Marta Beszterda
Department of Arts & Culture
Female composers, gender and politics
in communist Poland
Master’s thesis supervised by dr Rutger Helmers
Second reader: dr Maarten Beirens
Contents
Introduction ... 1
Chapter 1. Musical life in communist Poland ... 12
Chapter 2. Communist ideology and the gender of composers ... 28
Chapter 3. Polish female composers’ lives and careers during communist times ... 42
Conclusion. The ambivalence of communist regime’s impact and its consequences ... 64
Bibliography ... 68
Figures ... 72
Appendix 1 ... 73
Appendix 2 ... 76
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the following people and institutions who have helped in many ways with the completion of this work. First and foremost, I express my gratitude to the members of Musicology Department. I would like to thank dr Rutger Helmers for his supervision, engagement, an inspiring working atmosphere, but above all for trusting in my original idea for this project. I would also like to thank dr Maarten Beirens, as the second reader, for his time and contribution to evaluating this work. Moreover, I owe a special word of thanks to dr Barbara Titus for her exceptionally inspiring classes and for instilling in me a passion for the cultural study of music. I also thank dr Conny Roggebond from the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences for her invaluable insights and support during the initial phase of this research.
I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the composers: Hanna Kulenty, Elżbieta Sikora and Lidia Zielińska for their participation in this project and the will to share their memories and opinions. I also thank Danuta Gwizdalanka and dr Karolina Kizińska for our Skype conversations early this year that inspired me to carry on my research on gender in Polish music history.
I would like to thank the Library of Academy of Music in Poznań, whose staff have been particularly kind and helpful during my research. I am also grateful to Poznań University Library and the Library of the Musicology Institute at the University of Warsaw. I also thank Natalia Surma-Filipowska for providing a professional revision of my translations of the interviews run in Polish.
Finally, I would like to thank my Parents, without whom this work could never have come into existence, as well as my whole family, Polish and Dutch, for their love and unfailing support. And to my dearest friends, wholehearted thanks for standing by me during the ups and downs of the process of realising another dream.
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Introduction
This work focuses on the position of female composers in Poland between 1945 and 1989. Its goal is to understand how the situation of composing women as well as the discourse on composers’ gender presented itself during the communist times. The problem centres around an interplay between the political regime, the musical life in Poland, the lives and careers of Polish female composers and the problem of gender in classical music realm. Such a focus might seem very narrow and very broad at the same time. Narrow, because I choose a very specific scope where a particular political regime, geographical location, profession and gender intersect. Broad, because answering this question requires not only a multidisciplinary investigation in several fields – history, politics, musicology and gender studies, but also finding a key node that would allow to link the results of every of these investigations. Still, while very challenging, this question remains undoubtedly salient for several reasons, both from the musicological and sociological point of view.
The very first inspiration for this research came to me in January 2016 when I first realised that the fields of feminist and gender musicology are barely present in Polish scholarship, and are in the best-case scenario treated as a harmless oddity with doubtful scientific value. One can easily observe that there is a hidden reluctance in Polish musicological scholarship to take the feminist perspective or even to address the issues of gender at all. This led me to comprehend that before I can begin any kind of research on Polish female composers in order to contribute to the feminist musicology in the country, what I should first do is to conduct a research on the state of Polish feminist musicology field itself. The outcome of this research, the starting point of which was simply a question why there is no feminist musicology in Poland, is included in my essay “At the intersection of musical culture and historical legacy: feminist musicology in Poland” completed in June 2016.1 This research played a particularly important
role in unveiling the fact that several reasons lying behind the problematic status of feminist musicology in Poland nowadays are actually immersed in the way feminist discourse, classical music scene and musicological scholarship in Poland have been shaped in the communist times. For this reason, taking a closer look on how composers’ gender was handled in both musicological discourse and everyday life during that period seems not only to be a valuable contribution to enlarging the scope of music history studies, but also – and primarily – an
1 Marta Beszterda, “At the intersection of musical culture and historical legacy: feminist musicology in Poland” (Working paper, University of Amsterdam, 2016).
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endeavour which could potentially provide a better understanding of how the challenges of today’s feminist musicology in Poland should be approached.
First of all, even though it has been 27 years since the communist regime in Poland collapsed, its consequences are still palpable in the society of today. The problematic status of feminism is one of the cases where this palpability manifests itself the most. Because of the past regime, the discussion about feminism and gender equality in Poland is marked with a strong political prejudice, difficult to fight – or for a long time even to discuss. Based on the feminist discourse in Poland, it seems possible to point out at least three sources of this prejudice marking feminism and unveiling how the communist legacy has caught Polish women in a serious trap.2 First, as during the communist times the official political agenda strongly imposed
gender equality as part of a propaganda, some people in a post-communist society link women’s rights to the communist ideology. Second, while imposing the official gender equality, at the same time the communist authorities fiercely discredited feminist movement as an invention of so-called “degenerate West” which might have contributed to the general distrust to feminism among the society. And finally, the Church being a politically subversive space during the communist times and as a result gaining a real political power during the political transformation in the early 1990s, has obviously depreciated feminism and promoted traditional gender roles, which resonates with Polish society up to the present times. These interrelated factors have resulted in a quite common reluctance towards feminism in Poland and this is why coming back to communist times seems indispensable in order to understand feminism’s problematic status. Being aware of this reluctance of course sheds a new light on the absence of feminist musicology from Polish scholarship and on the fact that the feminist perspective is either avoided, either discredited and ridiculed, or misrepresented.
Second, the communist times were a very important period for the Polish classical music scene and the crucial one in terms of how today’s canon in formed. The most prominent careers of twentieth-century Polish composers owe their course to the foundation of the annual Warsaw Autumn Festival in 1956. In a political sense, the Festival was an artistic island of freedom, a significant breach from communist censorship. In a musical sense, it became a platform for several important compositional debuts (such as Henryk Mikołaj Górecki, Krzysztof Penderecki, Andrzej Panufnik), giving rise to some of the greatest careers in Polish composition. As a result, this contemporary compositional pantheon has shaped the construction of Polish classical music canon, the school curricula and the repertoire performed in the concert halls. At
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the same time, it is a very masculinised one, despite the alleged gender equality on the musical scene. One of the reasons why it is not addressed as problematic in musicology, might be the figure of Grażyna Bacewicz, who as an already fully-fledged artist and composer in the post-war period continued her career during the communist times and is considered to be one of the key twentieth-century creators next to the aforementioned male composers. While at face value it might seem that her presence could become a perfect take-off point for a discussion about gender in Polish musicology, during my research I realised that in fact she has become an excuse to wash one’s hands of a responsibility to engage in such a discussion, or at least a very common answer that is always at hand with regard to any questions concerning female composers in Poland.3 This is why re-examining gender dynamic on a post-war musical scene and the role
gender played in Bacewicz’s life and career seem particularly important in order to open the door of Polish musicology for the subject of gender.
Last but not least, it is very probable that the contemporary reluctance to seriously address feminism in Polish musicology is an element of a wider phenomenon, namely the reluctance to address any sociological aspect of music. This reluctance might have its sources in the 1945-1956 period, when it was required to interpret the reality, including music history, aesthetics and musical styles, through the lens of class conflict and Marxist rhetoric. The abstract dimension of music was dissembled in official scholarship and any evaluation of a musical work was subjugated to strict rules of socialist realism aesthetics. Anything that did not meet its requirements would be damned as “formalist”. Formalism – understood also as lack of a social aspect in music – was the most common allegation levelled against artworks in communist times and the usual excuse to ban or censor them. This resulted in a problematic status held by musicology’s sociological aspect later on - due to a certain backlash, scholars started to specifically avoid referring to any non-musical aspects of interpretation. Mieczysław Tomaszewski, one of the leading Polish musicologists, said:
The sociological aspect (...), despite all reservations, can (and should) be included in the scope of an artwork’s interpretation. The situation both here and in the East seems to resemble the “better safe than sorry” attitude, due to the memory of the years when the sociologizing was vulgar and all-embracing. It is however difficult to imagine the history of music and the theory of the work without the sociological aspect. Social function is, obviously, directly constitutive of musical genres and types. It simply creates them (...). We live in an age in which the scope of interest of mainstream musicology still encompasses music dominated by only one function: the aesthetic one. Other aspects of research come to the fore rather accidentally and marginally. Of course, the sociology of music - and above all
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ethnomusicology - are developing very well, but they are usually practiced as separate disciplines, not methodologically coordinated with the mainstream.4
What is crucial to emphasise here is that this call, made as early as in 1979, is unfortunately still valid in Polish musicology today. The deep wariness with which Polish scholars approach the sociological aspect of music, despite their alleged awareness of its importance, is still very much existent in contemporary scholarship. In an interview run in April 2016, Karolina Kizińska, a young Polish musicologist addresses this problem by saying:
I get the impression that New Musicology is generally treated with scepticism in Poland, whether it is about the connection between music and political matters, whether it is for instance about music and women’s studies. Generally speaking we are traditionalists, and most musicologists in Poland in fact feel closely related to the mindset typical for music theory rather than musicology. They have a very traditional approach to their studies, they usually like to lean solely on “music itself” and have an allergic reaction to any attempts to explain music through its cultural context, gender, politics or anything else that is not purely musical (…). I have the impression that most of the issues that could be categorised as New Musicology are taken with a grain of salt, they are perceived as a sort of light, and not necessarily serious, “humanizing music” (…).5
Bearing in mind the above, I hope this work will be a step further towards first, addressing this implicit but tangible attitude in Polish musicological scholarship, and second, finally incorporating more of the rich sociological and cultural context into musical studies. I believe this work holds such a potential for at least three reasons. First, it deconstructs the mechanisms through which communist ideology influenced understanding of concepts that are fundamental for music, particularly the concept of composer. Second, it sheds light on a strong interdependence between the political climate in communist Poland and the fact that musicologists and female composers do not address gender as a valid element of musical life. And third, it proves that despite this silence covering the topic of gender, it did play and still plays an important role in understanding Polish musical life.
The current state of research on musical life in Poland between 1945-1989 shows an uneven level of interest dedicated to its various aspects: while some of them are thoroughly covered, other still demand much more attention. For example, Ewa Rzanna-Szczepaniak has dedicated several books to the post-war situation in Poland with regard to the foundation and functioning of musical institutions (particularly the Polish Composers’ Union), the organisation of musical life and the ideological fundaments of communist system in the context of musical
4 Mieczysław Tomaszewski, “Muzykologia wobec współczesności”, in Intepretacja integralna dzieła muzycznego, ed. Wiesława Berny-Negrey and Herbert Oleschko, (Kraków: Akademia Muzyczna w Krakowie, 2000), 14. 5 Karolina Kizińska, interviewed by the author, April 2016.
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activity.6 As far as the aesthetics of socialist realism is concerned, more attention has been given
to it in the context of literature and arts than in music. Tomasz Tarnawczyk’s book
Optymistyczna i monumentalna. Symfonia w muzyce polskiego socrealizmu (Optimistic and monumental. Symphony in the music of Polish socialist realism)7 published in 2013 is so far the
only monograph dedicated to socialist realism in Polish music. An exceptionally important source for the study of socialist realism was the protocol from the Polish Composers’ Union’s Łagów Lubuski Conference in 19498 and together with Ewa-Rzanna Szczepaniak’s books,
especially Działalność Związku Kompozytorów Polskich na tle sytuacji w kraju 1945-1956
(The Activity of the Polish Composers’ Union in the context of the situation in the country 1945-1945)9 based on the protocols from the Polish Composers’ Union’s General Assemblies,
they formed a strong theoretical basis for the second chapter of this work. Moreover, there are two works that proved to be particularly useful in the study of Warsaw Autumn Festival. One of them is Cynthia Bylander’s PhD dissertation from 1989 which provides a very elaborate review of the circumstances leading to the foundation of the Festival and of its first editions. The other one is Anna Brzezicka-Kamińska’s Master’s thesis from 1997 on Polish female composers’ participation in the Festival – probably the first work in Poland that could be classified as feminist, although it was never published and is generally unknown to the wider public.10
A lot more could still be written on the resonance Warsaw Autumn Festival had with society and the interplay between political thaw in 1956 and the subsequent renaissance in Polish music. Moreover, not much is known about Polish Composers’ Union as a social group. We have the access to the official protocols and transcripts of their assemblies, but it for sure does not comprise the full spectrum of the opinions, beliefs composers held and the conversations they must have had in the backstage. Many biographies of composers and
6 See: Ewa Rzanna-Szczepaniak, Działalność Związku Kompozytorów Polskich na tle sytuacji w kraju
(1945-1956) (Opole: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Scriptorium, 2012).
Ewa Rzanna-Szczepaniak, Polityka kulturalna a rozwój kultury muzycznej w Polsce w latach 1944-1956 (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Contact, 2009).
Ewa Rzanna-Szczepaniak, Rozwój kultury muzycznej w Polsce w świetle polityki kulturalnej PZPR 1956-1970 (Poznań: Akademia Muzyczna im. I. J. Paderewskiego, 2013).
7 Tomasz Tarnawczyk, Optymistyczna i monumentalna. Symfonia w muzyce polskiego socrealizmu (Łódź: Akademia Muzyczna im. Grażyny i Kiejstuta Bacewiczów w Łodzi, 2013).
8 “Konferencja Kompozytorów w Łagowie Lubuskim w dniach od 5. VIII do 8. VIII 1949. Protokół”, Ruch
Muzyczny, October 1949, 12-31. See also: Sokorski, Włodzimierz. “Ku realizmowi socjalistycznemu w muzyce”. Ruch muzyczny, October 1949, 3-5.
9 Rzanna-Szczepaniak, Działalność Związku Kompozytorów Polskich.
10 Anna Brzezicka-Kamińska, “Polskie kompozytorki na Festiwalu Warszawska Jesień” (MA thesis, Uniwersytet Waszawski, 1998).
Cynthia Bylander, “The Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music, 1956-1961. It's goals, structures, programs and people” (PhD dissertation, Ohio State University, 1989).
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musicologists (both female and male) active in communist times are also still waiting to become covered in monograph literature. At the same time, Polish publications of the last decades of the twentieth century are very often dedicated to the compositional techniques and stylistic innovations, in other words: to the music itself.11 This aspect of musical studies is surprisingly
well covered and it seems to resonate with the earlier mentioned words by Karolina Kizińska who said that most musicologists in Poland are “traditionalists” in a sense that they commonly engage in the work typical for music theorists.12
As for collecting sources for this work, the biggest challenge was to get hold of first-hand female composers’ testimonies and their personal perspectives on composing in communist times. In order to provide myself such a source, I eventually decided to interview three composers: Hanna Kulenty, Elżbieta Sikora and Lidia Zielińska on my own.13 There is of
course a significant amount of materials coming from and written about Grażyna Bacewicz; the most useful one was the book Znak Szczególny (The Birthmark)14 written by her as a set of
short stories from her life, and quite a few coming from Krystyna Moszumańska-Nazar.15 I also
managed to collect a few press interviews with the living composers.16 Still, proportionally little
attention has been dedicated to the issues relevant to my research question, which made the opportunity to run the interviews particularly helpful.17 Of course at the same time it also raised
a few problems. While choosing my interviewees, I was trying to provide the voice of representatives of different generations and different academic environments. It is important to
11 See for example: Krzysztof Baculewski, Polska twórczość kompozytorska 1945-1984 (Kraków: Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, 1987).
12 Karolina Kizińska, interviewed by the author, April 2016. 13 See Appendix 3 of this work.
14 Grażyna Bacewicz, Znak szczególny (Warszawa: Czytelnik, 1970).
15 See: Krystyna Moszumańska-Nazar, “Szkic biograficzny”, in Krystyna Moszumańska-Nazar. Katalog
tematyczny utworów, ed. Katarzyna Kasperek (Kraków: Akademia Muzyczna w Krakowie, 2004), 143-148,
Krystyna Moszumańska-Nazar, “Autorefleksja kompozytorska”, in Krystyna Moszumańska-Nazar. Katalog
tematyczny utworów, ed. Katarzyna Kasperek (Kraków: Akademia Muzyczna w Krakowie, 2004), 149-153 and
Małgorzata Woźna-Stankiewicz, Lwowskie geny osobowości twórczej. Rozmowy z Krystyną Moszumańską-Nazar (Kraków: Musica Iagellonica, 2007).
16 See: “Elżbieta Sikora. Talent w Polsce zapomniany”, Dziennik.pl, accessed October 4, 2016, http://muzyka.dziennik.pl/artykuly/88808,elzbieta-sikora-talent-w-polsce-zapomniany.html.,
Hanna Kulenty, interview with Tomasz Cyz, Ruch Muzyczny, July 2014.
Elżbieta Sikora, interview with BoardroomMum, accessed October 4, 2016, http://www.boardroommum.com/interviews-archive/elzbieta-sikora/.
Elżbieta Sikora, inteview with Wojciech Sitarz, “Gdyby nie trema, zostałaby pianistką”, Wojciech Sitarz, 8 May 2011, accessed October 4, 2016, https://wojciechsitarz.wordpress.com/2011/05/08/gdyby-nie-trema-zostalaby-pianistka-%E2%80%93-rozmowa-z-elzbieta-sikora/.
17 See: Małgorzata Gąsiorowska, Bacewicz (Kraków: Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, 1999).
Judith Rosen, Grażyna Bacewicz. Her life and works. (Los Angeles: Polish History Music Series University of Southern California, 1984).
Adrian Thomas, Grażyna Bacewicz. Chamber and orchestral music. (Los Angeles: Polish History Music Series University of Southern California, 1985).
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note that the lives of the oldest and the youngest among studied women were substantially different and this is the fact I intend not to overlook despite the similarities and common patterns in their experiences. Similarly, despite placing in this work’s title the indication that I am studying “female composers in communist Poland”, I stay aware of the problematic, all-encompassing nature of such a category and I intend to present its chronological and geographical (or, in other words, vertical and horizontal) diversity. Drawing from the interviews with living composers and combining them together with the sources coming from earlier decades (in the case of Bacewicz and Moszumańska-Nazar) also results in a problem of the perspective one has on a certain period. Living composers perceive communist era through the context of present times and present times inevitably influence their opinions on the past, whereas for instance Grażyna Bacewicz’s opinions concerned the reality she actually lived in at the time of commenting on it, so she did not have the luxury of comparison.
Another challenge while collecting the sources was the very limited amount of literature dealing with the topic of gender in Polish music and composition, let alone discussing them specifically in the context of the communist period.18 This shortage, both in the first hand
sources (such as published interviews with composers) and in the academic literature, of course mirrors the aforementioned state of feminist research in musicology and proves that this work is necessary in order to fill a significant gap in the scholarship. An important theoretical basis for this work was of course built thanks to the Western literature, particularly Marcia Citron’s
Gender and the musical canon19 from 1993, Ruth Solie’s contribution on feminism in music in
the New Grove Dictionary20 and Susan McClary’s article Towards a feminist criticism of music
from 1990.21 Having said that, there are also two Polish musicologists, whose works and
opinions have been particularly helpful in conducting this research. The first one is Danuta Gwizdalanka who is considered to be the first musicologist in Poland who raised the topic of gender in music and is an author of the book Muzyka i płeć (Music and sex) published in 2001, and the other one is Karolina Kizińska, a young scholar who has become acquainted with this field of research during her studies in the United States.22 Besides the contribution they
18 I provided a more detailed overview of the available literature as well as a diagnosis of the state of feminist research in Polish musicology in an already mentioned unpublished article: Beszterda, “At the intersection of musical culture and historical legacy: feminist musicology in Poland”.
19 Marcia Citron, Gender and musical canon, (Cambridge University Press, 1993).
20 Ruth A. Solie, “Feminism”, in The New Grove Dictionary of music and musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie and John Tyrell, vol. 8 (London: MacMillan, 2001), 664-667.
21 Susan McClary, “Towards i feminist criticism of music”, Canadian university music review / Revue de musique
des universités canadiennes 10, no. 2 (1990): 9-18.
22 In fact, the first reflection on women in music in Poland comes from the 1997’s article published in Ruch
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provided through their academic writings, each of them brought important issues to my attention during our conversations, especially what is the climate around the subject of gender in Polish musicology.23
An important note should be made here about the historical and geographical context of this work. Namely, how this research can be related to the state of feminist research in musicology internationally. It is common to date the beginnings of feminist musicology in the West back to the late 1980s and early 1990s.24 Among other events, the 1988’s annual meeting
of American Musicological Society (AMS) featured a significant amount of feminist contribution, while Susan McClary’s ground-breaking text Feminine endings was published in 1991.25 Ever since, both musicological and ethnomusicological Western research have been
regularly influenced by women’s studies and feminist, gender and queer theory. The fact that musicologists started to shed light on intersections between musical culture and women / gender in this particular epoch seems to be a result of, on the one hand, the development of women’s studies in the 1970s (and their subsequent entrance into various fields of research in the humanities and social sciences), and on the other hand, the birth of New Musicology. In The
New Grove Dictionary feminist musicology is understood as:
A body of scholarship “dedicated to the understanding of women’s roles, experiences and contributions as well as the various ways in which gender as social construct has defined those roles in different cultural settings. Feminist scholarship has also been concerned with the retrieval of women’s compositions and the study of their activities as composers, performers and users of music (…) and with a critical approach in which the understanding of gender and gender ideology is brought to bear upon the entire musical realm. Specifically, feminist musical scholarship sees music as both product and promulgator of a gendered social order.26
While the inspiration as well as a great part of a theoretical framework for this project come from the above understanding of feminist musicology, it is particularly important for me to emphasise that my goal is by no means to kick off a trend in Polish musicology that would consist in an attempt to simply copy the Western, already a twenty-five-year-old version of
Congress for Women in Music in Los Angeles. (Anna Maria Harley, “Po polsku i po babsku”, Ruch muzyczny, September 21, 1997).
23 Karolina Kizińska, interviewed by the author, April 2016. Danuta Gwizdalanka, interviewed by the author, April 2016.
24 However, The New Grove Dictionary of music and musicians dates the earlier, pre-feminist phase or “women's studies phase” to emerge as early as in the 1970s, when its main focus was to include forgotten female musicians and their works into the focus of music history. (Solie, “Feminism”, 664.)
25 Susan McClary, Feminine endings: music, gender and sexuality (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1991).
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feminist musicology and apply it to the Polish scholarship in an unreflective mimicking way. I feel like this is essential to note, because as I am indeed relying on scholarship that is no longer recent from the Western point of view, and I am applying it to the ground where no similar movement has ever aroused, I assume this interpretation is probable to occur. But in fact, my intention is substantially different. I believe that Polish scholarship (as well as all the other scholarships that are in some ways more or less distinct from the Western academia) needs to work out its own approach to the problem of gender in music by integrating the accomplishments of existing feminist musicology scholarship with country-specific problems. Otherwise it will not truly develop Polish musicology and – above all – it will not last as an integrated, fully-fledged element of musicological research. This is why in this dissertation I am not limiting my research to a simple compensatory history by invoking and shedding light on biographies of female composers (which is of course still a necessary and valuable type of scholarship for Polish music history and is – unfortunately very occasionally – practised)27, but
I am also trying to examine the problem of gender in composing vis-à-vis the values and symbols promoted by the communist regime. This solution leaves some space to acknowledge that due to the course of historical events, Polish and West European / North American experiences of femininity, the meaning of feminism, as well as the specificity of music studies, are different, and that consequently the ensuing challenges for scholars differ as well. But above all, this approach has a power to counter an argument common in Poland that feminism is a “foreign invention”, by proving that despite the aforementioned differences, feminism is absolutely relevant to Polish history and necessary in Polish musicology.
With this intention, it is recommended for the future research to also encompass an overview of the situation of feminist and gender studies in musicology in other non-Western European scholarships in order to open a dialogue, provide a reciprocal exchange of ideas and ask whether similar problems occur. This would be particularly recommended for other countries from the former Soviet Bloc, as in those countries, similarly to Poland, the process of negotiating women’s rights and the status of gender studies is often difficult to understand
27 See: Magdalena Dziadek and Lilianna M. Moll, Odrodźmy się w muzyce! Muzyka na łamach polskich czasopism
kobiecych I “kobieca” krytyka muzyczna 1881-1939 (Katowice: Śląskie Towarzystwo Muzyczne, 2005).
Magdalena Dziadek and Lilianna M. Moll, Oto artyści pełnowartościowi, którzy są kobietami...Polskie
kompozytorki 1816-1939 (Katowice: Związek Kompozytorów Polskich Oddział w Katowicach, 2003).
Aleksandra Kłaput-Wiśniewska, “Artistic work of women – female works in self-reflection of Grażyna Bacewicz, Krystyna Moszumańska-Nazar and Agata Zubel”, in The musical work and its creators, ed. Anna Nowak (Bydgoszcz: Wydawnictwo Uczelniane Akademii Muzycznej im. Feliksa Nowowiejskiego, 2015), 55-69.
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without acknowledging the communist past.28 Unfortunately, for now, it is difficult to establish
the exact state of such a research in Poland’s neighbouring countries.
In light of the above, it is important to note that the research presented in this work obviously holds a potential to build a bridge between the Western and non-Western musicological scholarship. I strongly hope that the combination of Western and Polish perspectives will make this research gain attention of the scholars from both these traditions – even though for each of them there are issues in this work that they so far rarely recognize (for Polish musicologists that would be the feminist perspective and for Western feminist musicologists that would be the context of East European region).
Coming back to the main concern of this work, the core problem which has led me to formulate my research question is a central paradox one can easily observe when making a brief overview of the situation of female composers in communist Poland. On the one hand, the regime declared full gender equality and indeed no Polish woman composer has ever declared having felt discriminated within the musical scene in the country during the period. On the other hand, the numbers show a limited participation of women in institutions and festivals and the classical music canon created in the second half of the twentieth century is clearly masculinised. On top of that, the topic has been covered with a conspicuous silence. In order to deconstruct this complex and multi-layered paradox I originally leant on Joan W. Scott’s definition of gender presented in her article from 1986 “Gender: A useful category of analysis”:
As a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes, gender involves four interrelated elements: first, culturally available symbols that evoke multiple (and often contradictory) representations (…). For historians, the interesting questions are, which symbolic representations are invoked, how and in what contexts? Second, normative concepts that set forth interpretations of the meanings of the symbols, that attempt to limit and contain their metaphoric possibilities. These concepts are expressed in religious, educational, scientific, legal and political doctrines (…). [The third and fourth aspects are] social institutions and organisations (…) [and] subjective identity. (…) No one of them operates without the others. Yet they do not operate simultaneously, with one simply reflecting the others. A question for historical research is, in fact, what the relationships among the four aspects are.29
The above concept played an important role in organising my research as I bore in mind that invoking all four elements would be essential to understand where in the reality I want to
28 Janet Elise Johnson and Jean C. Robinson, Living gender after communism (Bloomington, IN : Indiana University Press, 2007).
29 Joan W. Scott, “Gender: a useful category of analysis”, The American historical review 91, No. 5 (1986): 1068-1069.
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investigate gender was placed and how it actually influenced the situation of female composers. Scott’s definition sheds light on the fact that gender as a system is something that incorporates several different parts of reality: symbols, their interpretations, institutions and individual identities, and that the ultimate challenge is to recognise the links between them. While this work, due to its strong focus on concrete female individuals should mostly be considered as a contribution to women’s studies rather than a theoretical treatise about the concept of gender, I decided to try to solve my “paradox” by addressing all four elements listed by Scott. As a consequence, the first chapter explains the general situation of musical life in Poland after the war and provides an analysis of the key institutions and organisations shaping this life. The second chapter explains how socialist realism aesthetic, using political doctrine, redefined symbols, their interpretations and its consequences to the perception of gender in the musical discourse. Finally, the third chapter provides individual testimonies and places concrete identities on a matrix outlined through the previous elements.
On a final note, I feel obligated to indicate that the question posed in this work holds a very personal value to me. As a cultural musicologist, my ultimate goal is to understand in what way music serves “as a social discourse: as a medium in which the fears and hopes of people are played out, negotiated, and shared, a medium which is both shaped by social values and in turn contributes to the organisation of conduct and beliefs”30. As a woman and a feminist researcher,
I want to understand on what basis certain spaces in the society were, or still are, not equally accessible to men and women. Finally, as a Polish feminist musicologist, I want to know how the above have influenced the creation of traditions and canons which later became the part and parcel of Polish culture – the one that has contributed to shaping my own identity.
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Chapter 1. Musical life in communist Poland
The period of communist regime in Poland took place between the 21st of July 1944, when the
Polish Committee of National Liberation was created in Moscow, and the 4th of June 1989,
when the first partially free elections took place and the official name of the country has been changed from Polish People’s Republic to Republic of Poland. From the perspective of a musicologist studying Polish classical music this period stands out as exceptionally interesting and important for at least two reasons. First of all, it was a time of several ground-breaking events in the country’s musical scene, which not only influenced the shape of Polish classical music canons, but also led to building the prominence of Polish composition in the world. For example, this was the time when the Polish Composers’ School arose, when sonorism first emerged and when the great history of Warsaw Autumn Festival, the icon of contemporary musical life in Poland, has started. It is also when many of today’s leading musical institutions were founded, such as the Polish Music Publishing House or Polish Composers’ Union. Second, it was a period when both private and professional life of composers, as well as the whole musical activity, were strongly and inevitably bound to the political life, to an extent rarely encountered in other historical periods (even considered the clear bond between the political and the musical in the period of foreign occupation in the nineteenth century and the World War II).
Given the above, it is clear that trying to understand the essentials and specificity of twentieth and twenty-first century Polish musical culture without acknowledging the intricacies of musical life in communist times would be a futile endeavour. At the same time, an attempt to provide an exhaustive review and analysis of musical life during a period of forty-five years would obviously be an extremely challenging undertaking that lies beyond the scope of this work. The aim of this chapter is therefore to draw a general outline of the system standing behind the official musical activity in the discussed period in order to understand the reality female composers used to function in, as well as to recognise where the power to administrate the musical life was located. The period of the strongest political influence and censorship in music was the early phase of communism in Poland, when all the ideological foundations of the new system were laid down and following them was strictly carried out, up to the political thaw which resulted in the foundation of Warsaw Autumn Festival in 1956. From that moment on, Polish composers could experience greater artistic independence, although the ideological surveillance of the cultural life in the country remained active – even if less strict – throughout the whole communist period. For this reason, a significant space in the literature describing
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musical culture under the communist regime is usually dedicated to this initial period: the phenomenon of socialist realism in music between 1949-1956 as well as the circumstances leading to the foundation of Warsaw Autumn Festival. Consequently, the 1944-1956 period will also stand as a main focus of this chapter. Two authors, whose works turned out to be particularly useful in order to draw a thorough image of this period are Ewa Rzanna-Szczepaniak and Cynthia Bylander. The former has dedicated two publications to the issues of musical life between 1944-1956, one of them discussing the cultural policies in the country and the other one specifically devoted to the activity of Polish Composers’ Union (Rzanna-Szczepaniak has not yet covered the Union’s activity in later years with a similar work, this is why the detailed description of the Union’s General Assemblies in this chapter is provided only for those that took place up to 1956).31 The latter is the author of an extended and revealing
review of the circumstances leading to the foundation of Warsaw Autumn Festival, presented in her PhD dissertation “The Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music, 1956-1961. Its goals, structures, programs and people”.32
Another intention of this chapter is to provide a set of names, facts and figures in order to illustrate female composers’ presence in the classical music world of the period. Next to addressing the key challenges of a post-war musical life, a special emphasis will therefore be put on the presence of women in the Polish Composers’ Union and on the Warsaw Autumn Festival’s scene.
Musical life after the World War II
After the World War II the musical life in Poland required a profound reconstruction. Not only did the war bring a significant number of casualties among Polish musicians and a loss of many musical resources from the libraries and archives, but also the musical culture in general was kept from flourishing under the German occupation in order to undermine Polish sense of self as a nation.
As all the official musical institutions in the country were either closed, either transformed into German ones, the concert activity within the group of Polish musicians became very limited and a great part of musical life moved to unofficial spaces such as cafés and bars. Several underground activities were of course initiated during the war. In order to proliferate musical culture and to integrate professional musicians, a Secret Union of Musicians (Tajny Związek Muzyków) was created. Cultural awareness was also kept up through the release of
31 See: Rzanna-Szczepaniak, Działalność Związku and Rzanna-Szczepaniak, Polityka kulturalna. 32 Bylander, “The Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music”.
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underground publications, magazines and books. Moreover, the Secret Union of Musicians administrated a conspiratorial system of musical education: officially the occupant only allowed the musical education to reach the secondary level, but both in Kraków and Warsaw the Union provided illegal conservatory classes with the opportunity to obtain an academic degree in composition, conducting and performance.33 One of the Union’s important accomplishments
was also to prepare a draft project for future development of musical life in the country after the war (their plans encompassed projects concerning educational system, publishing, radio broadcasting, as well as rebuilding Opera Theatre and Concert Hall in Warsaw).
When the Red Army entered Polish territory (as it was shaped before 1939) in 1944, the Polish Committee of National Liberation (Polski Komitet Wyzwolenia Narodowego) was created in Moscow, taking control over the country (eventually, new Polish authorities approved by Stalin officially became in charge of the country in 1947, as a consequence of falsified elections). The Committee initiated actions aiming to rebuild cultural and musical life in Poland as early as in 1944, its involvement soon leading to build a full state patronage system. As a consequence, the period of 1944-1945 was a very active and intense time for musical culture in the country. By the end of 1945 the state launched nineteen music schools for kids and several professional symphonic orchestras, Polish Radio opened five regional broadcasting stations and the Polish Music Publishing House (Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne) was founded in Kraków in April 1945, followed by the foundation of Ruch muzyczny magazine (both the Polish Music Publishing House and Ruch Muzyczny still remain the key contributors to musical life in present times). Many among such initiatives were possible to undertake so quickly not only thanks to the state, but also thanks to the former planning of the Secret Union of Musicians. Here, it should be noted that in the context of a pervasive control that communist authorities took over the artistic life in Poland, one cannot overlook that their great desire to fully control all musical activity went hand in hand with a genuinely dramatic situation of the country and its people and with the musicians’ strong anticipation to finally rebuild musical life after the war. As a result, the emphasis the communist system put on the importance of culture would raise high hopes among people dedicated to music. Ewa Rzanna-Szczepaniak writes:
The fact that the state took a role of the patron of culture and art was determined by two factors: ideological – arising from the implementation of the democratisation of culture postulate (...), and practical – since in the political system built after 1945 culture had been recognised as one of the essential factors shaping social consciousness. (…) Despite a very difficult general situation, the reconstruction of musical culture in Poland in all its aspects – organisational and administrative
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(rebuilding and running institutions) as well as artistic - was proceeding fast thanks to the fact that culture in general, including music, had become a field of an immediate interest of the state.34
For this reason, despite the ambivalent status of the new political situation, the promising vision of a vivid and well-supported musical life in the country resulted in the fact that a lot of people welcomed this new system of a full state patronage with their arms wide open.35
The implementation of a new political system was obviously followed by an attempt to apply the ideological foundations of communism to the realm of music and consequently to restrict composers’ artistic freedom. As a result, between 1949 and 1956, the only acceptable aesthetics of musical composition was that of socialist realism (see Chapter 2). While it provoked a strong objection among several composers (some of them even stopped composing), many of them agreed – implicitly or explicitly - to follow the new rules for a few reasons. First, “all the objections of a theoretical or aesthetic nature were interpreted as ideological – and therefore political – acts, and consequently subjected to repression”.36 Second, some composers
accepted the belief about so-called historical necessity: “After years of war and occupation, some among the people representing culture wanted to actively participate in the process of transformation and to take action (...). Some of them also truly believed in the correctness of new cultural politics.37 Third, the subordination was often conditioned by the financial factors:
“Those who accepted the political system and the cultural politics of the party, could expect a housing allocation, publications, paid radio broadcast, concerts, travelling abroad and artistic prizes”.38
In general, the first cracks in the severe censorship system began to appear in 195439 ,
following Stalin’s death in March 1953 and heralding a general political thaw that took place in Poland in 1956, known as Gomułka’s thaw or Polish October.40 This resulted in a historically
symbolical event – the foundation of Warsaw Autumn Festival.
34 Ibid., 55.
35 Rzanna-Szczepaniak, Działalność Związku, 22-23. 36 Ibid.
37 Ibid. 38 Ibid.
39 Bylander, “The Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music”, 71-77.
40 Władysław Gomułka (1905-1982), the First Secretary of the Polish Workers’ Party between 1943-1948, later removed from the Party’s authorities and imprisoned; again the First Secretary (of the United Polish Workers’ Party) from 1956 to 1970. In the months following his election in 1956 he was implementing reforms that slightly liberalised the political regime. For this reason, the initial period of his governance is known as “Gomułka’s thaw”.
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The Polish Composers’ Union and the role of its General Assemblies
One of the most significant events for the Polish composers’ community right after the war, was the official renewal of activity of the Polish Composers’ Association in 1945 under the name of Polish Composers’ Union (Związek Kompozytorów Polskich). Ever since their first official General Assembly that took place between the 29th of August and the 1st of September 1945,
the Union has been the key institution in the country in regard to ordering, performing, publishing and promoting new music. As such, during the communist period the Union stood also as a field of influences and actions of the Ministry of Culture and Art, the two working in a very close collaboration with each other.
Part and parcel of Polish Composers Union’s activity, and a key event in the musical politics of the period, was the Union’s annual General Assembly, where composers and musicologists41 not only discussed together the desired directions of musical life’s development,
but also explicitly aspired to give it a certain shape a priori (this was especially the case during the period of strong enforcement of socialist realism between 1949-1956). It is important to note then that a significant part of classical music official life in Poland until 1956 was in fact taking place outside of concert halls, conservatories or schools. The reason was that in communist system congresses, meetings, gatherings and conferences, all of which aimed to meticulously plan and control all activity in the country, were generally considered as an exceptionally valid manner of governing the country and its people, no matter in what field. This emphasis originally came from Stalin, who believed that gatherings are crucial in order to integrate the Party and to give the answers to all people’s problems.42 Among the goals of Polish
Composers Union’s assemblies, Rzanna-Szczepaniak enumerates: 1. Formulating guidelines for the musical composition, compatible with the official political line of the Party; 2. Creating a fixed, binding description of reality and a mindset that could not be challenged (the participants of assemblies could not reject or oppose to the imposed perspective on reality – by doing so, they would risk becoming an enemy of the system in the eyes of the authorities); 3. Working as a prerequisite for composers’ presence in the musical life and their professional status (artists who wanted to actively participate in musical life were expected to attend the assemblies and to approve of political projects voted during them, otherwise they risked being vanished from the artistic scene).43
41 Initially the Union involved exclusively composers; nonetheless during the 4th General Assembly the Musicologists’ Section was created.
42 Rzanna-Szczepaniak, Polityka kulturalna, 124. 43 Rzanna-Szczepaniak, Działalność Związku, 8.
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Each of the Union’s General Assemblies between 1946 and 1955 was attended by Włodzimierz Sokorski (the Minister of Culture and Art between 1952-1956) who presented the guidelines for the artistic activity, later discussed and approved by other participants. Rzanna-Szczepaniak also reports the participation of Stefan Dybowski (former Minister of Culture and Art) in the assemblies of 1950 and 1951, as well as other politicians from the Party.44 As a
consequence, the Union’s assemblies were in fact a hybrid, a perfct intersection of political and cultural life, where musical discourse stood both as a product of and a contributor to the political regime. As the composers’ community was organised in such a way, until 1956, the prominence and position of a composer in the country was not necessarily based on the quality of their works, but rather dependent on their participation in official gatherings and the approval they did or did not receive from the Party. In other words, an active participation in the life of Polish Composers’ Union was the only possible way to influence the discourse about music and at the same time the main space for one to exist and be acknowledged as a composer. For this reason, it is the structure of this institution that should be examined in order to assess women’s contribution to the musical life.
Table 1. Female members of the Polish Composers’ Union’s Board between 1945-1989.45
The proportion between male and female members who joined Polish Composer’s Union between 1945 and 1989 is the following: forty-three female composers and two hundred and
44 Ibid., 57-71.
45 Erhardt, 50 lat Związku Kompozytorów Polskich, 17-19.
Period of holding a position in the Union’s Board
Function Grażyna Bacewicz 1947-1950 1950-1951 1955-1957 Treasurer Board member Vice president
Elżbieta Dziębowska 1973-1975 Board member
Anna Maria Klechniowska 1950-1951 Vice secretary
Zofia Lissa 1948-1950 1951-1954 1954-1955 Board member Vice president Board member
Bernadetta Matuszczak 1967-1969 Board member
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ninety-five male composers as well as seventy-five female and ninety-two male musicologists since the foundation of musicologists’ section in 1948 (for the full list of female members see Appendix 1).46 This reveals a striking gap between the number of women and men who chose
and performed the composing profession at the time (almost seven times more men than women), but also shows that the situation was substantially better among the musicologists.
Eight General Assemblies of Polish Composers’ Union took place between 1945 and 1956 and one very significant conference, which took place in Łagów Lubuski in 1949 and is known to be the official starting point for the socialist realism rule in Poland (similar conferences took places around this time, inaugurating socialist realism in film, art, architecture or literature).47
During the assemblies, chosen people presented their papers or speeches that were further a subject of discussion among all the participants. Most of the time the voice was given to the Union’s president. He presented an opening and a closing paper of an assembly. The opening paper always included “a report and an assessment of the current state of musical culture in Poland”, while the closing speech involved a summary of all the discussion during an assembly and was considered as “an official standpoint of the Polish Composers Union members in front of the touched-on issues”.48 Additionally, one or two more speeches could be presented during
an assembly. During the period between 1945-1956 no woman held the president position, but three women were members of the Union’s board: Grażyna Bacewicz, Zofia Lissa and Anna Maria Klechniowska (see Table 1). Still, only one of them presented her papers during the assemblies – Zofia Lissa did so during the fifth and the seventh General Assembly. She was also very active during the Łagów Lubuski Conference when one could clearly observe her true engagement in the issues of formalism and socialist realism.49 Interestingly, Lissa was much
more of a musicologist than she was a composer. She was considered to be one of the most prominent scholars of the period; it was also due to her initiative that the musicologists’ section was officially founded within the Polish Composers’ Union in 1948. Tracing Rzanna-Szczepaniak’s report of the eight General Assemblies, Lissa appears to have been the most influential female figure at the Union’s assemblies between 1945-1956.50 Next to her high level
of musicological expertise, the strong political dedication to Marxism as well as a great need of
46 Ludwik Erhardt, 50 lat Związku Kompozytorów Polskich (Warszawa: Związek Kompozytorów Polskich, 1995), 6-15.
The list includes a few people marked as composers and musicologists at the same time. Those people have been counted as composers in the numbers presented above.
47 Rzanna-Szczepaniak, Działalność Związku, 21. 48 Ibid., 8.
49 Ibid., 50-54.
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a musicological insight during the assemblies definitely contributed to her prominence during the period.
Between 1956 and 1989 another seventeen General Assemblies took place. The women who performed functions in the Union’s Board during this period were: Grażyna Bacewicz, Bernadetta Matuszczak, Elżbieta Dziębowska and Grażyna Pstrokońska-Nawratil (see Table 1). Again no woman was in charge of the president position.
Men Women 1945-46 7 0 1946-47 7 0 1947-48 6 1 1948-50 4 2 1950-51 7 2 1951-54 10 1 1954-55 11 1 1955-57 8 1 1957-59 9 0 1959-60 8 1 1960-63 8 1 1963-64 8 1 1964-67 10 1 1967-69 10 2 1969-71 9 0 1971-73 9 0 1973-75 8 1 1975-77 9 0 1977-79 11 0 1979-81 11 0 1981-83 10 1 1983-85 11 0 1985-87 13 0 1987-89 13 0
Total number of men / women assigned a position in the board at least once between 1945-89
70 6
Total percentage 92,10% 7,90%
Table 2. Men and women in Polish Composers’ Union’s Board between 1945-1989.51
51 Ibid.
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During the whole period of 1945-1989 seventy men and only six women were assigned a position in the Union’s Board at least once. This obviously mirrors the general disproportion between female and male members who joined the Union, but here the difference is even bigger – over eleven times more men than women were Board members throughout the whole discussed period (see Table 2.). An interesting topic to cover in further studies would certainly be to examine in details the activity of those six composers in the Union and try to assess their contribution to its functioning, as well as to generally characterise their status within the composers’ community at the time. One of them, Grażyna Bacewicz, is going to be a subject of further investigation in the following chapters of this work.
Festivals and the participation of women composers
As the political authorities attempted to thoroughly control musical life in the country, it was also their initiative to organise and run major musical events such as competitions and festivals. As a result, the festivals of contemporary classical music taking place in the country: the Warsaw Autumn Festival (starting from 1956, initially under the name of International Contemporary Music Festival), as well as its short but significant precursor, the Festival of Polish Music (it took place twice, in 1951 and 1955), became the most prominent events on the musical scene, holding a great potential to enable young composers a starting point for their career.
The first project to launch an official festival presenting the composition of contemporary composers was mentioned as early as during the Łagów Lubuski Conference in 1949. Eventually the event took place between April and December 1951 under the name of the Festival of Polish Music (Festiwal Muzyki Polskiej). It was organised by the Polish Composers’ Union together with the Ministry of Culture and Art and in reality it encompassed all musical life in the country in that period, engaging most of the cultural institutions such as Polish Radio and the General Administration of Theatres, Operas and Philharmonias.52 According to Adrian
Thomas, the Festival stood as a central musical event in the country throughout most of the year:
It began on 13 April 1951 and concluded on 13 December, with three periods of intense activity: (i) 13-27 April in Warsaw and elsewhere, including major cities such as Katowice, Kraków and Poznań;, (ii) the summer months (mainly involving small-scale and amateur events), and (iii) 30 November to 13 December in Warsaw. In fact, much of the other musical activity in Poland between May and November
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was also by implication aligned to festival events, if only as a point of comparison with the main program.53
The two main reasons behind the idea to launch such a festival were the following: first, it was organised in order to celebrate and promote the work of young Polish composers, and second, it was above all to create an event with a political resonance, reinforcing the development of socialist realism trend in music; a proliferation and a celebration of the new musical aesthetics. Eventually, the Festival’s program also involved some of the older Polish music (including Moniuszko, Chopin and others), nevertheless the emphasis was laid on contemporary works. The organisers wrote:
Our task is not only to widely popularise contemporary music, but to show its artistic heritage of which the contemporary composers are the true heirs and continuators. In this way the fight for the music of socialist realism was cast on a broad background of the historical development of the Polish tradition of realist music. (...) The goals of the Festival reach far beyond the usual demonstration of so-called "achievements". Because the chief task of the Festival is a fight for the new, socialist face of Polish music.54
Moreover, Witold Rudziński, the president of the Polish Composers’ Union, stated that “Polish composers were actively participating in the battle for socialist realism, and that the Festival would permit the evaluation of the degree to which Polish composers had advanced in that campaign”.55 It therefore seems apparent that the Festival’s organisation was clearly in line with
the propagandist cultural politics of the Party. If one takes a look at the program of the Festival, it is quite clear that the goal of celebrating socialist realism aesthetics was achieved. Many pieces written specifically for this event took the form of cantata or a mass song (very desirable by the propagators of this aesthetics), moreover the musical style of the composition drew on folklore and Polish national traditions. Even the titles of some pieces are very telling themselves:
A word about Stalin (1951) by Alfred Gradstein or Symphony of peace (1951) by Andrzej
Panufnik arouse obvious associations with political propaganda.
As far as women’s participation in the Festival of Polish Music is concerned, assessing it is challenging due to the aforementioned all-encompassing, broad and not necessarily consistent form of the Festival, which resulted in the fact that there was no concrete program. Bylander reports that during the first edition of the Festival, one hundred and ten works by thirty-eight living composers were performed in the whole country and in most cases the pieces
53 Adrian Thomas, “File 750: Composers, politics and the Festival of Polish Music (1951)”, Polish music
journal 5, No. 1 (2002), accessed July 23, 2016, http://pmc.usc.edu/PMJ/issue/5.1.02/thomasfile.html.
54 Ibid.
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were performed more than once. In other words, great number of performances of Polish music that took place anytime between April and December 1951 was considered to be part of the Festival.56 Cynthia Bylander mentions two pieces by Bacewicz performed during the Festival
in 1951: Violin Sonata No. 4 and the Second Symphony. Further research would be necessary in order to recapture all the music repertoire performed during the Festival. Still, one may risk to say that finding another female composer’s work within the Festival’s program is not highly probable given that Bacewicz was the only female composer performed during the first six editions of the Warsaw Autumn Festival (from 1956 up to 1963, when Krystyna Moszumańska-Nazar’s festival debut took place).
The second and last edition of the Festival took place four years later, between January 17th and May 20th 1955 (afterwards, its place has been taken by the Warsaw Autumn Festival).
As Bylander pointed out, the difference could be felt between the two editions. The 1955’s Festival was influenced by the general political and musical relaxation that was proceeding since Stalin’s death in 1953. While the post-festival press reviews in 1951 all focused on commenting the level of socialist realism or formalism in performed pieces, no such critique could be observed after the second edition.57 Similarly to the first edition, it is difficult to
estimate the exact festival program. First, because of the broad form it took, and second, because contemporary scholars seem to focus more on the general meaning of the Festival as a cultural and political event, rather than to thoroughly analyse its course. Bylander only generally characterises the Festival’s second edition by writing:
The Festival was similar to the one held in 1951 in that its concerts took place throughout the country, both professional and amateur ensembles from Poland were involved, and compositions by both living and deceased composers were presented (…). Of the approximately 450 compositions performed during the Festival, 320 were written by 80 living Polish composers.58
Again, among a few names of composers who were performed she does list Bacewicz.59
Nevertheless, further research is still needed in order to assess exactly which female composers (and how many of them) had their pieces performed during the Festival.
After the second edition of the Festival of Polish Music, during the Polish Composers Union’s eighth General Assembly in 1955, the decision was made within the Union to launch an international festival of contemporary music (Kazimierz Sikorski, Tadeusz Baird, Kazimierz
56 Ibid.
57 Ibid., 81-82. 58 Ibid., 84. 59 Ibid.
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Serocki, Andrzej Dobrowolski, Włodzimierz Kotoński and Stefan Jarociński are generally listed as the initiators).60 It took place for the first time in October 1956 in Warsaw (and starting
from its second edition in 1958 received the name of Warsaw Autumn Festival). It is important to emphasise that while the Festival of Polish Music was no more than a tool in the service of communist propaganda, the circumstances and potential of creating Warsaw Autumn Festival were significantly different. Its ground-breaking character was already heralded by several signs preceding its foundation: a political relaxation, first cases of critique of the socialist realism rule within the country, as well as first contacts Polish artists started to develop with the Western musical world.
The change Warsaw Autumn was bringing was truly tangible for several reasons. First of all, it had a great educational aspect, as well as an international networking potential. It was organised on a wave of a general relaxation after ten years of isolating musical scene from the Western influences. As 1956 was the time of Gomułka’s thaw61 , which resulted in a short
political liberalization of the hard communist regime in terms of political, social and cultural life, the censorship became slightly weakened, which enabled new publications or film productions not permeated by communist propaganda. Moreover (and most importantly), the 1956’s thaw resulted in a retreat from imposing socialist realism aesthetic rule both in music and visual arts.
And even before the official proclamation of socialist realism as a binding aesthetics in 1949, the repertoire in the country was composed in a very limited manner. What could be found in the programs of concerts taking place in Warsaw during the first few seasons after the war (between 1944-1949), was a very traditional nineteenth-century repertoire: Brahms, Rossini, Chopin, Moniuszko, Wieniawski. Performing twentieth-century foreign composers such as Stravinsky, Bartók, Schoenberg, Berg or Webern was particularly rare.62
As Bylander points out, only a few of the Polish composers (including Andrzej Panufnik, Witold Lutosławski, Kazimierz Serocki and the only female composer – Grażyna Bacewicz) had the opportunity to travel abroad between 1945-1949 in order to hear works by Messiaen, Stravinsky or Schoenberg. Following the decisions made during the Łagów Lubuski Conference in 1949, the international exchange presented its lowest level between 1949-1955, the period of the strictest isolation in post-war Poland, which resulted in the fact that Polish
60 Ibid., 87.
61 The factors that contributed to Gomułka’s thaw are multifold, including Stalin’s death in 1953 and the following proccess of destalinization, as well as protests and tensions inside the country.
