniewska to Kazimierz Serocki; Letter, 29 August 1968, Zofia Wiśniewska to Kazimierz Serocki; Letter, 22 February 1969,Wanda Kowalska to Kazimierz Serocki; Letter, 26 March 1970, Zofia Wiśniewska to Kazimierz Serocki. 64. Pismo okólne Nr. 88 Prezesa Rady Ministrów z dnia 18 września 1962 roku. 65. ZKP [uncataloged document]. “Działalność Komitetu Międzynarodowego Festiwalu Muzyki Współczesnej w okresie VII ‘Warszawskiej Jesieni’—1963 roku. (Sprawozdanie Sekretarza Festiwalu),” 5. 66. ZKP [uncataloged document]. “Działalność Komitetu Międzynarodowego Festiwalu Muzyki Współczesnej w okresie VIII ‘Warszawskiej Jesieni’ 1964 roku,” 4. 67. The Festival Committee received approval to invite eight foreign guests in 1965; in 1966, they were granted permission to issue ten official invitations. ZKP [uncataloged documents]. “Działalność Komitetu Międzynarodowego Festiwalu Muzyki Współczesnej w okresie IX ‘Warszawskiej Jesieni’ 1965 roku,” 5; “Sprawozdanie Komitetu Międzynarodowego Festiwalu Muzyki Współczesnej w okresie X ‘Warszawskiej Jesieni’ 1966 roku,” 4. 68. ZKP 12/23. Protokół z posiedzenia Zarządu Głównego ZKP i Komisji Festiwalowej II Festiwalu Międzynarodowego Muzyki Współczesnej, 4 October 1957, 5–14. 69. ZKP [uncataloged document]. “Najogólniejsze podsumowanie Festiwalu VI ‘Warszawska Jesień,” 1. 70. ZKP 12/23. Protokół III Zebrania Plenarnego ZG ZKP, 20 November 1961. 71. ZKP [uncataloged document]. “Sprawozdanie z dzialalnosci Komitetu Miedzynarodowego Festiwalu Muzyki Wspolczesnej ‘Warszawska Jesien’ w okresie V Warszawskiej Jesieni (1961 r.),” 3.

202

Notes to Pages 102–106

72. ZKP 11/22. Protokół z zebrania Prezydium Komitetu Festiwalowego, 19 February 1964. 73. ZKP 11/48. Letter, 16 March 1968, Maria Kłopotowska to Seymour N. Resnick. 74. ZKP [uncataloged document]. “Działalność Komitetu Międzynardowego Festiwalu Muzyki Współczesnej w okresie VIII ‘Warszawskiej Jesieni’ 1964 roku,” 4. 75. ZKP 11/24. Letter, 11 July 1964, Leokadia Malinowska to Theodor Klein. 76. ZKP 11/24. Letter, 24 May 1963, Leokadia Malinowska to Biuro Współpracy Naukowej z Zagranicą MSZ. 77. ZKP 11/24. Letter, 16 July 1964, Leokadia Malinowska to MSW Biuro Rejestracji Cudzoziemców. 78. ZKP [uncataloged document]. “Sprawozdanie z działalności Komitetu Międzynarodowego Festiwalu Muzyki Współczesnej ‘Warszawska Jesień’ w okresie V Warszawskiej Jesieni (1961 r.),” 3. 79. Ibid., 5. 80. ZKP 11/16. “Renseignements pour les observateurs étrangers du VIe Festival de Musique Contemporaine à Varsovie,” 1–2. 81. James F. English, The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 283. 82. Ibid., 285. 83. Everett Helm, “Powrót do wielkiego świata—o międzynarodowym festiwalu muzyki współczesnej w Warszawie,” in Warszawska Jesień 1964 i 1965—fragmenty recenzji (biuletyn na prawach rękopisu) (Warsaw: Związek Kompozytorów Polskich, 1966), 69. Polish translation of an article that first appeared in Die Weltwoche (8 October 1965). 84. Anne E. Gorsuch, All This Is Your World: Soviet Tourism at Home and Abroad after Stalin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 98. 85. ZKP 11/75. Protokół z Zebrania Komitetu Festiwalowego, 21 October 1966. 86. “Turystyka bez mitów i przesadów,” Kultura (3 October 1965), 1. 87. Shawn Salmon, “Marketing Socialism: Inturist in the Late 1950s and Early 1960s,” in Turizm: The Russian and East European Tourist under Capitalism and Socialism, ed. Anne E. Gorsuch and Diane P. Koenker (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 186–204; Tchoukarine, “Yugoslavia’s Open-Door Policy,” 178. 88. ZKP [uncataloged document]. “Sprawozdanie z działalności Komitetu Międzynarodowego Festiwalu Muzyki Współczesnej ‘Warszawska Jesien’ w okresie V Warszawskiej Jesieni (1961 r.),” 3. 89. ZKP [uncataloged document]. “Działalność Komitetu Międzynarodowego Festiwalu Muzyki Współczesnej w okresie VI ‘Warszawskiej Jesieni’ 1962 roku,” 3. 90. ZKP [uncataloged document]. “Działalność Komitetu Międzynarodowego Festiwalu Muzyki Współczesnej w okresie VIII ‘Warszawskiej Jesieni’ 1964 roku,” 4. 91. ZKP [uncataloged document]. “Działalność Komitetu Międzynarodowego Festiwalu Muzyki Współczesnej w okresie IX ‘Warszawskiej Jesieni’ 1965 roku,” 5. 92. ZKP [uncataloged document]. “Sprawozdanie Komitetu Międzynarodowego Festiwalu Muzyki Współczesnej w okresie X ‘Warszawskiej Jesieni’ 1966 roku,” 4. 93. Anne E. Gorsuch, “Time Travelers: Soviet Tourists to Eastern Europe,” in Turizm: The Russian and East European Tourist under Capitalism and Socialism, ed. Anne E. Gorsuch and Diane Koenker (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 206. 94. Gorsuch, All This Is Your World.

Notes to Pages 106–113

203

95. Ibid., 81–85. 96. Peter Schmelz, Such Freedom, If Only Musical: Unofficial Soviet Music during the Thaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 48. 97. Ibid., 92–97. 98. ZKP 12/23. Protokół z posiedzenia Zarządu Głównego ZKP i Komisji Festiwalowej II Festiwalu Międzynarodowego Muzyki Współczesnej, 4 October 1957, 14. 99. Krzysztof Droba, “Spotkania z Giją Kanczelim,” in Duchowość Europy Środkowej i Wschodniej w muzyce końca XX wieku, ed. Krzysztof Droba, Teresa Malecka, and Krzysztof Szwajgier (Kraków: Akademia Muzyczna, 2004), 335. 100. Translated and quoted in Schmelz, Such Freedom, 48. 101. One example of this involved the 1958 World’s Fair: the planners of the Czechoslovak pavilion self-consciously conceived of themselves as being “in the ‘heart of Europe,’ in tune with the two worlds divided by the Cold War.” Austin Jersild, “The Soviet State as Imperial Scavenger: ‘Catch Up and Surpass’ in the Transnational Soviet Bloc, 1950–1960,” The American Historical Review 116/1 (2011): 120. 102. Zdeněk Nebřenský, “From International Activity to Foreign Tourism: East–West Interaction, Czechoslovak Youth Travel, and Political Imagination after Stalin,” East European Politics and Societies 29/1 (2015): 147–167. 103. ZKP 11/32. Letter [no date], Milan Adamčiak to the Warsaw Autumn Festival Office. The office sent a response on 18 August 1966. 104. “Galanta Songs,” Website of the Erste Stiftung, accessed 25 October 2013, www .erstestiftung.org/blog/galanta-songs-a-milan-adamciak-exhibition-in-bratislava/. 105. Brigid Cohen, “Limits of National History: Yoko Ono, Stefan Wolpe, and Dilemmas of Cosmopolitanism,” Musical Quarterly 97/2 (2014): 181–237. See also Brigid Cohen, Stefan Wolpe and the Avant-Garde Diaspora (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 106. Robert Naur, “Far-Out Autumn,” The New York Times (30 September 1962). 107. AKP, Spuścizna Kazimierza Serockiego, Korespondencja Kazimierza Serockiego. Letter, 18 October 1962, Kazimierz Serocki to Tadeusz Daniłowicz. C HA P T E R 5

1. ZKP 11/24. Letter, 17 January 1964, David Vaughan to Leokadia Malinowska. 2. Jaroslav Štastný, “Diabolus in Musica Bohemica et Slovaca: The Reception of John Cage’s Music in the Czech Lands and Slovakia,” Czech Music Quarterly 9/1 (2012): 32–33. 3. Viktor Pantůček, “Some Experimental Trends in Post-war Czech Music,” Czech Music Quarterly 5/1 (2008): 15–17. 4. Štastný, “Diabolus in Musica Bohemica et Slovaca,” 33. 5. Richard Toop, “Expanding Horizons: The International Avant-Garde, 1962–1975,” in The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music, ed. Nicholas Cook and Anthony Pople (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 453. 6. Jan P. Lee, “Musical Life and Sociopolitical Change in Warsaw, Poland: 1944–1960” (Ph.D. diss., The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1979). 7. ZKP 11/22. Protokół z zebrania Komisji Programowej, 30 October 1963. For a probing study of Ives’s reception, see David C. Paul, Charles Ives in the Mirror: American Histories of an Iconic Composer (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2013).

204

Notes to Pages 113–118

8. Tadeusz Kaczyński and Andrzej Zborski, Warszawska Jesień/Warsaw Autumn (Kraków: Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, 1983), 275 and 280. 9. Elliott Carter, “Letter from Europe,” Perspectives of New Music 1/2 (Spring 1963): 203. 10. Harvard University, Houghton Library, b. 90M-52 [Shelved as MS Storage 90]. Letter, September 1962, Elliott Carter to Paul Fromm. 11. ZKP 11/24. Letter, 8 January 1964, Wallace A. Littell to Paulina Semkow-Horodecka. 12. Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht, “The World Is Ready to Listen: Symphony Orchestras and the Global Performance of America,” Diplomatic History 36/1 (2012): 23. 13. ZKP 11/24. Letter [undated], Leokadia Malinowska to William Steinberg (Polish draft; English version sent 6 June 1964). 14. ZKP 11/24. Letter, 25 January 1964, Stefan Śledziński to William Steinberg. 15. ZKP 11/24. Letter [undated], Leokadia Malinowska to William Steinberg (Polish draft; English version sent 6 June 1964); Letter, 30 June 1964, Leokadia Malinowska to Wallace Littell. 16. ZKP 11/24. Letter, 27 June 1964, John S. Edwards to Leokadia Malinowska. 17. ZKP 11/24. Letter, 8 July 1964, Wallace W. Littell to Leokadia Malinowska. 18. This does not mean, however, that the United States was uninterested in promoting Ives in Poland. For information on their efforts, see Danielle Fosler-Lussier, Music in America’s Cold War Diplomacy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), 72–73. 19. Strengthening Cultural Bonds between Nations . . . through the Performing Arts. A Report on the Cultural Presentations Program of the Department of State, July 1, 1964—June 30, 1965. U.S. Department of State Publication 8038, International Information and Cultural Series 90 (1966), p. 10. I am grateful to Danielle Fosler-Lussier for sharing this material with me. 20. “A History of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra,” Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra website, accessed 7 August 2014, www.pittsburghsymphony.org/pso_home/web/orchestrahistory. 21. Eric Salzman, “Festiwal Jesień Warszawska. Wielki pokaz nowej muzyki,” in Warszawska Jesień 1964 i 1965—fragmenty recenzji (biuletyn na prawach rękopisu) (Warsaw: Związek Kompozytorów Polskich, 1966), 39. Polish translation of an article first published in The New York Herald Tribune (30 September 1964). 22. ERG, “Zakończenie VIII ‘Warszawskiej Jesieni’ Balety amerykańskie—opera Szostakowicza,” Trybuna Ludu (1964). 23. Carolyn Brown, Chance and Circumstance: Twenty Years with Cage and Cunningham (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 415–416. 24. Bohdan Pociej, “VIII Jesień,” 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), 83–84. Originally published in Tygodnik Powszechny no. 43 and 44 (1964). 25. Stefan Wysocki, “Po Warszawskiej Jesieni,” Kultura (11 October 1964): 5. 26. ZKP 11/24. Letter, 21 October 1963, David Vaughan to Szymon Zakrzewski; Letter, 17 January 1964, David Vaughan to Leokadia Malinowska. 27. ZKP 11/24. Letter, 19 February 1964, David Vaughan to Leokadia Malinowska. 28. Brown, Chance and Circumstance, 417. 29. ZKP 11/74. Protokół z zebrania Prezydium Komitetu festiwalowego, 17 December 1960.

Notes to Pages 118–122

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30. Gianmario Borio and Hermann Danuser, Im Zenit der Moderne: die Internationalen Ferienkurse für Neue Musik Darmstadt 1946–1966: Geschichte und Dokumentation in Vier Bänden (Freiburg: Rombach, 1997). 31. Cynthia E. Bylander, “The Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music, 1956–1961: Its Goals, Structures, Programs, and People” (Ph.D. diss., The Ohio State University, 1989), 196–199. 32. ZKP 11/74. Protokół z zebrania Prezydium Komitetu Festiwalowego, 21 March 1962. 33. ZKP [uncataloged document]. “Działalność Komitetu Międzynarodowego Festiwalu Muzyki Współczesnej w okresie VII ‘Warszawskiej Jesieni’—1963 roku. (Sprawozdanie Sekretarza Festiwalu),” 2–3. 34. ZKP [uncataloged document]. “Działalność Komitetu Międzynarodowego Festiwalu Muzyki Współczesnej w okresie IX ‘Warszawskiej Jesieni’ 1965 roku,” 2. 35. ZKP 11/74 Protokół z zebrania Prezydium Komitetu Festiwalowego, 28 May 1960; Protokół z zebrania Prezydium Komitetu Festiwalowego, 22 June 1960; Protokół z zebrania Prezydium Komitetu Festiwalowego, 7 June 1960. 36. ZKP 11/75. Protokół z zebrania Prezydium Komitetu Festiwalowego, 10 December 1963. 37. ZKP [uncataloged document]. “Działalność Komitetu Międzynarodowego Festiwalu Muzyki Współczesnej w okresie VIII ‘Warszawskiej Jesieni’ 1964 roku,” 2. 38. ZKP [uncataloged document]. “Działalność Komitetu Międzynarodowego Festiwalu Muzyki Współczesnej w okresie IX ‘Warszawskiej Jesieni’ 1965 roku,” 2. 39. Kazimierz Nowacki, Jolanta Bilińska, Małgorzata Kosińska, Marcin Majchrowski, Izabela Malec, Beata Bolesławska-Lewandowska, and Ewa Radziwon-Stefaniuk, “Composers, Compositions, Performers 1956–2011,” in Warsaw Autumn. 55th International Festival of Contemporary Music. 21–29 September 2012 (Warsaw: Warszawska Jesień, 2012), 325. 40. ZKP 11/22. Protokół z zebrania Komisji Programowej, 5 February 1964; ZKP 11/24. Letter, 13 February 1964, Leokadia Malinowska to John Cage; Letter, 4 March 1964, John Cage to Leokadia Malinowska; Letter, 30 March 1964, John Cage to Leokadia Malinowska. 41. ZKP 11/24. Letter, 22 May 1964, Stefan Śledziński to John Cage and David Tudor. 42. ZKP 11/24. Letter, 29 May 1964, David Vaughan to Stefan Śledziński. 43. ZKP 11/24. Letter, 11 July 1964, Leokadia Malinowska to David Vaughan. 44. ZKP 11/24. Letter, 7 August 1964, David Vaughan to Leokadia Malinowska. 45. Lewis L. Lloyd, in Merce Cunningham, ed. James Klosty (New York: Saturday Review Press/E.P. Dutton, 1975), 49. 46. ZKP 12/23. Protokół z posiedzenia rozszerzonego Plenum Zarządu Głównego Związku Kompozytorów Polskich, 17 October 1958, 2. 47. ZKP 12/23. Stenogram z obrad Plenum Zarządu Głównego Związku Kompozytorów Polskich, 5 April 1957, 28. 48. Ibid., 31–32. 49. ZKP 12/23. Protokół III zebrania plenarnego ZG ZKP, 20 November 1961, 1. 50. ZKP [uncataloged document]. “Sprawozdanie z działalności Komitetu Międzynarodowego Festiwalu Muzyki Współczesnej ‘Warszawska Jesień’ w okresie V Warszawskiej Jesieni (1961 r.),” 2. 51. Ibid., 5. 52. ZKP 11/74. Protokół z zebrania przedstawicieli Komitetu Festiwalowego z przedstawicielami PAGARTu, 10 October 1962.

206

Notes to Pages 122–127

53. Ibid. 54. Kaczyński and Zborski, Warszawska Jesień, 284. 55. For example, a 1956 cultural exchange agreement indicated that Poland would invite a Bulgarian music ensemble to perform to the Warsaw Autumn. AAN KC PZPR WK, 237/ XVIII-140, 84. 56. ZKP 11/74. Protokół z posiedzenia Prezydium Komitetu Festiwalowego, 31 March 1961. 57. Polish Jews were allowed to immigrate legally to Israel during a period in which emigration from Poland was otherwise nearly impossible. For more on the “Israel option,” see Dariusz Stola, Kraj bez wyjścia? Migracje z Polski 1949–1989 (Warsaw: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, 2012), 49–65. 58. Warsaw Autumn performances, however, did not guarantee lasting prominence in Poland. In 1989, ZKP’s Musicology Section mounted an academic conference to redress the lack of knowledge about émigré composers—among them Haubenstock-Ramati, Palester, Panufnik, and Spisak. See Krystyna Tarnawska-Kaczorowska, ed., Muzyka źle obecna (2 vols.; Warsaw: Związek Kompozytorów Polskich, 1989). 59. ZKP 11/74. Protokół z posiedzenia Prezydium Komitetu Festiwalowego, 15 November 1961. 60. ZKP 11/75. Protokół z zebrania Komisji Repertuarowej, 7 April 1965. 61. Peter J. Schmelz, “Andrey Volkonsky and the Beginnings of Unofficial Music in the Soviet Union,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 58 (2005): 139–207. 62. Peter J. Schmelz, Such Freedom, If Only Musical: Unofficial Soviet Music during the Thaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 89–96. 63. ZKP 11/74. Protokół z posiedzenia Prezydium Komitetu festiwalowego, 22 December 1961. 64. ZKP 11/74. Protokół z zebrania Prezydium Komitetu Festiwalowego, 31 January 1962. 65. ZKP 11/16. Automne de Varsovie. Festival International de Musique contemporaine 15–23.IX.1962 [promotional pamphlet] (Warsaw: Związek Kompozytorów Polskich, 1962), 3. 66. ZKP 11/74. Protokół Nr. 5/62. (38) z zebrania Prezydium ZG ZKP, 3 March 1962. 67. ZKP 11/75. Protokół z posiedzenia Prezydium Komitetu Festiwalowego, 7 April 1962. 68. ZKP 11/74. Protokół z zebrania Prezydium Komitetu Festiwalowego, 21 March 1962. 69. Elliott Carter to Paul Fromm, September 1962. 70. MKiDN. Ministerstwo Kultury i Sztuki Wydz. Konkursów i Festiwali (14). VI MFMW “Warszawska Jesień” (Projekt programu i uwagi do projektu programu) 1961–1962 r. Letter, 1 June 1962, Stefan Kisielewski to Wiktor Weinbaum. 71. MKiDN. Ministerstwo Kultury i Sztuki Wydz. Konkursów i Festiwali (14). VI MFMW “Warszawska Jesień” (Projekt programu i uwagi do projektu programu) 1961–1962 r. Letter, 27 May 1962, Zofia Lissa to Wiktor Weinbaum. 72. MKiDN. Ministerstwo Kultury i Sztuki Wydz. Konkursów i Festiwali (14). VI MFMW “Warszawska Jesień” (Projekt programu i uwagi do projektu programu) 1961–1962 r. Letter, 9 June 1962, Wiktor Weinbaum to Tadeusz Galiński. Weinbaum’s language is loaded: at the time, the phrase “young composers” (molodïye kompozitorï) had thoroughly negative connotations in the Soviet Union, where it referred specifically to the group of composers (including Volkonsky) that had come of age in the post-Stalin era and was fasci-

Notes to Pages 127–134

207

nated by modernist techniques from the West. For more on this phrase, see Schmelz, Such Freedom, If Only Musical, 5–6 n. 11. 73. Ibid., 48–49. 74. Elliott Carter to Paul Fromm, September 1962. 75. ZKP 11/75. Protokół z zebrania Komisji Programowej Festiwalu, 15 January 1963. 76. Kaczyński and Zborski, Warszawska Jesień, 284. 77. Schmelz, Such Freedom, If Only Musical, 141. 78. ZKP 11/75. Protokół z zebrania Komisji Repertuarowej Festiwalu, 30 January 1963. 79. ZKP 11/75. Protokół z zebrania Komitetu Festiwalowego, 12 October 1963. 80. Ibid. 81. Interview with Włodzimierz Kotoński, 13 June 2008 (Warsaw, Poland). 82. ZKP 11/75. Protokół zebrania Prezydium Komitetu Festiwalowego, 21 January 1963. 83. ZKP 12/23. Protokół z zebrania plenarnego Zarządu Głównego ZKP (III), 18 November 1959. 84. ZKP 11/75. Protokół z zebrania Komitetu Festiwalowego, 12 October 1963. 85. Kaczyński and Zborski, Warszawska Jesień, 286–287. 86. Pantůček, “Some Experimental Trends in Post-war Czech Music,” 18. 87. Lenka Křupková, “Das Warschauer Fenster in die Neue Musik zur Reflexion des Warschauer Herbstes in der tschechischen musikalischen Publizistik der 50er und 60er Jahre,” Musikgeschichte in Mittel- und Osteuropa 12 (2008), 297–299. 88. ZKP 11/75. Protokół z zebrania Komisji Programowej, 7 November 1962. 89. ZKP 11/75. Protokół z zebrania Komisji Programowej Festiwalu, 15 January 1963; Protokół z zebrania Komisji Repertuarowej, 9 March 1964. 90. One instance of this took place in 1972, when an orchestra from Brussels had to cancel its festival performance of a Denisov composition in response to Soviet pressure. I have written about this incident at greater length in Lisa Jakelski, “The Changing Seasons of the Warsaw Autumn: Contemporary Music in Poland, 1960–1990” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2009), 179–186. 91. Křupková, “Das Warschauer Fenster,” 297–299; Marian Jurik, “Antytezy-Poglądy— Sztuka,” in Warszawską Jesień 1964 i 1965—fragmenty recenzji (biuletyn na prawach rękopisu) (Warsaw: Związek Kompozytorów Polskich, 1966), 5. Polish translation of an article that first appeared in Kulturny život (24 October 1964). 92. Ulrich Dibelius, “Muzyka promienująca poza granicę,” in Warszawską Jesień 1964 i 1965—fragmenty recenzji (biuletyn na prawach rękopisu) (Warsaw: Związek Kompozytorów Polskich, 1966), 46–50. Polish translation of an article that first appeared in Die Welt (15 October 1965). 93. Harvard University, Houghton Library, b. 90M-52 [Shelved as MS Storage 90]. Letter, 18 October 1965, Elliott Carter to Paul Fromm. 94. David Crowley, “Thaw Modern: Design in Eastern Europe after 1956,” in Cold War Modern: Design 1945–1970, ed. David Crowley and Jane Pavitt (London: V&A, 2008), 145. 95. György Péteri, “Introduction: The Oblique Coordinate Systems of Modern Identity,” in Imagining the West in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, ed. György Péteri (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010), 11.

208

Notes to Pages 134–141

96. For an insightful treatment of this issue, see Piotr Piotrowski, In the Shadow of Yalta: Art and the Avant-Garde in Eastern Europe, 1945–1989, trans. Anna Brzyski (London: Reaktion Books, 2009), 11–30. 97. Zygmunt Mycielski, “Do przyjaciół,” Ruch Muzyczny 9/21 (1965): 13. 98. “Listy o muzyce,” Ruch Muzyczny 10/22 (1966): 15. 99. Pociej, “VIII Jesień,” 82. 100. Petr Bakla, “Petr Kotík: As a Composer, I’ve Always Been a Loner,” Czech Music Quarterly 8/2 (2011): 4. 101. Renee Levine Packer, This Life of Sounds: Evenings for New Music in Buffalo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 96–99. 102. Pociej, “VIII Jesień,” 82. 103. Pantůček, “Some Experimental Trends,” 18–19. 104. Kaczyński and Zborski, Warszawska Jesień, 289. 105. Schmelz, Such Freedom, If Only Musical, 134, 171–178. 106. Joy H. Calico, “Schoenberg’s Symbolic Remigration: A Survivor From Warsaw in Postwar West Germany,” The Journal of Musicology 26/1 (2009): 42. Calico explores similar ideas at greater length in Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw in Postwar Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). 107. This aspect of the Warsaw Autumn remained important well into the 1970s. In Krzysztof Droba et al., “Pamiętam, była ‘Jesień’ . . .” Ruch Muzyczny 51/18–19 (2007), see reminiscences by Andrzej Chłopecki (p. 26) and Tadeusz Wielecki (p. 27). 108. Akira Iriye, Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 109. Susan E. Reid, “The Exhibition Art of Socialist Countries, Moscow 1958–9, and the Contemporary Style of Painting,” in Style and Socialism: Modernity and Material Culture in Post-war Eastern Europe, ed. Susan E. Reid and David Crowley (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 101–132. C HA P T E R 6

1. ZKP 11/22. Protokół z zebrania Komisji Programowej, 6 November 1963. 2. Anton Haefeli, Die Internationale Gesellschaft für Neue Musik (IGNM): Ihre Geschichte von 1922 bis zur Gegenwart (Zurich: Atlantis Musikbuch, 1982). 3. ZKP 11/22. Protokół z zebrania Komisji Programowej, 6 November 1963. 4. Tadeusz Marek, essay in Program I-ego Międzynarodowego Festiwalu Muzyki Współczesnej Warszawa 10–21 października 1956, ed. Tadeusz Marek (Warsaw: Komitet Organizacyjny I-ego Międzynarodowego Festiwalu Muzyki Współczesnej, 1956), 27. 5. Jerzy Waldorff, “Sezon rozpocięty,” Świat (28 September 1958): 11. 6. See, for example, Beate Kutschke, “In Lieu of an Introduction,” in Music and Protest in 1968, ed. Beate Kutschke and Barley Norton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 5–9; Anne E. Gorsuch and Diane P. Koenker, “Introduction: The Socialist 1960s in Global Perspective,” in The Socialist Sixties: Crossing Borders in the Second World, ed. Anne E. Gorsuch and Diane P. Koenker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 6–7. 7. Amy Beal, New Music, New Allies: American Experimental Music in West Germany from the Zero Hour to Reunification (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 172–

Notes to Pages 141–146

209

175; Martin Iddon, “Pamphlets and Protests: The End of Stockhausen’s Darmstadt,” in Musikkulturen in der Revolte: Studien zu Rock, Avantgarde und Klassik im Umfeld von “1968,” ed. Beate Kutschke (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2008), 55–63. 8. Kutschke, “In Lieu of an Introduction,” 8. 9. For a useful overview of this diversity, see Martin Klimke and Joachim Scharloth, eds., 1968 in Europe: A History of Protest and Activism, 1956–1977 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). The range of positions within the political Left was also vast, and even student activists who were supposedly unified by a common commitment to socialism, and who ostensibly were part of a transnational youth culture, did not always see eye-to-eye. See Nick Rutter, “Look Left, Drive Right: Internationalisms at the 1968 World Youth Festival,” in The Socialist Sixties: Crossing Borders in the Second World, ed. Anne E. Gorsuch and Diane P. Koenker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 193–212. 10. Eric Drott, Music and the Elusive Revolution: Cultural Politics and Political Culture in France, 1968–1981 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 4–7. 11. Andrzej Chłopecki, “Karol Szymanowski as a Central Figure in the Activity of the International Society for Contemporary Music 1924–1939,” in “Warsaw Autumn” as a Realisation of Karol Szymanowski’s Vision of Modern Polish Music, ed. Aleksandra JagiełłoSkupińska and Anna Grywacz (Warsaw: Polish Music Information Centre, 2007), 15–18. 12. ZKP 15/2. Urząd Wojewódzki Krakowski Wydział Społeczno-Polityczny, Document confirming official PTMW registration, 19 April 1949. 13. Steven Stucky, Lutosławski and His Music, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 22. 14. Anne C. Shreffler, “The International Society for Contemporary Music and Its Political Context (Prague, 1935),” in Music and International History in the Twentieth Century, ed. Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht (New York: Berghahn, 2015), 76–80. 15. ZKP 15/2. Letter, 4 October 1957, PTMW Organizing Committee to Wydział Społeczno-Administracyjny Prezydium Rady Narodowej m. st. Warszawy. 16. ZKP 15/2. Letter, 6 November 1957, Czesław Lewicki to ZKP Executive Board. 17. ZKP 15/5. Letter, 28 January 1958, Pierre Stoll to Czesław Lewicki; ZKP 15/2. Protokół z posiedzenia Komitetu Organizacyjnego P.T.M.W., 12 March 1958. 18. ZKP 15/2. Protokół zebrania członków założycieli Polskiego Towarzystwa Muzyki Współczesnej, 30 September 1957. 19. ZKP 15/2. Letter, 12 September 1958, PTMW to Tadeusz Galiński. 20. ZKP 15/2. Letter, 30 December 1960, MSW Departament Społeczno-Administracyjny to PTMW. 21. Maja Trochimczyk, “1968—Operation Danube, ISCM, and Polish Music,” in Polish Music Since 1945, ed. Eva Mantzourani (Kraków: Musica Iagellonica, 2013), 89. 22. ZKP 15/2. Letter, 25 May 1961, Grażyna Bacewicz to Urząd Spraw Wewnętrznych Prezydium Rady Narodowej w m. st. Warszawy. 23. ZKP 11/75. Protokół z zebrania Komitetu Festiwalowego, 19 October 1967. 24. Trochimczyk, “1968—Operation Danube, ISCM, and Polish Music,” 84–85. 25. ZKP 11/75. Protokół z zebrania Komitetu Festiwalowego, 19 October 1967. 26. ZKP 11/49. Letter, 28 November 1967, Zygmunt Krauze to Warsaw Autumn Festival Committee. 27. ZKP 11/75. Protokół z zebrania Komitetu Festiwalowego, 19 October 1967.

210

Notes to Pages 146–150

28. ZKP 11/75. Protokół z zebrania Komisji Repertuarowej, 16 December 1967. 29. Beal, New Music, New Allies, 135. 30. ZKP 11/75. Protokół z zebrania Komitetu Festiwalowego, 19 October 1967. 31. ZKP 11/49. Letter, 16 August 1967, Stuart Dempster to Maria Kłopotowska. 32. ZKP 11/49. Letter, 15 February 1968, Maria Kłopotowska to Stuart Dempster. 33. ZKP 11/49. Letter, 5 March 1968, Stuart Dempster to Maria Kłopotowska; Letter, 28 March 1968, Maria Kłopotowska to Stuart Dempster; Letter, 10 May 1968, Stuart Dempster to Maria Kłopotowska. 34. ZKP 11/75. Protokół z zebrania Prezydium Komitetu Festiwalowego, 30 January 1968. 35. ZKP 11/75. Protokół z zebrania Komisji Repertuarowej, 21 March 1968. 36. ZKP 11/75. Protokół z zebrania Komisji Repertuarowej, 11 April 1968. 37. ZKP 11/75. Protokół z zebrania Prezydium Komitetu Festiwalowego, 17 April 1968. 38. Ibid. 39. Malgorzata Fidelis, “Red State, Golden Youth: Student Culture and Political Protest in 1960s Poland,” in Between the Avant-Garde and the Everyday: Subversive Politics in Europe from 1957 to the Present, ed. Timothy Brown and Lorena Anton (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011), 145–153. 40. Dariusz Stola, Kraj bez wyjścia? Migracje z Polski 1949–1989 (Warsaw: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, 2012), 219–232. There is a growing literature in Polish on the 1968 events and anti-Zionist campaign. It includes Jerzy Eisler, Polski Rok 1968 (Warsaw: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, 2006); Piotr Osęka, Marzec ’68 (Kraków: Znak, 2008); Piotr Osęka, Syjoniści, inspiratorzy, wichrzyciele. Obraz wroga w propagandzie marca 1968 (Warsaw: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, 1999); and Dariusz Stola, Kampania antysyjonistyczna w Polsce 1967–1968 (Warsaw: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, 2000). For brief, English-language summaries of Poland’s 1968, see Anthony Kemp-Welch, Poland under Communism: A Cold War History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 148–163; Stefan Garsztecki, “Poland,” in 1968 in Europe: A History of Protest and Activism, 1956–1977, ed. Martin Klimke and Joachim Scharloth (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 179–187. 41. Garsztecki, “Poland,” 185. 42. ZKP 11/44. Letter, 16 July 1968, MKiS BWKZ to Warsaw Autumn Festival Committee (copy sent to MKiS Dep. do Spraw Muzyki i Teatru). 43. John Tilbury, “Angielska awangarda 1968,” Ruch Muzyczny 12/17 (1968): 19–20; Ove Nordwall, “György Ligeti,” Ruch Muzyczny 12/17 (1968): 21–22; Sven-Erik Werner, “Spotkanie z nową muzyką duńską,” Ruch Muzyczny 12/17 (1968): 23–24. 44. Witold Lutosławski, “Sur l’orchestre d’aujourd’hui,” Ruch Muzyczny 12/17 (1968): 3–4; Anna Skrzyńska, “Musique du Studio de Varsovie,” Ruch Muzyczny 12/17 (1968): 9–10; Tadeusz Kaczyński, “À la memoire de Józef Koffler 1896–1943,” Ruch Muzyczny 12/17 (1968): 11–13; Mirosław Perz, “Ancienne musique polonaise et sa place dans la culture européenne,” Ruch Muzyczny 12/17 (1968): 14–15. 45. Mark Kramer, “The Czechoslovak Crisis and the Brezhnev Doctrine,” in 1968: The World Transformed, ed. Carole Fink, Philipp Gassert, and Detlef Junker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 121–122. 46. Ibid., 135–136. 47. Ibid., 146–147; Kemp-Welch, Poland under Communism, 164–165.

Notes to Pages 150–157

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48. Shreffler, “The International Society for Contemporary Music.” 49. ZKP 11/45. Letter, 28 August 1968, Danish ISCM Section to Witold Lutosławski. 50. ZKP 11/45. Telegram, 30 August 1968, Swedish ISCM Section to PTMW. 51. AKP, Spuścizna Kazimierza Serockiego, Korespondencja prywatna—świat. Letter, 20 November 1969, Heinrich Strobel to Kazimierz Serocki. 52. ZKP 11/45. Telegram, 14 September 1968, PTMW to Swedish ISCM Section. 53. ZKP 11/45. Telegram [no date], Norwegian ISCM Section to Maria Kłopotowska; Letter, 6 September 1968, Jean Henneberger to Heinrich Strobel; Telegram, 17 September 1968, Swedish ISCM Section to PTMW. 54. Trochimczyk, “1968—Operation Danube, ISCM, and Polish Music,” 86–87. 55. ZKP 11/45. Letter, 11 October 1968, Gunnar Bucht to ISCM Presidential Council and National Sections. The ISCM did not return to Eastern Europe until 1986, when the festival concerts took place in Budapest. 56. ZKP [uncataloged document]. “Sprawozdanie z XLII Światowego Festiwalu SIMC w Warszawie,” 3–5. 57. Tadeusz Kaczyński and Andrzej Zborski, Warszawska Jesień/Warsaw Autumn (Kraków: Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, 1983), 292. 58. ZKP [uncataloged document]. “Sprawozdanie z XLII Światowego Festiwalu SIMC w Warszawie,” 6. 59. Ibid., 7. 60. ZKP 11/45. Letter, 18 September 1968, Klaus Huber to Andrzej Dobrowolski; Kaczyński and Zborski, Warszawska Jesień, 292. 61. ZKP [uncataloged document]. “Sprawozdanie z XLII Światowego Festiwalu SIMC w Warszawie,” 6. 62. Trochimczyk makes a parallel point in “1968—Operation Danube, ISCM, and Polish Music,” 88. 63. ZKP 11/46. Letter, Received 13 September 1968, Marek Kopelent to Maria Kłopotowska. 64. ZKP [uncataloged document]. “Sprawozdanie z XLII Światowego Festiwalu SIMC w Warszawie,” 5. 65. AAN KC PZPR WK, 237/XVIII-329, 85–86. 66. ZKP 11/46. Letter, Received 13 September 1968, Marek Kopelent to Maria Kłopotowska. 67. “Goście ‘Warszawskiej Jesieni’ 1968,” Ruch Muzyczny 12/21 (1968): 2. 68. Trochimczyk, “1968—Operation Danube, ISCM, and Polish Music,” 86. 69. Kaczyński and Zborski, Warszawska Jesień, 352. 70. Jerzy Waldorff, “Kompromitacja staruszki,” Polityka 18/40 (1974): 8. 71. Tadeusz Kaczyński, “Od Monteverdiego do Beatlesów,” Ruch Muzyczny 21/24 (1977): 12. 72. ZKP 11/49. Letter, Received 7 September 1968, Cathy Berberian to Maria Kłopotowska. 73. Trochimczyk, “1968—Operation Danube, ISCM, and Polish Music,” 91. 74. ZKP 11/49. Letter, 5 September 1968, Sylvano Bussotti and Romano Amidei to Warsaw Autumn Festival Committee. 75. Michalina Cieślar, “Zespół ‘Warsztat Muzyczny’ i jego rola w kreowaniu muzyki awangardowej” (M.A. thesis, Warsaw University, 1993), 9–10.

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Notes to Pages 158–167 76. Ludwik Erhardt, “Tylko spokój może nas uratować,” Kultura 6/41 (13 October 1968):

10. 77. Józef Kański, “Pojesienne refleksje,” Trybuna Ludu (5 October 1968). 78. “Goście ‘Warszawskiej Jesieni’ 1968,” 2. 79. Eigel Kruttge, “Das 42. Weltmusikfest der IGNM im Warschauer Herbst 1968,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 129/11 (1968): 474. 80. Erhardt, “Tylko spokój może nas uratować,” 10. 81. Kański, “Pojesienne refleksje.” 82. Jerzy Waldorff, “Czarna msza i mysz,” Świat 18/40 (6 October 1968): 10. 83. Władysław Malinowski, “Muzyczna jesień,” 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), 121. Originally published in Współczesność 23 (1968). 84. Ibid., 124. 85. ZKP 11/49. Letter, 24 [no month provided] 1968, Maria Kłopotowska to Marian Gołębiowski. 86. Ludwik Erhardt, “Da capo,” Kultura 6/42 (20 October 1968): 9. For an alternative account of this concert, see Malinowski, “Muzyczna jesień,” 121–122. 87. “XII ‘Warszawska Jesień’—XLII Festiwal SIMC—Program,” Ruch Muzyczny 12/17 (1968): 16–17. 88. ZKP [uncataloged document]. “Sprawozdanie z XLII Światowego Festiwalu SIMC w Warszawie,” 7. 89. Trochimczyk, “1968—Operation Danube, ISCM, and Polish Music,” 87. 90. Ibid., 88. 91. Composers in Western Europe did not universally welcome this yoking, either. See, for example, Robert Adlington, Composing Dissent: Avant-Garde Music in 1960s Amsterdam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 178–228. EPILOGUE

1. William Quillen, “Winning and Losing in Russian New Music Today,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 67/2 (2014): 487–542. 2. Janusz Cegiełła, Szkice do autoportretu polskiej muzyki współczesnej (Kraków: Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, 1976), 23–24. 3. WAF. Protokół z zebrania członków Komisji Programowej ‘Warszawskiej Jesieni,’ 21 November 1974. 4. Kaczyński and Krauze were both on the commission from 1970 to 1981; Kilar served from 1975 to 1981 and Schäffer from 1975 to 1980. Along with Patkowski, other members of the Repertoire Commission in the 1970s were Kazimierz Nowacki (1966–81), Tomasz Sikorski (1966–74), Andrzej Markowski (1971–81), Bohdan Pociej (1971), Augustyn Bloch (1974– 93), Krzysztof Meyer (1975–86), Marek Stachowski (1975–95), Jerzy Maksymiuk (1978–86), and Eugeniusz Knapik (1979–89). 5. Lisa Jakelski, “The Changing Seasons of the Warsaw Autumn: Contemporary Music in Poland, 1960–1990” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2009), 220–239. 6. Mirosław M. Bujko, “Ziarna i plewy,” Odrodzenie (15 October 1988).

Notes to Pages 167–171

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7. Ludwik Erhardt, “Co dalej z Jesienią?” 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), 254–256. Originally printed in Ruch Muzyczny 36/21 (1992). 8. Interview with Krzysztof Knittel, 13 June 2008 (Warsaw, Poland). 9. ZKP. Protokół z obrad III Plenum Zarządu Głównego Związku Kompozytorów Polskich, 20 September 1995. 10. ZKP, Zebrania plenarne Zarządu Głównego Związku Kompozytorów Polskich, 27.03.1993–19.04.1995. III Zebrania Plenarnego Zarządu Głównego Związku Kompozytorów Polskich, 17 November 1993, 11–15. 11. ZKP, Zebrania plenarne Zarządu Głównego Związku Kompozytorów Polskich, 27.03.1993–19.04.1995. Protokół z obrad VIII Plenum Zarządu Głównego Związku Kompozytorów Polskich, 15 March 1995. 12. Iwona Szafrańska, “Czy ‘Warszawska Jesień’ jest potrzebna? Wypowiedzi Krzysztofa Pendereckiego, Antoniego Wita, Wojciecha Kilara i Witolda Szalonka,” Opcje (September 1996), 5, 10, 15–16, 22–23, 30–32. 13. Interview with Krzysztof Knittel. Quotation authorized 21 July 2009. 14. In 2017, Wielecki will end his many years of service as Warsaw Autumn Festival director. On 22 October 2015, ZKP announced that composer, pianist, and arts administrator Jerzy Kornowicz will be Wielecki’s successor. “Konkurs na stanowisko dyrektora Warszawskiej Jesieni,” website of the Polish Composers’ Union, accessed 19 June 2016, www .zkp.org.pl/index.php/pl/ogloszenia-administracyjne/inne/795-konkurs-na-stanowiskodyrektora-warszawskiej-jesieni. 15. “Sponsorzy i patroni,” website of the 2014 Warsaw Autumn Festival, accessed 30 June 2015, www.warszawska-jesien.art.pl/wj2014/o-festiwalu/sponsorzy. 16. Jan Topolski, “A Young Barbarian in the Gardens of the Warsaw Autumn: The New Generation’s View on the Festival in the Context of Modernity,” in “Warsaw Autumn” as a Realisation of Karol Szymanowski’s Vision of Modern Polish Music, ed. Aleksandra JagiełłoSkupiństa and Anna Grzywacz (Warsaw: Polish Music Information Centre, 2007), 46–48. 17. “O warszawskiej jesieni,” website of the 2015 Warsaw Autumn Festival, accessed 19 June 2016, www.warszawska-jesien.art.pl/wj2015/o-festiwalu/wstep. 18. Warsaw Autumn 2005. 48th International Festival of Contemporary Music. September 16–24, 2005 (Warsaw: Warszawska Jesień, 2005). 19. Warsaw Autumn 2011. 54th International Festival of Contemporary Music. 16–24 September 2011 (Warsaw: Warszawska Jesień, 2011). 20. “O warszawskiej jesieni.” 21. Interview with Tadeusz Wielecki, 10 June 2008 (Warsaw, Poland). 22. “O warszawskiej jesieni.” 23. Ibid. 24. Katherine Verdery, What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 15–16.

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biblio g ra phy

ARCHIVES

Archiwum Akt Nowych (AAN)—Central Archives of Modern Records, Warsaw, Poland Ministerstwo Kultury i Sztuki (MKiS)—Ministry of Culture and Art ∙Centralny Zarząd Instytucji Muzycznych (CZIM)—Central Administration of Music Institutions ∙Centralny Zarząd Teatrów, Oper i Filharmonii (CZTOiF)—Central Administration of Theaters, Operas, and Philharmonic Orchestras Komitet Centralny, Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza (KC PZPR)—Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party ∙Wydział Kultury (WK)—Culture Department Archiwum Kompozytorów Polskich XX w. (AKP)—Archive of Twentieth-Century Polish Composers, University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland Tadeusz Baird Collection Kazimierz Serocki Collection Archiwum Ministerstwa Kultury i Dziedzictwa Narodowego (MKiDN)—Archive of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, Warsaw, Poland Biuro festiwalu “Warszawska Jesień” (WAF)—Warsaw Autumn Festival Office, Warsaw, Poland Archiwum Związku Kompozytorów Polskich (ZKP)—Archive of the Polish Composers’ Union, Warsaw, Poland

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Index

Page numbers in italic refer to figures. Achorripsis for 21 instruments (Xenakis), 53 actor-network theory, 185n23 Adamčiak, Milan, 107–108 Aggregate (Kayn), 53 Agon (Stravinsky), 52 aleatoricism, 64 Allelujah II (Berio), 53, 59, 60 Amidei, Romano, 155–56, 157 Anaklasis (Penderecki), 96 Andersen, Mogens, 144 Antic Meet (Merce Cunningham Dance Company), 110 anti-Semitism, 8, 148, 150 Antyfony [Antifone] (Twardowski), 59 Apostrofy for 9 instruments (Szabelski), 59 Apparitions (Ligeti), 124 Approach to Hidden Man, The (Guyonnet), 151–52 Aprèslude (Castiglioni), 58 Argentina, 17, 145 Ars Polona, 98 Artikulation (Ligeti), 124 art music, 2, 34, 68, 72, 170 art world, 1, 5, 6, 185n23 Association of Polish Composers (Stowarzyszenie Kmpozytorów Polskich), 14 Atmosphères (Ligeti), 124, 149 audiences, 3, 6, 41, 51, 71, 101; appeal to young audiences, 170; attendance numbers, 67–72;

Cold War politics and, 74–78; concert-hall behaviors, 62, 64–65; “contemporary classics” and, 146; education of, 61; electronic music and, 44; growing knowledge of avant-garde works, 84–85; listening practices of, 62, 72, 74; scandal and, 78–80, 82–84; vociferous behaviors of, 72–74 Auric, Georges, 26 Austria, 23, 30, 102, 145 avant-gardes, 8, 57; American, 80, 115, 117–120; audience interest in, 70–71; contemporary music identified with, 37; of Eastern Bloc, 131; emerging avant-garde of Poland, 45–47, 96; expanding horizons of, 110–11; scandal and, 83; transnationalism and, 133–36; as Warsaw Autumn programming category, 53; Western, 17, 37, 38, 159; Western definitions of, 122 Babbitt, Milton, 113; Philomel, 156 Bacewicz, Grażyna, 21, 31, 143, 145; Concerto for Orchestra, 59 Bäck, Sven-Erik: A Game around a Game, 53 Baculewski, Krzysztof, 76, 77 Baird, Tadeusz, 12–13, 15, 25, 97; biographical notes on, 179; on choice of repertoire, 165–66; Eastern European officials and, 42; festival proposal of, 20–21; Grupa ʼ49 and, 179, 180; on isolation of Polish composers,

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Baird, Tadeusz (continued) 16; on meaning of contemporary music, 37; on planning for Warsaw Autumn, 21; on Soviet music in festival repertoire, 122–23; Temporary Repertoire Commission and, 55; Western publishers and, 99 Baird, Tadeusz, works of: Cassazione per orchestra, 12, 13; Egzorta (Exhortation), 53; String Quartet, 43; Wariacje bez tematu (Variations without a Theme), 59 ballet, 51, 57 Barber, Samuel: Summer Music, 58 Barshai, Rudolf, 123 Bartók, Bela, 19, 20, 34, 128, 142; compositional technique of, 181; “contemporary classics” category and, 51, 52 Bartók, Bela, works of: Concerto for Orchestra, 25; Contrasts, 52, 58; Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, 51, 52; Piano Concerto no. 2, 52; Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, 52; String Quartet no. 1, 58; String Quartet no. 4, 43; String Quartet no. 5, 25 Beal, Amy, 141 Becker, Howard, 1, 6, 185n23 Belarus, 169 Bensberger Circle, 97 Berberian, Cathy, 154–55 Berg, Alban, 30, 31, 179; Kammerkonzert, 52; Lulu, 52; Lyric Suite, 26; Polish audience responses to, 84; String Quartet, op. 3, 58; Wozzeck, 52 Berio, Luciano, 54, 146, 147, 159; Allelujah II, 53, 59, 60; Nones, 53 Białobrzeski, Henryk, 70 Bierut, Bolesław, 11, 18, 32 Billy the Kid (Copland), 114 Blacher, Boris: Jüdische Chronik, 59; OrchesterOrnament, 53 Bloch, Augustyn, 98, 212n4 Blomdahl, Karl-Birger, 144, 151 Boehm, Jan, 30 Boulanger, Nadia, 17, 29, 73, 100; as guest of honor at 1956 festival, 22, 23; Polish students of, 180–81 Boulez, Pierre, 31, 42, 45, 46, 54, 153, 159; Improvisation sur Mallarmé, 53; Piano Sonata No. 2, 44; Pli selon pli, 119; Le soleil des eaux, 53 Brahms, Johannes, 27 Brant, Henry: Galaxy II, 53 Brazil, 17 Brecht, Bertolt, 75, 76, 79 Brennecke, Willfried, 94

Brezhnev Doctrine, 8 Bristiger, Michał, 46 Britten, Benjamin, 17, 19, 34, 73 Brno State Philharmonic, 23, 25 Bucht, Gunnar, 151 Bulgaria, 44, 122, 123, 159, 160 Bush, Alan, 17 Bussotti, Sylvano, 53, 155–56, 157; La Passion selon Sade, 156, 159 BWKZ [Biuro Współpracy Kulturalnej z Zagranicą] (International Cultural Relations Bureau), 48, 60, 90, 101; Eastern Bloc counterpart institutions and, 123; ISCM Festival and, 139; lists of visiting observers kept by, 91 Bylander, Cynthia, 4, 24, 32 Cage, John, 54, 60, 73, 116, 153, 159; Merce Cunningham Dance Company and, 110, 115, 117; Musica Viva Pragensis and, 110, 132 Cage, John, works of: Concert for Piano and Orchestra, 54, 110; 4′33″, 107; Music for Wind Instruments, 59; Music of Changes, 79; Piano Concerto, 53; Variations II, 119; Variations III, 119; Water Music, 157 Cairns, David, 40–41 Calico, Joy, 136, 197n44 Canon (Penderecki), 59, 80, 81, 82–83 Cantata no. 2, op. 31 (Webern), 58 Canticum psalmi resurrectionis (Schönbach), 53 Canticum sacrum (Stravinsky), 52 Canticum Zachariae (Salvas), 153 Canti strumentali (Górecki), 59 Canto (Kotoński), 59, 95 capitalism, 40, 56, 76, 134, 170, 171 Cardew, Cornelius: Third Orchestral Piece, 59 Carter, Elliott, 83, 90, 113; American modernism promoted by, 93; cultural mobility and, 87–88; on Denisov, 128; on diffusion of Polish avant-gardism, 134; Double Concerto, 86; Eight Etudes and a Fantasy, 57, 59, 86, 92; String Quartet no. 1, 113; on U.S. cultural diplomacy, 86–87 Cassazione per orchestra (Baird), 12, 13 Castiglioni, Niccolò, 53; Aprèslude, 58 Catholic Church: in Poland, 12, 97; in West Germany, 97 Cello Concerto no. 1 (Shostakovich), 52 censorship, 35, 49, 77, 150 Cerha, Frederic, 60 Chamber Music for 21 instruments and percussion (Kotoński), 43 chance composition, 43

index Chester Music, 97, 98 Childs, Barney, 147 China, People’s Republic of, 16, 22, 29, 90 Chłopecki, Andrzej, 39 Chopin, Fryderyk, 103 Chopin competitions, 28, 31 Christianity, 66 Churchill, Winston, 7 Chwe, Michael, 74 Cinque canti (Dallapiccola), 52, 58 Ciuciura, Leoncjusz: Spirale I, 159 CLAEM (Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales), 2 Cleveland Orchestra, 97 Cohen, Brigid, 108 Cold War, 1, 4, 20, 33, 61, 96, 166–67; apolitical modernism in early period of, 141; avantgarde and, 54; concerns for geopolitical parity, 23, 56; concert-hall politics and, 74–78; crystallization of opposing camps, 5; cultural diplomacy of, 7, 113, 119, 141; cultural fault line of, 3; Czechoslovakia in interstitial cultural position during, 107, 203n101; end of, 4, 167; geopolitical divisions of, 74, 112, 121, 133, 137; logic of cultural rivalry, 41; mobilizing of modernist music and, 135; neutral territory in, 49; U.S. cultural diplomacy and, 86–87 Communist Party, Czechoslovak (KSČ), 150 Communist Party, Polish. See PZPR Communist Party, Soviet: Twentieth Congress, 11 competitions, 2, 31 composers, Polish, 13, 14, 24, 33, 135; audiences and, 72; contact with outside world, 93–101, 134; Denisov and, 128; economic opportunities in hard currency, 99–100; festival ticket discounts for, 68; folk music resurrected by, 166–67; foreign visitors and, 89–90, 108; international isolation of, 16; in interwar years, 13; modernism and, 43; Polish critics and, 46–47; serialism and, 44–45; Soviet criticism of, 45–46; twelve-tone techniques and, 91; in Warsaw Autumn programming, 53; ZKP and, 50 composers, Soviet, 106, 127–28, 134; unofficial Soviet music, 124, 127, 128, 131–33, 207n90; “young composers,” 127, 131, 206n72 Composizione per orchestra no. 1 (Nono), 45 Concert for Piano and Orchestra (Cage), 54, 110 Concertino (Stravinsky), 58 Concerto, op. 24 (Webern), 57, 58 Concerto for Cello and Orchestra (B. Tchaikovsky), 104

233

Concerto for Flute, Oboe, Piano, and Percussion (Denisov), 112, 128, 132–33 Concerto for Nine Instruments (Webern), 52 Concerto for Orchestra (Bartók), 25 Concerto for Orchestra (Grażyna), 59 Concerto for Orchestra (Lutosławski), 24, 30 Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra (Cage), 54 Concerto in E-flat Major [“Dumbarton Oaks”] (Stravinsky), 58 “contemporary classics” category, 51, 52, 54, 146 contemporary music. See new (contemporary) music Contrasts (Bartók), 52, 58 Copland, Aaron, 17, 34, 97, 115; Billy the Kid, 114 Cori di Didone (Nono), 53, 59 cosmopolitanism, 128, 142 Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, 5 Cowell, Henry, 113 Creative Associates Program (SUNY Buffalo), 135 Crescendo e diminuendo (Denisov), 152, 159 critics, 29–31, 34, 61, 165; on audience reactivity, 73; British, 45, 46; discourse of neutral territory and, 39–40; Polish, 46, 85; Soviet, 45–46 Crowley, David, 70, 134 Crystals (Gilboa), 153 Cuba, 111 Cultivation of the Millet, The [Die Erziehung der Hirse] (Dessau-Brecht), 75, 76, 79 cultural mobility, 6, 7, 87–88, 94, 108, 112, 120; enabled and impeded by state support, 162; physical movement of people and, 137 Culture, Ministry of. See MKiS Czechoslovakia, 16, 22, 106, 132, 134, 203n101; de-Stalinizing reforms in, 133; invited guests from, 90; Merce Cunningham Dance Company in, 110; Prague Spring (music festival), 20; Prague Spring, 140; Stalinist-era policies in, 34; visitors to Warsaw Autumn, 105, 107–108; Warsaw Pact invasion of, 8, 140, 150, 161 Dallapiccola, Luigi, 27, 54; Cinque canti, 52, 58 “Dance of the Golden Calf,” Moses und Aron (Schoenberg), 52 Darmstadt International Summer Courses, 2, 3, 36, 38, 54; Austro-German compositions highlighted by, 26; concert programs of, 25; criticism of, 40, 141; Helm and, 80; Kotoński at, 95, 180; Polish musicians at, 51, 118; scholarly attention to, 4; “specialist” audiences at, 72; West German reconstruction and, 20

234

index

Debussy, Claude: Jeux, 58; Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp, 58 defectors, 123 Dejmek, Kazimierz, 167 Delekta, Franciszek, 45 Dempster, Stuart, 147, 156 Denisov, Edison, 127–28, 207n90; Concerto for Flute, Oboe, Piano, and Percussion, 112, 128, 129–130, 131, 132–33; Crescendo e diminuendo, 152, 159; Sun of the Incas, 136; visibility outside the Soviet Union, 136 Department of State, U.S., 86–87, 93, 114, 119 Dessau, Paul: The Cultivation of the Millet, 75, 76, 79; Jüdische Chronik, 59 Dibelius, Ulrich, 134 Di Bonaventura, Mario, 152 diplomacy, cultural, 7, 24, 42, 66, 115, 141, 162; audiences and, 75; cross-border action and, 137; East–West opposition and, 88; new music and diplomacy in Eastern Bloc, 121–27; Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra (PSO) and, 113; as primary value of Warsaw Autumn, 19, 64 Dirks, Walter, 97 Dobrowolski, Andrzej, 15, 31–32, 42, 67; on audience engagement, 72; biographical notes on, 179; boycott of 1968 Warsaw Autumn/ISCM Festival and, 152; meaning of contemporary music and, 37 dodecaphony, 13, 26, 29, 149; Polish fascination with, 43; post-dodecaphonic compositional technique, 58–59; pro-Western sympathies and, 34. See also serialism; twelve-tone music Domaine musical, 42, 119 Donatoni, Franco, 100; For Grilly, 59, 63; Per orchestra, 63, 64 Donaueschingen Festival, 2, 38, 79; criticized for capitalist market connections, 40; Kotoński at, 94; Music Days, 139; Penderecki and, 95, 96; “specialist” audiences at, 72 Dorian Quintet, 86 Double Concerto (Carter), 86 Drott, Eric, 1–2, 141 Druckman, Jacob, 147 Dubček, Alexander, 150 Duo concertant (Stravinsky), 58, 125 Dutilleux, Henri, 26 Dziady [Forefather’s Eve] (Mickiewicz), 148 Dziennik Bałtycki (newspaper), 39–40 Eastern Bloc, 4, 7, 37; circulation of new music in, 111; compositional networks of, 93; formalism opposed in, 76; invited guests from,

90, 91; national differences within, 133; new music moved diplomatically in, 121–27; new music moved informally in, 127–133; reassessment of Stalinism, 11; strained relationships among countries within, 42; visitors to Warsaw Autumn from, 105 “Eastern Waves” festival (2005), 169 Ebony Concerto (Stravinsky), 25 Edition Wilhelm Hansen, 98 Egzorta [Exhortation] (Baird), 53 Eight Etudes and a Fantasy (Carter), 57, 59, 86, 92 Eksteins, Modris, 83 electronic music, 34, 37, 43, 51, 156; audience interest in, 70–71; Stockhausen’s lectures on, 124 elitism, 68, 72 émigrés, 54, 100, 123, 124, 136, 206n58 Enescu, George, 37 English, James, 8–9, 103 Epitafium (Górecki), 43, 91 Epizody [Episodes] (Serocki), 53 Erhardt, Ludwik, 29, 30, 31, 39, 40, 158, 159 Erwartung (Schoenberg), 52 Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum (Messiaen), 151 Etiuda konkretna no jedno uderzenie w talerz [Study on One Cymbal Stroke] (Kotoński, 1959), 51 Europe, Eastern, 3, 16, 139, 160, 184n12; American cultural influence in, 86–87; “backwardness” of, 19–20, 75, 78; cultural diplomacy in, 42–43; diffusion of Polish avant-gardism in, 134; invited guests from, 92–93; “iron curtain” metaphor and, 7; serialism in, 4; Soviet travelers in, 104, 105–106; Thaw in, 5; visiting orchestras from, 23; yoking of music and politics in, 161. See also Eastern Bloc Europe, Western, 3, 13, 29, 79; audiences in, 79; avant-garde centers of, 37; compositional networks of, 93; left-wing politics of late 1960s in, 141; music publications in, 91; pre–World War II contacts with, 17; visiting orchestras from, 23; yoking of music and politics in, 161, 212n91 European Festivals Association, 101, 102 European Union, 168 Evangelisti, Franco: Ordini, 59 Faber, Lothar, 156 Falla, Manuel de, 52 Feldman, Morton: Two Pieces for Three Pianos, 156, 159 Ferrari, Luc: Hétérozygote, 156

index Festival Committee, 48, 49, 55, 56, 57, 148; on audience turnout and reactions, 69–70, 71, 73; budget for festival and, 60; “contemporary classics” and, 146; diplomacy of new music in Eastern Bloc and, 125; foreign visitors and, 90, 100–101, 102, 104, 105, 201n67; Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra (PSO) and, 114; Polish connections with Western musicians and, 118 festivals, 1, 2, 17, 93 Festivals of Polish Music, 14, 26, 33, 90; First, 14; Second, 16, 17, 18, 22 Figures sonores (Matsudaira), 53, 59 film festivals, 103–104 Firebird suite (Stravinsky), 25 Fireworks (Stravinsky), 25 5 Bagatelles (Fortner), 59 Five Movements, op. 5 (Webern), 43 Fluxus, 108 folk and folk-inspired music, 24, 50, 166–67 foreign visitors, 17, 22; from Eastern Bloc, 105–108; as observers, 89–93; ripple effects of foreign travel, 108–109; as tourists, 101–105, 103 For Grilly (Donatoni), 59, 63 formalism, 12, 125 For Prepared Piano (Wolff ), 79 Fortner, Wolfgang: 5 Bagatelles, 59 Fosler-Lussier, Danielle, 7, 93 4′33″ (Cage), 107 Four Nocturnes for Orchestra (Henze), 53 France, 17, 22, 23, 54, 99, 168; avant-garde centers in, 111; ISCM Festival and, 145; programming of music from, 41–42; Serocki in, 180; transnational new-music networks and, 136; visitors to Warsaw Autumn, 105; as vital point of cultural reference, 26 Franco, Francisco, 150 Frederick, Kurt, 197n44 Frémy, Gérard, 156 French Radio and Television National Orchestra, 23, 25 Fromm, Paul, 86–87, 113, 128, 198n5 “From Monteverdi to the Beatles” (Berberian), 155 Fryderyk Chopin Society, 181 Fryderyk Chopin University of Music, 169 Fünf neapolitanische Lieder (Henze), 53 Fünf Orchesterstücke [Five Pieces for Orchestra], op. 16 (Schoenberg), 52, 114 Galaxy II (Brant), 53 Galiński, Tadeusz, 47–48, 60, 127, 143, 206n72 Game around a Game, A (Bäck), 53 Gazzelloni, Severino, 118

235

Gelmetti, Vittorio: Treni d’onda a modulazione di intensità, 156 genres, musical, 1, 2, 6, 22, 141 George Enescu Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra, 23, 26 Georgescu, George, 26 German Society of Contemporary Music, 158 Germany, East [German Democratic Republic] (GDR), 12, 16, 96, 123; invited guests from, 90; serialism in, 4; socialist modernist composers in, 77; Soviet travelers in, 106 Germany, reunited, 168 Germany, West [Federal Republic of Germany] (FRG), 20, 22, 39, 54, 91, 99; avant-garde centers in, 111; criticism of new-music institutions in, 141; ISCM Festival and, 145; new music in, 35; Polish composers’ contacts with, 94–97; programming difficulties in, 146; relations with Poland, 96–97; transnational new-music networks and, 136 Geständnisse [Confessions] (Szalonek), 45 Gienow-Hecht, Jessica, 24, 113 Gilboa, Jacob: Crystals, 153 Ginastera, Alberto, 52, 54 Glissando (new-music magazine), 168 Goehr, Alexander, 144 Gomułka, Władysław, 11, 12, 35, 150, 190n14 Górecki, Henryk Mikołaj, 44, 46, 53, 54, 57, 166 Górecki, Henryk Mikołaj, works of: Canti strumentali, 59; Epitafium, 43, 91; Scontri, 55; Symphony no. 1, op. 14 (“1959”), 45 Gorsuch, Anne, 106 Goskontsert (Soviet concert agency), 123, 125 Great Britain (United Kingdom), 22, 91, 97, 136, 145 Greenblatt, Stephen, 6–7, 88 Grosheva, Yelena, 45 Grupa ‘49 (The 1949 Group), 179, 180 Gruppen (Stockhausen), 53, 59, 60 Gubaidulina, Sofia, 107 Guyonnet, Jacques: The Approach to Hidden Man, 151–52 Halprin, Anna: Parades and Changes, 107–108 hard currency, 99–100, 102, 104, 118, 146, 147, 201n61 Hartmann, Karl Amadeus: Jüdische Chronik, 59; Symphony no. 2, 58; Symphony no. 6, 52 Haubenstock-Ramati, Roman, 54, 60, 123, 206n58; Serenade, 53 Helm, Everett, 43, 75, 79, 80, 93; on Penderecki and Donaueschingen, 96; published accounts

236

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Helm, Everett (continued) of visit to Warsaw Autumn, 91–92; on travel to Poland as adventure, 104 Helsinki Philharmonic, 124 Henze, Hans Werner, 54; Four Nocturnes for Orchestra, 53; Fünf neapolitanische Lieder, 53; Jüdische Chronik, 59 Hétérozygote (Ferrari), 156 Het-Residentie Orkest, 154, 159 Heyworth, Peter, 40, 41 Hiller, Lejaren, 135 Hindemith, Paul, 20, 27, 57, 115, 142; Kammermusik, op. 24, 58; Pittsburgh Symphony, 113; String Quartet no. 3, op. 22, 58 Histoire du soldat (Stravinsky), 52 Honegger, Arthur, 19, 20, 26, 34; Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher, 52 Horizonty Muzyki (Horizons of Music) radio program, 180 Huber, Klaus, 152 Hudební Rozhledy (Music Review), 132 Hungarian Revolution (1956), 8, 12, 35, 107, 124, 186n2 Hungary, 8, 16, 134, 145 Ibert, Jacques, 42 Iddon, Martin, 3, 141 Iliev, Konstantin, 54, 63; Sinfonia breve, 52 Iłłakowicz, Kazimiera, 45 improvisation, 2 Improvisationen (Serocki), 95 Improvisation sur Mallarmé (Boulez), 53 indeterminacy, 2, 50 In memoriam Dylan Thomas (Stravinsky), 52 intelligentsia, 68, 106, 148 internationalism, 25, 88–89 International Monetary Fund, 5 IRCAM (music research institute, Paris), 2 Iriye, Akira, 137 Irrender Sohn, Ein (Nilsson), 53 ISCM (International Society for Contemporary Music), 2, 8, 118, 119, 158–161, 211n55; boycott of 1968 Warsaw Autumn/ISCM Festival, 150–58; festivals in Copenhagen, 142, 144; French Section, 41; ISCM Festival and Warsaw Autumn, 139–141, 145–150, 160, 161, 162; PTMW in Poland and, 141–45; World Music Days, 142 Israel, 123, 139, 145, 153, 206n57 Italy, 22, 99, 111, 145 Ives, Charles, 113, 204n18; Tone Roads no. 3, 114

Jacobs, Arthur, 44 Janáček, Leoš, 19, 63; Řikadla (Nursery Rhymes), 52 Japan, 111, 145, 169 Jaroch, Jiří: Symphony no. 2, 59 Jarociński, Stefan, 50 Jasieński, Jerzy, 15, 21, 27–28, 179–180 jazz, 2, 31, 34, 35 Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher (Honegger), 52 Jelinek, Hanns, 13 Jeu de cartes (Stravinsky), 25 Jeux (Debussy), 58 Jews, Polish, 54, 148, 150, 169, 206n57 Jolivet, André, 26 journals, 34, 35–36 Jüdische Chronik (Blacher, Dessau, Hartmann, Henze, Wagner-Régeny), 59 Juilliard String Quartet, 43 Kaczyński, Tadeusz, 61, 149, 166, 212n4 Kagel, Mauricio, 54, 146; Transición II, 53 Kal, Berthe, 136 Kammerkonzert (Berg), 52 Kammermusik, op. 24 (Hindemith), 58 Kancheli, Giya, 106–107 Kański, Józef, 44, 64, 158, 159 Karandashova, Maria, 125 Kato, Ayakoto, 152 Kayn, Roland: Aggregate, 53 Kazandjiev, Vassil, 152 Keldysh, Yuri, 43–44, 192n50 Keyboard Studies (Riley), 156 Khachaturian, Aram, 68 Khruschchev, Nikita, 11–12, 106 Kilar, Wojciech, 53, 54, 166, 212n4; Riff 62, 59 Kisielewski, Stefan, 64, 76, 126; “Letter of the Thirty-Four” signed by, 77; on riots at performance of Canon (1962), 80, 82 Klavierstück XI (Stockhausen), 79 Kłopotowska, Maria, 154 Klyuzner, Boris, 125; Violin Sonata, 59 Knapik, Eugeniusz, 212n4 Knittel, Krzysztof, 167–68 Koffler, Józef, 54, 149, 150; Songs, 52; String Trio, 52 Kontra-Punkte (Stockhausen), 53 Kopelent, Marek, 153, 154 Korea, North, 17, 22, 29, 90 Korea, South, 169 Kornowicz, Jerzy, 213n14 Kotík, Petr, 110, 135–36; Music for Three, 135 Kotoński, Włodzimierz, 15, 21, 37, 95, 96, 117; biographical notes on, 180; cultural exchange

index travels in Eastern Bloc, 131; at Darmstadt Summer Courses, 50–51; on hard-currency payments, 100; ISCM Festival and, 145–46; Ligeti works in festival program and, 124; social service and, 66; Temporary Repertoire Commission and, 55; West German contacts of, 94–95, 96; in ZKP leadership, 50, 94 Kotoński, Włodzimierz, works of: Canto, 59, 95; Chamber Music for 21 instruments and percussion, 43; Etiuda konkretna na jedno uderzenie w talerz, 51; Monochromie, 95; Musique en relief, 53, 95; Muzyka kameralna (Chamber Music), 94 Kotyczka, Stanisław: Permutacje (Permutations), 58 Kozłlowski, Karol, 70 Kraków Philharmonic, 114 Krauze, Zygmunt, 83–84, 156, 166, 180, 212n4 Krenek, Ernst, 20 Krenz, Jan, 21, 53, 54; Capriccio, 58; Grupa ‘49 and, 179, 180 Król Roger [King Roger] (Szymanowski), 52 Kruttge, Eigel, 144, 158 Krzemieński, Witold, 131 Książek, Tadeusz, 15 Kultura (journal), 104, 105 Kutschke, Beate, 141 Kydryński, Lucjan, 27, 28 Lachenmann, Helmut, 146 Lady Macbeth, Suite from (Shostakovich), 58 Latvia, 105 Leeuw, Ton de, 159 Legend of Love, The (Melikov), 57, 59 Leibowitz, René, 26, 180 Leipzig Gewandhaus, 70 Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra, 42, 75 Leningrad Philharmonic, 22, 43 “Letter of the Thirty-Four,” 77 Lewicki, Czesław, 143 Lidholm, Ingvar: Mutanza, 59; Ritornell, 53 Ligeti, György, 123–24; Apparitions, 124; Artikulation, 124; Atmosphères, 124, 149 Lissa, Zofia, 17, 127 Litania do Marii Panny [Litany to the Virgin Mary] (Szymanowski), 52 Lithuania, 105 Lloyd, Lewis L., 120 Lopatnikoff, Nikolai, 114 Ludorowski, Ludwik, 29 Lulu (Berg), 52

237

Lutosławski, Witold, 15, 21, 41–42, 53, 144; international connections, 97–98, 117–18; ISCM Festival and, 145, 161; PTMW and, 142, 144; Qualifying Commission tenure of, 50; Temporary Repertoire Commission and, 55; Western publishers and, 99; writings in Ruch Muzyczny, 149 Lutosławski, Witold, works of: Concerto for Orchestra, 24, 30; Muzyka żałobna (Funeral Music), 43, 91; Paroles tissées, 161; Piano Concerto, 169; Silesian Triptych, 24; Symphony no. 1, 15, 25; Symphony no. 3, 169 Lyric Suite (Berg), 26 Lyrische Gesänge (Schönbach), 58 Mädchentotenlieder (Nilsson), 53 Maderna, Bruno: Second Concerto for oboe and orchestra, 156 Maksymiuk, Jerzy, 212n4 Mała Warszawska Jesień (Little Warsaw Autumn), 170 Malawski, Artur, 25; Piano Trio, 143 Malewicz-Madey, Anna, 152 Malinowska, Leokadia, 117, 194n98 Malipiero, Gian Francesco, 27 Manzit (Welin), 152 Marek, Tadeusz, 28, 39, 41, 139–140 Markowski, Andrzej, 114, 131, 212n4 Marshall Plan, 5 Martin, Frank, 19, 34; Petite symphonie concertante, 58 Martinet, Jean-Louis, 26; Prométhée, 53 Martinů, Bohuslav, 34; Serenade for Chamber Orchestra, 58 Maski [Masks] (Szymanowski), 58, 125 Matsudaira, Yoritsune: Figures sonores, 53, 59 Mazur, Krzysztof Antoni, 39–40 Melikov, Arif: The Legend of Love, 57, 59 Melos (West German new-music magazine), 35 Melos Ensemble, 63 Merce Cunningham Dance Company, 110, 111, 115, 117–120, 132, 137 Messiaen, Olivier, 19, 26, 31, 54; Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum, 151; Les Offrandes oubliées, 29; Réveil des oiseaux, 52; Vingt regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus, 52 Metopy [Metopes] (Szymanowski), 52 Mexico, 17 Meyer, Krzysztof, 212n4 Miaskovsky, Nikolai, 37 Mickiewicz, Adam, 148 middle space, 8–9

238

index

Milhaud, Darius, 20, 26, 42 minimalism, 166 Ministry of Foreign Affairs. See MSZ Mistral, Gabriela, 136 MKiS [Ministerstwo Kultury i Szuki] (Ministry of Culture), 5, 6, 18, 90; conflict with PAGART over finances, 147–48; cultural diplomacy within Eastern Bloc and, 123; Department of Artistic Events and Celebrations, 15; festival budget and, 60, 61, 167; Festival Committee reports to, 73; festival planning and, 49; Festivals of Polish Music and, 14; foreign visitors and, 17, 100, 101; foundations of Warsaw Autumn and, 27; funding of Warsaw Autumn and, 100; International Cultural Relations Committee, 21; ISCM Festival and, 149; Music Department, 36, 71, 181; Music Group, 48, 55, 92, 194n98; payment of performers and, 118; publishing and, 98–99; second Warsaw Autumn Festival and, 34; uncertain future of Warsaw Autumn and, 47; upowszechnienie and, 65–66 Młodziejowski, Jerzy, 29 “moderate group,” 52–53, 54 modernism, 2, 34, 50, 108, 133; American, 93; apolitical, 141; canon of, 51; consumer capitalism and, 170; curtailed by PZPR, 35; in Eastern Bloc, 4; institutionalized, 170; in interwar Poland, 12; meaning of contemporary music and, 37; scandalized audiences and, 83; socialist, 75, 77, 121; Soviet view of, 3; Warsaw Autumn programming and, 146; Western, 3 modernity, 36–38, 65, 79, 84; festival organizers and image of, 112; foreign visitors as arbiters of, 93; Soviet, 126; Western standards of, 134 Moeck, Hermann, 94, 95, 98 Mongolia, 90 Moniuszko, Stanisław, 181 Monochromie (Kotoński), 95 Mooser, R.-Aloys, 29 Moscow Chamber Orchestra, 123 Moses und Aron (Schoenberg), 58 Movements (Shapey), 59 Mozart, Wolfgang A., 28 Mravinsky, Evgeny, 43 MSZ [Ministerstwo Spraw Zagranicznych] (Ministry of Foreign Affairs), 48, 90, 102; International Cultural and Academic Exchanges Department, 109 Musgrave, Thea, 63; Serenade, 59 Musica Concertante (Serocki), 43, 95 Musical America (journal), 35 Musical Quarterly, 75, 91

Musica Stricta (Volkonsky), 124, 125, 127, 131 Musica Viva Pragensis, 110, 111–12, 120, 132, 133; Czechoslovak cultural authorities’ restrictions on, 135–36; Polish musical press and, 135; suppression of Prague Spring and, 153–54 Music for Piano and Chamber Orchestra (Schnittke), 131 Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta (Bartók), 51, 52 Music for Three (Kotík), 135 Music for Wind Instruments (Cage), 59 Music Group (Zespół do Spraw Muzyki), 48 Music Now concert series, 2, 3 Music of Changes (Cage), 79 musicologists, 5, 17, 36, 39, 61, 149, 165; cultural mobility and, 88; East German, 35; festival ticket price discounts for, 68; as invited guests to Warsaw Autumn, 91, 92–93; publications and, 34; Soviet, 43, 92, 106; West German, 35 Musik und Gesellschaft (journal), 35 musique concrète, 27, 44, 51 Musique en relief (Kotoński), 53, 95 Mutanza (Lidholm), 59 Muzyka kameralna [Chamber Music] (Kotoński), 94 Muzyka żałobna [Funeral Music] (Lutosławski), 43, 91 Mycielski, Zygmunt, 15, 16, 17, 135; on Poland’s cultural isolation, 19, 20; on Polish composers’ responsibilities, 65 National Philharmonic, 29, 34, 68, 132, 159; Chamber Hall, 71; Choir, 45; Concert Hall, 63, 70, 111, 169; subscription concerts at, 72 National Philharmonic Orchestra, 50 National Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra, 48 national sovereignty, 13 Nazism, 20, 25, 39, 75, 122, 150 Nendick, Josephine, 156, 156 neoclassicism, 57, 59 Netherlands, 145, 168 Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (journal), 158 new (contemporary) music, 9, 18, 62, 163; audience for, 66; canon formation, 169; circulation in Eastern Bloc, 111; cross-border mobility and, 108, 162; cultural mobility and, 87–88; encounters of music and politics in late 1960s, 140–41; meaning of, 36–37; moved diplomatically in Eastern Bloc, 121–27; moved informally in Eastern Bloc, 127–133; neutral overview of, 38–41; pluralist conception of, 36–38; role

index of festivals in defining, 1, 6, 165; social service and, 65–66; in West Germany, 43 New York City, 2, 86 Night Wandering (Merce Cunningham Dance Company), 110 Nikolov, Lazar: Sonata for Flute and Piano, 59 Nilsson, Bo, 96; Ein irrender Sohn, 53; Mädchentotenlieder, 53; Quantitäten, 79; 20 Gruppen, 59 Nones (Berio), 53 Nono, Luigi, 45, 46, 110, 118; Cori di Didone, 53, 59 Nørgård, Per, 159 Norwall, Ove, 149 Norway, 145 Nowacki, Kazimierz, 212n4 Nummi, Seppo, 13 Octet (North), 59 Oczy powietrza [Eyes of the Wind] (Serocki), 95 Oder-Neisse treaty (1970), 96 Oedipus Rex (Stravinsky), 58 Offrandes oubliées, Les (Messiaen), 29 Oliveros, Pauline, 147 Olkuśnik, Joachim, 78 opera, 51, 181 Orchester-Ornament (Blacher), 53 orchestras, 22–24 Ordini (Evangelisti), 59 Orff, Carl: Trionfo di Afrodite, 53 Osa, Maryjane, 190n14 Paczkowski, Andrzej, 69 PAGART (state-run concert agency), 48, 60, 104, 117; conflict with MKiS over finances, 147–48; Eastern Bloc counterpart institutions and, 123 Palester, Roman, 123, 206n58 Palm, Siegfried, 118 Panufnik, Andrzej, 16, 123, 206n58 Parades and Changes (Halprin), 107–108 Paris Opéra, 70 Paroles tissées (Lutosławski), 161 Parrenin String Quartet, 22 Pärt, Arvo, 135; Perpetuum Mobile, 131–32 Passion selon Sade, La (Bussotti), 156, 159 Pasternak, Boris, 124 Patkowski, Józef, 50, 51, 122, 156; biographical notes on, 180; as leader of Repertoire Commission, 166, 212n4 Penderecki, Krzysztof, 44, 46, 53, 54, 166; avantgarde and, 57; West German connections of, 95–96

239

Penderecki, Krzysztof, works of: Anaklasis, 96; Canon, 59, 80, 81, 82–83; St. Luke Passion, 96; Strofy (Strophes), 45, 95; Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima, 80 Les Percussions de Strasbourg, 147 Perkowski, Piotr, 67 Permutacje [Permutations] (Kotyczka), 58 Per orchestra (Donatoni), 63, 64 Perpetuum Mobile (Pärt), 131–32 Persephone (Stravinsky), 58 Perspectives of New Music (journal), 87 Perz, Mirosław, 149 Péteri, György, 7, 134 Peterson, Richard, 183n4 Petite symphonie concertante (Martin), 58 Petrassi, Goffredo: Serenata, 52 Petrushka suite (Stravinsky), 25 Pfrogner, Hermann, 13 Philomel (Babbitt), 156 Piano Concerto (Cage), 53, 54 Piano Concerto (Lutosławski), 169 Piano Concerto, op. 42 (Schoenberg), 26, 29 Piano Concerto no. 2 (Bartók), 52 Piano Sonata (Stroe), 59 Piano Sonata No. 2 (Boulez), 44 Piano Sonata no. 3 (Szymanowski), 52 Piano Trio (Malawski), 143 Piekut, Benjamin, 185n23 Pierrot lunaire (Schoenberg), 52 Pieśni księżnickzki z baśni [Songs of a Fairy Princess] (Szymanowski), 52 Pijper, Willem: String Quartet no. 5, 59 Pilarski, Bohdan, 34, 46 Piotrowski, Piotr, 56 Piston, Walter, 115; Violin Concerto no. 1, 114 Pithoprakta (Xenakis), 59 Pittsburgh Symphony (Hindemith), 113 Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra (PSO), 111, 112–15, 117 Pli selon pli (Boulez), 119 pluralism, 61, 62, 112; institutionalization of, 47–49; populism and, 67; upowszechnienie and, 67 Plus-Minus (Stockhausen), 156 Pociej, Bohdan, 46, 115, 135, 212n4 pointillism, 44, 45, 64, 128 Poland, 5, 105, 184n12; “backwardness” of, 19–20, 51; cultural isolation of, 19, 40; cultural retrenchment in, 35–36; economic stagnation in, 60; in European Union, 168; explosion of cultural diversity in, 35; in interwar period, 12; “liberated” from Nazi occupation by

240

index

Poland (continued) USSR, 122; limits of Soviet influence in, 8; Nazi occupation of, 140; People’s Republic (Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa), 77, 96; post-socialist period, 77, 167–171; restricted mobility of citizens, 16; socialist ecosystem of, 4; Stalinization of, 11, 18, 180; suppression of Prague Spring and, 140, 150, 151; tourism from socialist countries, 106 POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, 169 Polish Composers’ Union, 179, 180, 181 Polish October Revolution (1956), 12, 13, 32, 107 Polish Radio, 21, 34, 48, 169; Experimental Studio, 51, 149, 179, 180; sponsorship of foreign visitors, 91 Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra, 25, 45 Polish Society for Contemporary Music. See PTMW Północ (North), 168 Po row form, 128, 129–130 postmodernism, 2, 166 Poulenc, Francis, 42 Pousseur, Henri, 153; Quartet 1961, 59; Rimes pour différentes sources sonores, 53 Poznań riots (June 1956), 11 Poznań State Symphony Orchestra, 131, 132 Pragokoncert (Czechoslovak concert agency), 153 Prague Philharmonic, 22 Prague Spring (1968), 8, 140, 150, 153, 162 Prague Spring Festival, 20, 34 prepared piano, 43, 79 Prieberg, Fred, 35 prizes, 17 Prokofiev, Sergei, 19, 20, 51, 52, 127 Prokofiev, Sergei, works of: Quintet, 52; Sarcasms, 52; Suite no. 2 from Romeo and Juliet, op. 64ter, 43; Violin Sonata no. 1 in F Minor, op. 80, 58, 125; Visions fugitives, 52 Prométhée (Martinet), 53 Protestants, in West Germany, 97 Przekrój [Cross-Section] (magazine), 27 PTMW [Polskie Towarzystwo Muzyki Współczesnej] (Polish Society for Contemporary Music), 141–45, 160–61, 180 PWM [Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne] (Polish State Music Publishers), 98, 180 PZPR [Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza] (Polish United Workers’ Party), 70, 73, 143; anti-Semitic campaign, 8, 148, 150; Central Committee, 17, 104; Central Committee’s Culture Department, 15, 61, 71–72, 154; deStalinizing reforms and, 34; dominance of,

4–5; Eighth Plenum (1956), 11; First Festival of Polish Music and, 14; party members’ attendance at Warsaw Autumn, 77; position on abstract artworks, 56; publications of, 28, 44, 64, 80, 114; ZKP and, 36 Quantitäten (Nilsson), 79 Quartet 1961 (Pousseur), 59 Quillen, William, 165 Quintet (Prokofiev), 52 Rääts, Jaan, 123 Rabe, Folke, 108 Rachmaninov, Sergei, 37, 51 radio, 2, 21, 79, 93; Horizonty Muzyki (Horizons of Music) program, 180; Southwest German Radio (SWDR), 94, 97; West German Radio (WDR), 94, 96, 97. See also Polish Radio Rauschenberg, Robert, 110 Ravel, Maurice, 26 Rebling, Eberhard, 35 Regamey, Konstanty, 123 Reihe, Die, 60 Renard (Stravinsky), 58 Repertoire Commission, 63, 67, 109, 117, 167, 179, 180; change in membership, 165–66, 212n4; curatorial role of, 169; ISCM Festival and, 139; Polish connections with Western musicians and, 118; Soviet “young composers” sought by, 131; strategy for presentation of music, 146 Réseau Varèse, 168 Retablo de maese Pedro, El (Falla), 52 Réveil des oiseaux (Messiaen), 52 Riegger, Wallingford, 113 Riff 62 (Kilar), 59 Řikadla [Nursery Rhymes] (Janáček), 52 Riley, Terry: Keyboard Studies, 156 Rimes pour différentes sources sonores (Pousseur), 53 Rite of Spring, The (Stravinsky), 25, 83 Ritornell (Lidholm), 53 Rogalski, Theodor, 37 Romania, 16, 23, 26 Romantic heritage, 134 Rosenberg, Hilding, 52 Rostand, Claude, 144 Rostropovich, Mstislav, 104 Rowicki, Witold, 21, 50, 193n76 Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, 23 Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, 22, 23 Ruch Muzyczny [Musical Movement] (journal), 34, 35–36, 135, 149–150, 154, 158

index Rudziński, Witold, 91, 124, 181 Rudziński, Zbigniew, 180 Ruggles, Carl, 113 Rune (Merce Cunningham Dance Company), 110 Russia, post-Soviet, 165, 169 St. Luke Passion (Penderecki), 96 Sakva, Konstantin, 45 Salvas, Tadeáš: Canticum Zachariae, 153 San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop, 107–8 Sarcasms (Prokofiev), 52 Scandinavia, 102, 151, 168 Schaeffer, Pierre, 44, 45 Schäffer, Bogusław, 31, 34, 53, 54, 189n79; Repertoire Commission and, 166, 212n4; Symfonia: Muzyka elektroniczna, 156 Schmelz, Peter, 4, 124 Schnittke, Alfred, 132, 135; Music for Piano and Chamber Orchestra, 131 Schoenberg, Arnold, 2, 12, 20, 30, 54, 60; Cold War politics and, 76; “contemporary classics” category and, 52; Festival Committee classification of, 57; Piano Concerto, op. 42, 29; Polish audience responses to, 84 Schoenberg, Arnold, works of: “Dance of the Golden Calf,” Moses und Aron, 52; Erwartung, 52; Fünf Orchesterstücke (Five Pieces for Orchestra), op. 16, 52, 114; Moses und Aron, 58; Piano Concerto, op. 42, 26; Pierrot lunaire, 52; Suite, op. 29, 58; Suite for Piano, op. 25, 52; A Survivor from Warsaw, 75, 136, 197n44; Variationen für Orchester, op. 31, 52; Verklärte Nacht, 114 Schönbach, Dieter, 63, 100; Canticum psalmi resurrectionis, 53; Lyrische Gesänge, 58 Schuller, Gunther, 113; Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee, 113, 114; String Quartet no. 1, 59 Schuman, William, 43 Scontri (Górecki), 55 Scriabin, Alexander, 17 Searle, Humphrey, 53 Second Concerto for oboe and orchestra (Maderna), 156 Second Viennese School, 43, 51, 56, 142 Seehaber, Ruth, 96 Segmenty [Segments] (Serocki), 59 Seiber, Mátyás, 63; Suite for Harpsichord and String Quartet, 59 Septet (Stravinsky), 58 Serenade (Haubenstock-Ramati), 53 Serenade (Musgrave), 59

241

Serenade for Chamber Orchestra (Martinů), 58 Serenata (Petrassi), 52 serialism, 3, 34, 37, 46, 180; dominance in 1959 festival program, 44; in Eastern Bloc, 4; erotic potential of, 78; French composers, 26; post-Webernian, 79. See also dodecaphony; twelve-tone music Serocki, Kazimierz, 15, 20–21, 50, 128; avantgarde and, 57; biographical notes on, 180; at Donaueschingen, 139; Grupa ‘49 and, 179; on Soviet visitors to Warsaw Autumn, 109; on state influence, 48; Temporary Repertoire Commission and, 55; West German connections of, 95, 96; in ZKP leadership, 50 Serocki, Kazimierz, works of: Epizody (Episodes), 53; Improvisationen, 95; Musica Concertante, 43, 95; Oczy powietrza (Eyes of the Wind), 95; Segmenty (Segments), 59 Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee (Schuller), 113 Shapey, Ralph: Movements, 59 Shostakovich, Dmitry, 3, 19, 34, 44, 52, 54, 58, 122 Shostakovich, Dmitry, works of: Cello Concerto no. 1, 52; Suite from Lady Macbeth, 58; Symphony no. 10 in E Minor, op. 93, 159; Symphony no. 11, op. 103 (“The Year 1905”), 43 Sibelius, Jean, 51 Sierpiński, Zdzisław, 30, 31, 40, 44 Sikorski, Kazimierz, 15, 32; biographical notes on, 180–81; on haphazard organizational procedures, 41; on launching of Warsaw Autumn, 18–19; on self-promotion of performers, 48; Trumpet Concerto, 59 Sikorski, Tomasz, 180, 212n4 Silesian Philharmonic, 45, 63 Silesian Triptych (Lutosławski), 24 Silverberg, Laura, 4, 77 Sinfonia breve (Iliev), 52 Sinfonia da camera (Turski), 53 Six Bagatelles, op. 9 (Webern), 58 Six Pieces for Orchestra, op. 6 (Webern), 113 Skrowaczewski, Stanisław, 21 Skrzyńska, Anna, 149 Śledziński, Stefan, 116, 119 Słopiewnie [Word Songs] (Szymanowski), 58 Slovakia, 107–108 socialism, 28, 40, 65, 170, 171; “with a human face,” 150; modernization project of, 134; “socialist” music, 122, 127; state socialism, 4, 12, 33, 141, 142, 165; youth culture of 1960s and, 209n9

242

index

socialist realism, 3, 12, 15, 65, 142; accessibility of, 125; artists’ turn against, 35; East German, 79; “edutainment” and, 14; failure to take hold in Poland, 49; folk music and, 166; Grupa ‘49 (The 1949 Group) and, 179; modernism in antagonistic mutual dependency with, 167; musical traditionalism preserved by, 135; poor reception at festivals, 122; postwar reconstructed concert hall and, 70; Western view of, 3 Society for Private Musical Performance, 2 Sofia Philharmonic, 122 Sofia Soloists, 159 Sokorski, Włodzimierz, 15, 16 Soleil des eaux, Le (Boulez), 53 Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp (Debussy), 58 Sonata for Flute and Piano (Nikolov), 59 Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion (Bartók), 52 Sonata for Violin and Piano (Ustvolskaya), 59 Songs, op. 14, 15, 19 (Webern), 52 South America, 3, 149, 159 Sovetskaya Muzïka [Soviet Music] (journal), 45, 135, 192n50 Soviet Union (USSR), 3, 5, 12, 16, 100, 105, 134; conservative scores associated with, 113; cultural diplomacy of new music and, 121; de-Stalinization in, 138; first Warsaw Autumn and, 22; influence of Polish modernism in, 137–38; invited guests from, 90; modernist music in, 135; musical modernism as sign of cultural distance from, 133; Poland “liberated” from Nazi occupation by, 122; Polish musicians in, 17; serialism in, 4; Soviet music in Warsaw Autumn repertoire, 122–27, 126; Soviet travelers in Eastern Europe, 104, 105–106; suppression of Prague Spring and, 150; visitors to Warsaw Autumn, 105, 109. See also composers, Soviet Spain, 150, 151 SPAM [Stowarzyszenie Polskich Artystów Muzyków] (Society of Polish Musical Artists), 90, 143 spectatorship, musical, 72 Spirale I (Ciuciura), 159 Spisak, Michał, 23, 100, 123, 206n58 Stachowski, Marek, 212n4 Stachurska, Zofia, 45 Stalin, Joseph, 5, 11, 13, 44 Stalinism, 4, 13, 18, 26, 132, 157; dissolution of the PTMW and, 143; field of possibilities for Warsaw Autumn and, 33; folk or folk-influ-

enced music and, 51, 166; isolation under, 140; mandate to reach wide audience and, 68; music censured under, 16; national and local variants of, 5; reassessment in Eastern Bloc, 11; Soviet insularity and, 106; upowszechnienie and, 66; “wedding cake” skyscrapers and, 70, 196n28 State Higher School of Music, 67, 82, 179, 180 State Opera (Warsaw), 48, 181 Steinecke, Wolfgang, 20, 94 Stęszewski, Jan, 193n78 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 43, 46, 54, 57, 67, 146; influence on avant-gardes in Eastern Bloc, 153; lectures on electronic music, 43, 124 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, works of: Gruppen, 53, 59, 60; Klavierstück XI, 79; Kontra-Punkte, 53; Plus-Minus, 156; Telemusik, 156; Zyklus, 53 Stola, Dariusz, 16 Story (Merce Cunningham Dance Company), 110 Strauss, Richard, 26 Stravinsky, Igor, 12, 19, 20, 34, 57, 63; “contemporary classics” category and, 51; Polish audience responses to, 84; rehabilitated in the Soviet Union, 125–26 Stravinsky, Igor, works of: Agon, 52; Canticum sacrum, 52; Concertino, 58; Concerto in E-flat Major (“Dumbarton Oaks”), 58; Duo concertant, 58, 125; Ebony Concerto, 25; Firebird suite, 25; Fireworks, 25; Histoire du soldat, 52; Jeu de cartes, 25; In memoriam Dylan Thomas, 52; Oedipus Rex, 58; Persephone, 58; Petrushka suite, 25; Renard, 58; The Rite of Spring, 25, 83; Septet, 58 String Quartet (Baird), 43 String Quartet, op. 3 (Berg), 58 String Quartet no. 1 (Bartók), 58 String Quartet no. 1 (Carter), 113 String Quartet no. 1 (Schuller), 59 String Quartet no. 2 (Szymanowski), 52 String Quartet no.3 (Kopelent), 154 String Quartet no. 3 (Schuman), 43 String Quartet no. 3, op. 22 (Hindemith), 58 String Quartet no. 4 (Bartók), 43 String Quartet no. 5 (Bartók), 25 String Quartet no. 5 (Pijper), 59 Strobel, Heinrich, 94, 95, 139, 151, 154 Stroe, Aurel: Piano Sonata, 59 Strofy [Strophes] (Penderecki), 45, 95 Stryja, Karol, 21 Stuckenschmidt, Hans Heinz, 92 Subotnick, Morton, 108

index Suite, op. 29 (Schoenberg), 58 Suite for Harpsichord and String Quartet (Seiber), 59 Suite for Piano, op. 25 (Schoenberg), 52 Suite no. 2 from Romeo and Juliet, op. 64ter (Prokofiev), 43 Summer Music (Barber), 58 Sun of the Incas (Denisov), 136 surrealism, 35 Survivor from Warsaw, A (Schoenberg), 75, 136, 197n44 Sweden, 94, 145, 159 Switzerland, 22, 123, 145 Symfonia: Muzyka elektroniczna (Schäffer), 156 Symphonic Variations (Malawski), 25 Symphony no. 1 (Lutosławski), 15, 25 Symphony no. 1, op. 14 [“1959”] (Górecki), 45 Symphony no. 2 (Hartmann), 58 Symphony no. 2 (Jaroch), 59 Symphony no. 2 [“Olympic”] (Turski), 15 Symphony no. 3 (Lutosławski), 169 Symphony no. 3, op. 27 [“Song of the Night”] (Szymanowski), 12 Symphony no. 4 (Brahms), 27 Symphony no. 5 (P. I. Tchaikovsky), 27 Symphony no. 6 (Hartmann), 52 Symphony no. 10 in E Minor, op. 93 (Shostakovich), 159 Symphony no. 11, op. 103 [“The Year 1905”] (Shostakovich), 43 Szabelski, Bolesław, 116; Apostrofy for 9 instruments, 59 Szalonek, Witold, 44, 45, 46, 53, 54 Szell, George, 97 Szparkowski, Eugeniusz, 70 Szwarcman, Dorota, 76–77 Szymanowski, Karol, 12, 26, 51, 114, 142 Szymanowski, Karol, works of: Król Roger (King Roger), 52; Litania do Marii Panny (Litany to the Virgin Mary), 52; Maski (Masks), 58, 125; Metopy (Metopes), 52; Piano Sonata no. 3, 52; Pieśni księżnickzki z baśni (Songs of a Fairy Princess), 52; Słopiewnie (Word Songs), 58; String Quartet no. 2, 52; Violin Concerto no. 2, op. 61, 113 Takemitsu, Toru, 159 Tanglewood, 97 Tátrai Quartet, 25 Taverma. Gianpiero, 152 Tchaikovsky, Boris: Concerto for Cello and Orchestra, 104

243

Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Illich, 27 Telemusik (Stockhausen), 156 television, 69 Temporary Repertoire Commission, 50, 51, 54–55; compositions and composers selected by, 51–54; music classified by, 56 Tenebrae (Huber), 152 Thaw, 5, 6, 17, 105, 132; earliest phases of, 12–13, 16, 89–90; modernizing progress and, 20; opportunities for international contact during, 7; reactivation of the PTMW, 143; short-lived Thaw in Poland, 35, 36, 61 Third Orchestral Piece (Cardew), 59 Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima (Penderecki), 80 ticket prices, 68 Tilbury, John, 3, 149, 156, 156–57, 157, 180 Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche (Strauss), 26 Timpana Percussion Ensemble, 151, 159 Tippett, Michael, 53 Tompkins, David, 14 tonality, 57, 59 Tone Roads no. 3 (Ives), 114 Toop, Richard, 110–11 Topolski, Jan, 168, 170 Torbus-Mierzwiakowa, Irena, 153 totalitarianism, 5 Toulouse Quintet, 42, 43 tourism, 7, 24, 89, 101–105, 103 Transición II (Kagel), 53 transnationalism, 89, 133–36, 140, 141, 147, 209n9 Treni d’onda a modulazione di intensità (Gelmetti), 156 Trionfo di Afrodite (Orff ), 53 Trochimczyk, Maja, 144, 155 Trumpet Concerto (Sikorski), 59 Trybuna Ludu [People’s Tribune] (PZPR organ), 28, 114, 115 Trybuna Robotnicza [Workers’ Tribune] (newspaper), 80 Tübingen Memorandum, 97 Tudor, David, 43, 79, 80; Merce Cunningham Dance Company and, 110, 117, 118, 120; Musica Viva Pragensis and, 110, 132 Turski, Zbigniew, 15; Sinfonia da camera, 53 Twardowski, Romuald: Antyfony [Antifone], 59 twelve-tone music, 13, 35, 91. See also dodecaphony; serialism 20 Gruppen (Nilsson), 59 Two Pieces for Three Pianos (Feldman), 156, 159 Tygodnik Powszechny [Universal Weekly] (Catholic publication), 115

244

index

Ukraine, 169 Union of Czechoslovak Composers, 132 Union of Soviet Composers, 127, 186n8 United Kingdom. See Great Britain (United Kingdom) United States, 17, 22, 86–87, 91, 97, 136; Americans at Warsaw Autumn, 112–120, 116; ISCM Festival and, 145; Lutosławski in, 97; music publications in, 91 Universal Edition, 97 upowszechnienie (mass dissemination of culture), 65–66, 67 USSR State Symphony Orchestra, 23, 25, 27, 159 Ustvolskaya, Galina: Sonata for Violin and Piano, 59, 125, 126 Vandagriff, Rachel, 198n5 Varèse, Edgar, 63, 153 Variationen für Orchester, op. 31 (Schoenberg), 52 Variations, op. 27 (Webern), 124 Variations, op. 30 (Webern), 52, 57, 58 Variations II (Cage), 119 Variations III (Cage), 119 Vaughan, David, 117, 119 Vayman, Mikhail, 125 Venice Biennale, 2 Verdery, Katherine, 171 Verklärte Nacht (Schoenberg), 114 Vertovec, Steven, 8, 88, 89 Vest, Lisa Cooper, 19 Vesuvius Ensemble, 154, 159 Vienna Symphony, 23, 30 Vietnam, 90 Vingt regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus (Messiaen), 52 Violin Concerto no. 1 (Piston), 114 Violin Concerto no. 2, op. 61 (Szymanowski), 113 Violin Sonata (Klyuzner), 59 Violin Sonata no. 1 in F Minor, op. 80 (Prokofiev), 58, 125 Visions fugitives (Prokofiev), 52 Volkonsky, Andrey, 127, 206n72; Musica Stricta, 124, 125, 127, 131 Vostřák, Zbyněk, 153 Wagner-Régeny, Rudolf: Jüdische Chronik, 59 Waldorff, Jerzy, 13, 30, 31, 64, 140, 155, 158–59 Wariacje bez tematu [Variations without a Theme] (Baird), 59 Warsaw, city of, 39, 103, 139, 168; Academy of Music, 179; Belvedere Palace, 18; as “city of Chopin,” 28; concert halls, 69; musical

freedom in, 40; Old Town, 70, 92; postwar reconstruction in, 104; Palace of Culture and Science, 70; State Higher School of Music, 67; State Opera (Warsaw), 48, 181 Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music: Americans at, 112–120, 116; as arena for cultural diplomacy, 7, 19, 97, 119, 141, 162; budget, 60, 194n98; as catalyst for change in Eastern Bloc, 137–38; contingency in Polish culture of 1950s and, 32–33; cultural mobility and, 88–89, 94, 120, 137; discourse of neutral territory and, 38–41, 67; Festival Office, 102, 108, 117; film festivals compared to, 103–4; first, 6, 8, 12, 13, 20–22, 26, 29, 32– 33; foreign travelers to, 7–8; foreign visitors to, 89–93, 101–5, 103; foundations of, 14–18; founding of, 6; geopolitical parity and, 56; influence on avant-gardes in Eastern Bloc, 134; ISCM Festival and, 139–141, 145–150; mobilization of avant-garde performers, 111; performance of cross-border relations at, 7; planning for, 21–27, 48–49, 50; Polish October Revolution and, 12; post–Cold War history of, 167–171; postwar new music institutions and, 2–3; Program Commission, 169; programming choices, 25, 52–53, 58–59, 122–27; public image of, 48; radio broadcasts of, 13; reputation of, 60; scandal and, 78–84; second, 34, 36; as socialist education project, 6; State Higher School of Music, 82; tenth anniversary of, 61, 94; time devoted to categories, 56, 57, 60; “Warsaw Spring” and, 18–21; as zero sum game, 27–32; as zone of cross-border cultural contact, 1, 127 Warsaw Pact, 5, 8, 12, 39, 150, 161 “Warsaw Spring,” 16, 17 Warsaw State Opera and Philharmonic Orchestra, 181 Warsaw Uprising (1944), 4, 179 Warsztat Myszyczny (Musical Workshop), 152, 156, 180 Water Music (Cage), 157 WDR (West German Radio), 94, 96, 97 Webern, Anton, 3, 30, 54, 78, 84, 114 Webern, Anton, works of: Cantata no. 2, op. 31, 58; Concerto, op. 24, 57, 58; Concerto for Nine Instruments, 52; Five Movements, op. 5, 43; Six Bagatelles, op. 9, 58; Six Pieces for Orchestra, op. 6, 113; Songs (op. 14, 15, 19), 52; Symphony, op. 21, 45; Variations, op. 27, 124; Variations, op. 30, 52, 57, 58 Weill, Kurt, 20

index Weinbaum, Wiktor, 21, 36, 42–43, 55; biographical notes on, 181; on tourism from socialist countries, 106; on “young composers” in Eastern Bloc, 127, 206n72 Welin, Karl-Erik, 63; Manzit, 152 Werner, Sven-Erik, 149 West German Radio Wind Ensemble, 42 Wielecki, Tadeusz, 168, 170, 213n14 Wieniawski compeition, 31 Williams, Alistair, 3 Wisłocki, Stanisław, 21, 23, 26, 50 Wodiczko, Bohdan, 21, 34 Wolff, Christian, 119; For Prepared Piano, 79 World War II, 13, 17, 33, 179; death of Polish Jews in, 54; institutions destroyed in, 70; West German–Polish relations and, 96 Woytowicz, Bolesław, 179 Wozzeck (Berg), 52 Wysocki, Stefan, 63–64, 117 Xenakis, Iannis, 54, 57, 63, 146, 159; Achorripsis for 21 instruments, 53; Pithoprakta, 59 youth culture, 170, 209n9 Yudina, Maria, 124–25 Yugoslavia, 44, 90, 98, 105, 111, 132, 136

245

Zabolotsky, Nikolai, 124 Zagreb Biennale, 98, 136 ZAIKS (Polish artistic copyright agency), 95, 99, 100 Zafred, Mario, 17 Zieliński, Tadeusz, 85 ZKP [Związek Kompozytorów Polskich] (Polish Composers’ Union), 32, 42, 103, 155, 186n8; constraints of official cultural life and, 56; festival planning and, 48–49, 50, 168; Festivals of Polish Music and, 90; foundations of Warsaw Autumn and, 14–18; independence from Polish cultural authorities, 161; informal cultural exchange in Eastern Bloc and, 131; ISCM Festival and, 147, 160; meaning of contemporary music and, 36–37; Musicology Section, 206n58; planning for Warsaw Autumn and, 21–27; “popular” art music and, 68; PTMW and, 142, 143, 144–45; Qualifying Commission, 50, 193n78; Repertoire Commission and, 167; Romantic notions of musical autonomy, 36; second Warsaw Autumn Festival and, 34; upowszechnienie and, 66; Warsaw Autumn project launched by, 18–21 Zyklus (Stockhausen), 53