Music in Polish Romantic Epic Poetry [Music and Literature: Innovations, Intersections, and Interpretations, Napier University, Edinburgh 14-15th June 2018] (original) (raw)
Related papers
Descriptive Instrumental Music in Nineteenth-Century Poland: Context, Genre, and Performance
Descriptive instrumental works composed in nineteenth-century Poland do not easily fit classification as consumer music, as they fulfilled important patriotic and commemorative functions. While these pieces, like descriptive works composed elsewhere, employ topical gestures and melodic quotations, in the Polish works, patriotic songs are used intertextually to construct coherent historical or allegorical narratives of the nation through music. In Jankiel’s “Concert of Concerts,” an excerpt from the epic poem Pan Tadeusz, the poet Adam Mickiewicz describes a performance of such musical narrative of events in Polish history. Thus Mickiewicz apotheosized the then-popular descriptive pieces and inspired future compositions in the same genre. These pieces cross generic boundaries and interact in unexpected ways with the canonic repertory, offering insights into compositional techniques and strategies used by composers such as Fryderyk Chopin and illuminating modes of listening familiar to their audiences.narrative of events in Polish history. Thus Mickiewicz apotheosized the then-popular descriptive pieces and inspired future compositions in the same genre. These pieces cross generic boundaries and interact in unexpected ways with the canonic repertory, offering insights into compositional techniques and strategies used by composers such as Fryderyk Chopin and illuminating modes of listening familiar to their audiences.
Music and Infinity. Studies in Polish Romanticism
Toruń, 2016
The rhythm of Romanticism in Poland is ominously tapped by history, politics, various defeats, and the sense of national captivity, but the descant to this main melodic line are rhythms and melodies of everyday life and extraordinary art. Contrary to many stereotypes and clichés referring to Polish Romanticism, national martyrology and historism are not the only matter of concern for Polish authors. Tradition, customs, everydayness, social relations, existence, and art are crucial literary themes. In addition, aesthetic experiences, the musical life, the search for sacrum in the individual dimension and outside the Catholic Church are typical of Romanticism in Poland, which brings this movement closer to the European culture of that period. All essays collected in this book are dedicated to these issues from the border of art, aesthetics, and specific mysticism.
Paderewski in Poetry: Master of Harmonies or Poland's Savior?
Public fascination with Polish composer, virtuoso pianist and statesman, Ignacy Jan Paderewski, continued throughout his creative life. His museum in Morges, Switzerland, his Archives at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland and at the Archiwum Akt Nowych in Warsaw, contain numerous gifts, honors, tributes, and awards, bestowed upon Paderewski during his lifetime. This paper presents a range of literary tributes to the pianist-politician, spanning his career, from 1889, following his first international triumphs as a virtuoso in Paris and Brussels, to 1941 and elegies that expressed grief after his death. The overview includes analysis and context of Paderewski-themed poems by Richard Watson Gilder, John Huston Finley, Robert Underwood Johnson, Charles Phillips, Henryk Merzbach, Julian A. Święcicki, Maryla Wolska, Waldemar Bakalarski, and Anne Strakacz-Appleton. Several thematic threads are singled out and exemplified by poems: "synaesthetic," "erudite," "patriotic," "laudatory" or "commemorative," and "elegiac." The poetic responses, arising as a reaction to current political and artistic events, feature two turning points (a) in 1918 when Poland regained independence and Paderewski became its prime minister and (b) in 1941 when he died. While the literary quality of most of these poems is not consistent, the poetry provides a valuable document of its times and a testimony to Paderewski's close links with the members of the American literary establishment (Gilder and Finley were editors of important journals and influential men of letters; Finley and Phillips taught at universities, etc.). The poems also reveal the virtuoso pianist's unique role in Polish culture, both within the country and in exile communities. The text of Paderewski's patriotic song of 1917 is also discussed; all the poems are collected in an appendix.Published in Polish Music Journal (online) vol. 4, no. 1 (Summer 2001). Paper presented at the Session on "Paderewski and Sembrich." Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., June 2002.
Modernity in Polish Music: „Mity” by Karol Szymanowski and „Caprices” by Ludomir Michał Rogowski
Lietuvos muzikologija, 2017
As we take a look at the history of Polish music, we can see, that the tendencies popular in Western Europe in the beginning of the 20 th century, e.g. impressionism, expressionism or dodecaphony, were developed much more lately. This was mostly because of the political situation in Poland but also because of sentimentalism to the Romantic Era and audience's conservatism. However, there were many excellent examples of the approach to modernism in Polish composers' works. The author of this paper examines two of them. The first one can be seen in a composition by Karol Szymanowski entitled Mity, Op. 30 (1915) for violin and piano, in which the composer created a new musical style-violin impressionism. The second one is seen in a musical piece by Ludomir Michał Rogowski, Caprices (1922?) for viola, soprano or clarinet and piano, in which the composer tried to break the rules of classical harmony by usage of, as he said, "natural" scales. The aim of the article is to show a new approach to musical material by the aforementioned composers that is-their way of modernizing Polish music.
Ars musica and its contexts in medieval and early modern culture, ed. by Paweł Gancarczyk
2016
This volume is dedicated to Elżbieta Witkowska-Zaremba on the occasion of her 70th birthday. It draws together twenty-nine articles in English, Polish and German, devoted to various aspects of the functioning of music in the culture of the Middle Ages and early modern period. The first part contains texts devoted to the theory and the teaching of music, while the second includes studies of musical practice, i.e., works and repertories functioning in specific sources and communities. Ars musica is shown here in its cultural contexts, which encompass iconography, literature and politics. Such interdisciplinary approaches are found in the third part, and the volume closes with articles relating to the concepts currently in use in discourse about music, as well as to issues in historiography and history of musicology.
The Concept of Polish Music: In Search of Adequate Criteria
Musicology Today
The article discusses the notion of Polish music, the possibilities of defining that notion, establishing its scope and listing specific problems related to it. For about 150 years, writers on Polish music have expressed the conviction that it has its own distinctive stylistic and expressive character. Studies concerning the specific qualities of Polish national style after WWII have naturally linked up to Polish music history, mainly that of the 19th century. The new political and cultural situation in Poland after 1989 calls, however, for a change of perspective. We must take into account the present-day cultural situation, in which boundaries are blurred, while supra-national structures and global thinking are beginning to dominate. The paper attempts to define Polish music as a notion in contemporary discourse on history, to examine the resonance of that category, and to point to artistic phenomena which this notion may be said to describe. I will list and analyse the criteria t...
In: S. Żerańska-Kominek (ed.). Nationality vs Universality: Music Historiographies in Central and Eastern Europe. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016, s. 99–124.
The importance of the literary analysis of musicological texts, of the examinations of “musicological poetics”, was stressed more than twenty years ago by Henry Kingsbury, and many remarkable results have been achieved in this field ever since, especially in the context of “new musicology”. But this cannot be said about Czech musicology, and particularly about the research into the poetics of Czech music historiography. Such lagging behind in this particular area naturally also hinders the development of the closely related sub-disciplines of Czech music historiography, namely its methodology and the history of music reception. While in other historical disciplines it has long been clear for that literary representation is an essential part of the historian’s work, and as such deserves to be studied critically, the Czech music historiography has not reflected on this issue too deeply, being (whether consciously or subconsciously) committed to the Rankian notion that the historian’s task is merely to convey objectively “wie es wirklich gewesen war”. In this paper, I have tried to at least partially make up for this omission by providing a discourse analysis of the early works of Zdeněk Nejedlý (1878–1962), a controversial historian, critic, politician and especially Classic of Czech musicology. Nejedlý’s works written between 1901 and 1921 represented the very first comprehensive and coherent historiographical representation of the history of modern Czech music (ca. 1860–1920). The aim of this deconstruction is to identify ways in which Nejedlý conceptualized and represented the development of modern Czech music and its “meaning” and how he achieved the rhetorical power of his conception.