Monika Pasiecznik
Women’s Voices in 20th- and 21st-century Polish Music
The average share of female composers at contemporary music festivals around the world today does not exceed 20%. Some say that the figures reflect the actual proportions between women and men composers. It is difficult, however, not to consider them as disproportionate. The largest festivals are declaring their willingness to change the status quo and promising to take a closer look at the music of women composers.
The Polish School
For decades in the 20th century, the only well-known woman in Polish music was composer and violinist Grażyna Bacewicz (1909–1969). Her career was extraordinary in times of limited women’s rights in Poland, especially in the area of access to education and public office. Born into a relatively wealthy Polish-Lithuanian family of musicians, Bacewicz received support for her musical interests. After graduating from the State Conservatory of Music in Warsaw, starting in 1932, she continued her studies in Paris with Nadia Boulanger. French Neoclassicism became her own musical language.
Under Communism, equal gender rights became an important political goal and propaganda slogan. Despite deep social transformations, composing women still evoked distrust and created a sensation, as is attested by the words of Stefan Kisielewski, a composer and critic who rated Bacewicz’s music highly. In 1948, he wrote about her Concerto for String Orchestra: ‘Here, we have finally felt a ‘red-blooded piece’ of healthy and tasty music, written with truly masculine creative potency.’
In 1966, Bacewicz became the world’s first female professor of composition at the State Music College in Warsaw. Aside from composing and concertizing, she also held important public office – among other things, for many years she was vice-president of the Polish Composers’ Union.
When the musical avant-garde began to slowly return to favor after the death of Stalin, a group of composers known today around the world as ‘the Polish School’ appeared. In their works from the 1960s, Krzysztof Penderecki, Henryk Mikołaj Górecki, Witold Szalonek and Kazimierz Serocki focused on pure sound, developing a new style of Polish contemporary music: Sonorism. Though Bacewicz initially attempted to join this movement, in the end she remained a Neoclassicist. Meanwhile, Krystyna Moszumańska-Nazar (1924–2008), a generation younger than Bacewicz, appeared on the music scene.
Associated with Kraków, she quickly joined the sound experiment movement, particularly enjoying composition for percussion. How faithful she remained to this instrument is attested by her Concerto for Percussion and Symphonic Orchestra from 1998, in which – alongside the soloist’s extraordinarily rich instrumentation – we have additionally two equally expanded percussion sections in the orchestra. The composer was also esteemed as a teacher: hired in 1963 in Kraków as an assistant to Bolesław Woytowicz, from 1970 onward she taught composition independently. Climbing the academic career ladder, in 1987 she became rector – the third woman to hold this post at the Kraków conservatory, after Stefania Łobaczewska and Eugenia Umińska.
In subsequent decades, more and more women emerged onto the new music scene.
The prematurely-deceased Barbara Buczek (1940–1993) was not only an uncompromising composer, but also a pianist and doctor of philosophy. She gave herself over passionately to delving into the possibilities of music, writing dense and extraordinarily complex works, an example of which is Primus Inter Pares (1985) for 7 instruments.
Marta Ptaszyńska (b. 1943), a composer and percussionist, has been expanding the repertoire for her instrument for years. Her Concerto for Marimba and Orchestra (1985) won a prize at the International Composers Competition in New York. Since 1998, Ptaszyńska has been a professor of composition at the University of Chicago.
In the 1970s, the first generation of composers formally trained in electronic music appeared in Poland. Among them was Elżbieta Sikora (b. 1943), who first completed a degree in sound engineering in Warsaw, then left for Paris in 1968 for postgraduate study at the GRM studio under Pierre Schaeffer and François Bayle. Only after returning to Warsaw in 1970 did she obtain a diploma in composition. In 1971, when she began working at the Polish Radio Experimental Studio, she already had to her credit an electronic work entitled Prénom, realized in France (1970; a new version is entitled Flashback). The SEPR’s modern equipment encouraged Sikora to experiment with sound synthesis, oscillators, Moog and EMS synthesizers etc.
In 1973, Elżbieta Sikora – together with friends of hers from the conservatory, Krzysztof Knittel and Wojciech Michniewski – founded the KEW artistic group, which was the first in Poland to utilize live electronics. Musique concrète, composed from processed recordings and instilled during her two years of postgraduate with Schaeffer and Bayle, remained at the center of Sikora’s interests, though later she also tried out other techniques. At Paris’ IRCAM studio, she composed La tete d’Orphée II (1981–1982) for flute and electronics, which she realized using a 4X digital processor, Buchl synthesizer and PDP-10 computer. This was her first work for instrument with electronics, but also the beginnings of her work with a computer (which was at the time the size of a wardrobe).
Experience gained at the GRM and SEPR opened the door for Sikora to yet other international electroacoustic music centers, such as IMEB Bourges, CCRMA Stanford and TU Berlin. She was showered with awards: in 1980, Sikora won prizes at an electroacoustic music competition in Bourges for two works for tape: The Waste Land (1979) and Lettres à M. (1980). In 1985, she became a professor at the Conservatory in Angoulême. In recent years, she has directed the Musica Electronica Nova international biennale in Wrocław.
The studio at the Academy of Music in Poznań has been led for many years by Lidia Zielińska (b. 1953), one of the pioneers of electroacoustic composition in Poland, who has worked at, among other places, the SEPR, IPEM/BRT in Ghent, EMS in Stockholm, ZKM in Karlsruhe and IMEB in Bourges. Her electronic compositions Like These White Mice (1996) and Too Many Words (2001) won prizes in Bourges and Stockholm. Zielińska’s artistic interests focus on experimental and multimedia forms. The composer enjoys collaborating with artists from other arts, and is involved in sound ecology. Aside from composing and teaching, Zielińska is engaged in musical life. For three years, she was artistic director of the Poznań Spring Music Festival; for twelve years, she was active on the program committee of Warsaw Autumn. She has also represented the Polish Electroacoustic Music Society and sat on the board of the Polish Composers’ Union.
Women Professors and Directors
Up until the 1970s, the SEPR was the only professional electroacoustic music studio in Poland. Since then, new electronic music centers have begun to spring up at the music academies in Kraków, Warsaw, Łódź, Wrocław and Katowice. Though they fulfill above all a didactic purpose, they are also involved in artistic endeavors and organize concerts.
From 1971 until recently, Grażyna Pstrokońska-Nawratil (b. 1947), a superb composer and one of the most esteemed teachers, led her own composition studio in Wrocław. After completing her degree in Wrocław, she received a scholarship for further training in France, where she studied under Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Boulez and Iannis Xenakis. Though she also did postgraduate study at an experimental studio in Marseille, electronic music was not the object of her direct interest. Pstrokońska is esteemed as a composer of works for orchestra, for instance her Frescoes cycle, which is characterized by refined harmony and colorful orchestration.
Women Émigrés
Hanna Kulenty (b. 1961) says that her music is ‘European trance music’. Having completed her degree at the Warsaw Academy of Music, the composer left for Holland in 1986 and became permanently associated with this country. She debuted in the mid-1980s with works in a Sonorist spirit, only to work out her own recognizable Post-Minimalist style in the next decade. ‘Arch polyphony’ and ‘time dimension polyphony’ are Kulenty’s original compositional techniques which have permitted her to create an array of instrumental concerti, including the Concerto for Trumpet and Orchestra (2002).
Much as for Hanna Kulety, new Dutch music remains the most important point of reference, for Swiss resident Bettina Skrzypczak (b. 1963), it is new German music. The composer contends that the purpose of art is change and the search for new emotional and intellectual experiences. She enjoys exploring the spaces of the unconscious – as in the composition Miroirs (2000) for mezzo-soprano and chamber ensemble. Since 1995, Skrzypczak has been teaching at the Music College in Lucerne.