DIRECTOR'S REPORT:

POLISH THEMES AT AN AMERICAN CONFERENCE

by Maria Anna Harley

Soon after the Gorecki Autumn, the positive results of which exceeded my expectations (and will be summarized in a new book of essays and Gorecki's interviews given at USC), my attention shifted to Witold Lutoslawski. I had proposed a session on Lutoslawski's music for the 1997 Meeting of the American Musicological Society (Phoenix, Arizona) and my proposal was accepted. Three papers on Lutoslawski appeared in the program of this important conference, the annual gathering of music historians from the U.S., Canada, and Europe. Even more importantly, the meeting was held in association with the annual gathering of the Society for Music Theory (as it is customary every two years), so the potential audience of our session included historians, theoreticians, students of both areas, and composers.

Who was speaking, then? The first paper of the Lutoslawski and Schnebel joint AMS-SMT session was given by Prof. Adrian Thomas--whose expertise in Polish music goes far beyond Gorecki (Thomas was the Provost's Distinguished Visitor at USC's Gorecki Autumn). His paper on "Future Sketches: Lutoslawski's Jeux venitiens" was based on documents held at the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel as welll as those newly located by Prof. Thomas in the Archives of John Cage--to whom Lutoslawski offered the manuscript score of Jeux venitiens with sketch material and the original version of the piece. Prof. Thomas discussed differences between the two versions of the music. In the abstract, printed in the conference program, Thomas described the content of his paper in the following words:

Jeux venitiens (1960-1961) occupies a pivotal place in Lutoslawski's career. Lutoslawski employs his twelve-note harmonic schemes and "ad libitum" rhythmic principle substantively for the first time, and the work's structural design also anticipates many subsequent pieces. This paper investigates the new and genuinely agant-garde means with which Lutoslawski fashined his mature languge. [...] The sketches shed much light on later technical and expressive refinements. In addition, they demonstrate that melody, as well as harmony and rhythm, was an integral component of Lutoslawski's thinking even at this crucially experimental moment.

The second speaker, Dr. Martina Homma of Cologne, Germany, is currently a guest of the PMRC, working with me on a joint conference project and conducting her own research. Homma's 1995 dissertation on Witold Lutoslawski's compositional technique is based on over 10 years of research, supported by the composer with access to his scores, sketches and with interviews; her disertation received the highest academic award of the University of Cologne ("opus eximium"). I hope to see it published as a book by the Polish Music Reference Center. At the AMS-SMT Meeting, however, Homma spoke about "Sound Color and Harmony in Lutoslawski's Music." Her profound knowledge of Lutoslawski 's compositional process and musical style was obvious in her discussion of different examples where the composer used tone color and harmonic elements together to create specific tone-complexes. The paper explained the main principles behind linking color and harmony, characterized Lutoslawski's style of orchestration, illustrated the conjunction of layered instrumental color with intervallic structure as well as with rhythm and texture. Homma concluded:

The timbral-harmonic dimension of Lutoslawski's compositions is closely related to other aspects of his compositional technique, such as local harmony ("harmonia lokalna"). Its creation through a selective use of intervallic structures undergoes an evolution that may be traced chronologically throughout Lutoslawski's oeuvre.

Finally, in my presentation, "New Insights into Lutoslawski's Concept of the Sound Plane" I drew on my research conducted in the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel in the summer of 1996. I was looking through sketch material and Lutoslawski's notes for information for a completely different paper, on the use of the subjects of Death and Night in his music; this paper was presented at the Lutoslawski conference in June 1997 in Warsaw (the paper will be published in Lutoslawski Studies). While browsing through the collection of documents I found Lutoslawski's notes dating back to the late 1950s and the early 1960s about a new compositional technique, based on "sound planes" and "objects." Lutoslawski's use of French terminology (l'objet sonore), let me on a search for the sources of Lutoslawski's ideas in the writings of Pierre Schaeffer, who coined the French term. In the abstract, I wrote:

This term [i.e. the sound plane] describes musical entities with clearly delineated temporal borders and pitch-timbral content.. [...] Sketch material for Trois poemes d'Henri Michaux (1962-63) and Paroles tissees (1965) contains many instances of superimposed sound planes that intersect and permeate each other. Lutoslawski's idea of complex juxtaposition of evolving sound masses has parallels in the music of Xenakis, Penderecki, or Ligeti, and may be contrasted with the use of sonorous elements by Bacewicz and Ptaszynska. The composer, profoundly concerned with perceptual clarity, structures the sound planes in accordance with the principles of auditory scene analysis--including the phenomena of masking and auditory stream segregation. The planes located in the same registral space are differentiated by timbre, while planes of similar timbres are sharply distinguished by register, articulation, dynamics, and so on.

The short durations of each paper, including mine, did not leave time to realize everything promised in the abstract; my cuts extended to comparisons with other composers, including Bacewicz and Ptaszynska. This was, therefore, the first question of a very lively and interesting question period. The three papers created a certain whole, allowed for interactions between the speakers, and created a precedent in the history of the AMS Meetings: a session dedicated--almost in its entirety--to one contemporary Polish composer. (The fourth paper of the session, by Paul Attinello, discussed the music of a German avant-garde composer, Dieter Schnebel).

However, the Lutoslawski session was not the only Polish element on the program. As usual, there were papers on Chopin, by Halina Goldberg, of the Queen's College and Graduate Center, City University of New York and by Adriana Ponce of Brandeis University. Dr. Goldberg's presentation on "Chopin in Warsaw's Salons" drew extensively from the research for her doctoral dissertation, a pioneering study into the sociological dimension of the musical life in Warsaw. Dr. Goldberg writes in the abstract of her paper:

Much has been said about Chopin's participation in Parisian salon life, but the salons frequented by Chopin in Warsaw are given marginal mention. Yet it is in Warsaw's salons that the young Fryderyk received his social grooming, and it is here that he met may of his future Parisian hosts or made connections that opened the doors to the most respected households of European capitals. [...] The post-war Polish research emphasized the incebtedness of Chopin's music to folkore and downplayed the contribution of intelligentsia and aristocracy as representative of boureois decadence and the aristocratic abuse of wealth. Yet I have found an abundance of information about this active salon culture in diaries, letters, and journal articles. Warsaw had over forty significant salons, and direct evidence of Chopin's musical presence can be established in most of them. These salons were just as splendid and socially refined as their countepart in Paris or Vienna, and they sought the same lvel of intellectual and artistic experiences. The picture that now unfolds contradicts the accepted image of Warsaw asa cultural backwater and instead restores the Polish capital to its European status."

Finally, the the very last presentation of the AMS-SMT Meeting, Dr. Adriana Ponce discussed "Chopin's Ballades: A Romantic Representation of Form and Time." The paper proposed a new interpretation of the form of these works "in terms of a process resembling a conic spiral" on the basis of Chopin's "idiosyncratic process of thematic recurrence together with a conspisuous delay of any high-level structural dominants in Chopin's first, third and fourth Ballades." In contrast to the four papers summarized above, Dr. Ponce's study did not rely on newly accessible source materials (sketches, documents) but on a revised interpretation of form in Chopin's music, cast in new theoretical terms.

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Copyright 1997 by the Polish Music Reference Center
Send your comments and inquiries to: polmusic@usc.edu

Newsletter Editor: Wanda Wilk.
Formatting by M. A. Harley, 3 November 1997