Beyond Borders: Internationalism and Migration in Polish Concert Music of the Twentieth Century

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel examines how Polish music as a cultural category has been shaped by international institutions, composers who crossed borders, and Polish musicians living outside of Poland. After the regaining of Polish independence in 1918, Polish composers often saw international accolades as crucial to establishing legitimacy for their chosen artform and pursued a variety of institutional and creative pathways for integrating themselves into broader, Europe-wide movements. At this time, Polish activity flourished in the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM), an organization of modernist composers whose main task was to organize an annual peripatetic festival that put on display the latest trends in composition. By the middle of the century, internationalism was increasingly underwritten by the significant number of Polish composers living abroad, who had fled during World War II or during the establishment of communist rule after the war. These emigre composers played multiple roles in the postwar period: on the one hand, they created a deep network of contacts on which composers remaining in Poland regularly drew, but on the other, they found their own places within various national canons under question. We seek to better understand the nature of these cross-border contacts, and to examine the institutions that helped to underwrite them, with the aim of rethinking the default framing around national borders through which the history of music in Poland has been traditionally relayed.

Sub Unit

• Arts II: Music, Theater, Performance Studies

Chair

• Beata Boleslawska, Inst of Art PAS (Poland)

Papers

• Poland's Presence at ISCM Festivals in the Interwar Period - Jolanta Guzy-Pasiak, Inst of Art PAS (Poland)

• On the Road to Internationalization: The Activity of the Polish Section of ISCM - Beata Boleslawska, Inst of Art PAS (Poland)

• Chopin Diplomacy in Mid-Century Poland - Mackenzie Pierce, U of Michigan

Discussant

• Kevin Bartig, Michigan State U