„Łzy lejąca” w arcydziełach muzyki polskiej XX wieku

„Mother weeping” in the masterpieces of Polish music of the 20th century The theme of the sorrowful mother has been present in music for centuries. The medieval sequence Stabat mater dolorosa brought many excellent interpretations. As far as the music of Polish composers in the 20th century is concerned, the first name to be mentioned is Karol Szymanowski and his masterpiece: Stabat Mater, Op. 53 (1926). This work, using a text in Polish and referring to folklore, set one direction for the interpretation of the theme of the sorrowful mother in the Polish music of the last century. It was continued by Andrzej Panufnik in his touching interpretation of Gorzkie żale in the suite Hommage à Chopin for voice and piano (1949), and particularly Henryk Mikołaj Górecki in his Symphony of Sorrowful Songs (1976). The second line is marked by compositions referring to the Latin tradition, with no clear references to Polish themes – such as Stabat Mater by Roman Padlewski (1939) and Stabat Mater by Krzysztof Penderecki (1962). The article outlines both lines of interpretation of the “Mother weeping” motif in the works of Polish composers of the 20th century on the example of the above-mentioned masterpieces of Polish musical culture of the last century. Abstrakt Motyw Matki Bolesnej obecny jest w muzyce od wieków. Średniowieczna sekwencja Stabat Mater dolorosa przyniosła wiele znakomitych interpretacji. Jeśli chodzi o muzykę polską XX wieku, w pierwszej kolejności należy tu przywołać nazwisko Karola Szymanowskiego i jego arcydzieło Stabat Mater op. 53. Utwór ten, wykorzystujący tekst w języku polskim oraz odwołujący się do ludowości, wyznaczył jeden kierunek interpretacji motywu Matki Bolesnej w muzyce polskiej ubiegłego stulecia. Nawiązał do niego m.in. Andrzej Panufnik w niebanalnej interpretacji Gorzkich żali w suicie Hommage à Chopin na głos i fortepian, a przede wszystkim Henryk Mikołaj Górecki w Symfonii pieśni żałosnych. Drugą linię interpretacyjną wyznaczają kompozycje utrzymane w tradycji łacińskiej, bez wyraźnych odniesień do wątków polskich – jak Stabat Mater Romana Padlewskiego i Stabat Mater Krzysztofa Pendereckiego. Artykuł przybliża obie linie interpretacyjne motywu „łzy lejącej” w twórczości kompozytorów polskich XX wieku na przykładzie przywołanych wyżej arcydzieł polskiej kultury muzycznej ubiegłego stulecia.

Le influenze italiane in Karol Szymanowski

Like many other artists, Szymanowski was hugely attracted to Italy. In this article, I will briefly expose, firstly, the “Italian” tracks that can be found in the Polish composer’s music, and, secondly, the declarations on Italy in Szymanowski’s writings, in particular on his art and music, trying to relate these elements between them to see what image of Italian culture emerges. I will show how Szymanowski’s cultural environment remains German-based nevertheless looking for the lost unity between man, art and nature in the heritage of the Italian Renaissance.

Fairbairnian approaches to King Roger , the opera by Karol Szymanowski

In what follows I will develop an account of Fairbairn's object relations theory as I have understood and developed it, and, apply that theory to an understanding of the threeact opera King Roger, Op. 26 (1926) by Karol Szymanowski. My Fairbairnian approaches to the opera come from my previous work on Fairbairn's object relations theory. In order to fully understand the first of the approaches I employ you may need to read my book Personal Relations Theory (Clarke, 2006), in particular chapters one, five, and six. In order to fully understand the second of the approaches I am using you need to read Thinking Through Fairbairn (Clarke, 2018a), in particular chapters two, three, and four, as well as my paper in the journal Attachment (Clarke, 2018b) on MPD/DID and Fernando Pessoa's heteronyms.

Karol Szymanowski’s Dominant Drive Model and the Excess of the Cycle

The chapter explores several songs by Karol Szymanowski that demonstrate the explicit rotation of a T→S→D substitution model in relatively strict terms. These songs also reflect on the theme of desire as a circular driving force. The chapter then examines Szymanowski’s symphonic music, specifically the third symphony, “Song of the Night” Op. 29, whose sonorities spread their tensions out in many directions. To visually re-create this, the chapter employs a method called “drive analysis,” which represents triads as triangles and tetrads as squares, each with tailored corners to represent the raising or lowering of pitches. When placed on a graph whose y-axis unfolds the circle of descending fifths and whose x-axis represents the flow of time, various patterns emerge that unlock new hearings of a work whose harmonic “momentum” could otherwise be considered static.

Microtonal Restraint

This article proposes that the beginnings of twentieth-century microtonal music and thinking were shaped more by restraint in composers’ thinking than by a full embrace of the principle of ‘progress for progress’s sake’. Pioneering microtonal composers such as Ferruccio Busoni, Julián Carrillo, John Foulds, Alois Hába, Charles Ives and Richard Stein constitute an international group of breakaway modernists, whose music and writings suggest four tropes characterizing this first-generation microtonal music: the rediscovery of a microtonal past, the preservation of tonality, the refinement of tonality and the exercise of restraint. The article traces these tropes of early twentieth-century microtonal experiment in works by Carrillo, Foulds, Hába, Ives and Stein with reference to writings and music by Busoni, Nikolay Kul′bin, Harry Partch, Karol Szymanowski and Ivan Vyschnegradsky. It adds to the growing scholarship about early twentieth-century tonally based aesthetics and techniques, and broadens perspectives on the history of twentieth-century microtonal music.

Karol Szymanowski and multiculturalism

Background. The problem of self-determination of an artist who apprehends oneself as a representative of a certain nation, but is forced to selfactualize in the cultural space of a multinational empire, remained relevant for a long period for the majority of representatives of the Polish creative intelligentsia. Among them, it is appropriate to recall, in first, Karol Szymanowski, whose creative development took place in a multicultural environment. The outstanding musician was feeling his involvement not only in the European tradition in general, but also in the Antique, Eastern, Polish, Russian, and, especially, Ukrainian culture, because his life for 36 years was related with Ukraine. The temporal distance that has formed between the eras, the changes in cultural paradigms that have now taken place, encourage us to rethink the approaches to the various cultural-creating activities of artists in past eras, to evaluate them from modern positions. If we consider multiculturalism in a positive sense – as a phenomenon of social life characterized by coexistence and active interaction within one society of many cultures, then the analysis of Szymanowski’s creative evolution in this context looks relevant for modern cultural figures. At the same time, in Ukraine, there has not yet been a steady interest of scientists in the work by K. Szymanowski, although certain steps are being taken in this direction: PhD theses by Anatolii Kalynychenko, Hanna Seredenko, Oleksandr Serdiuk, Dmitriy Poliachok have appeared that explore some aspects of the Polish artist’s creativity, taking into account modern methodological tools. An important function of stimulating interest in the creative figure of Szymanowski is performed, in particular, by the “Kropyvnytskyi Museum of Musical Culture named after K. Szymanowski” (headed by Olexandr Polyachok) that initiates various projects related to the popularization of Shimanovsky’s creative heritage, including holding scientific conferences and publishing. A significant contribution to the study of various aspects of the K. Szymanowski’s creative activity was made by Polish scientists, in particular, Malgorzata Komorowska, Zofia Helman, Teresa Chilińska, but their works are in a greater degree focused on the analysis of the musician’s creativity in the Polish cultural context. Objectives of the study. This article is destined to examine the creative personality of the Polish artist in a new problematic field. The purpose of the study is to identify the features of the creative formation and growth of K. Szymanowski in the context of multiculturalism. The object of analysis is the creative activity of K. Szymanowski; the subject, on which the attention is focused, is the peculiarities of cultural and creative attitudes formation, the principles of artistic activity, the means of cultural communication of K. Szymanowski in the conditions of multiculturalism. Research results. The scientific novelty of the research consists in the identification of little-known facts of the creative biography of K. Szymanowski and their new interpretation, the formation of new ideas about the specifics of his creative approaches both in composing and literary work. The important role of self-education in his creative development, the ability for self-development, conscious cultural pluralism formed in the context of multicultural conditions, a tendency to innovate (for example, intense interest in new artistic and stylistic trends) are emphasized. Attention is drawn to the originality of Szymanowski’s relationships with various cultural environments, with which he was closely linked by fate. After all, his formation as a personality took place under the influence of several cultures, the features of which were intertwined, coexisting in the everyday life of his family estate in the Ukrainian village Timoshivka and Elisavetgrad, the city of his childhood and youth. The significant influence of regular visits to European cultural centers and travels to the countries of the Arab East on the formation of the cultural identity of the artist is also noted. The analysis of archival materials, in particular, comments in the margins of the pages of books from the family library, showed the enormous influence of literary texts on the composer’s cultural identity. Szymanowski carefully read, thought over and discussed with his close ones literary works, various works of philosophers and art historians. Szymanowski’s archives contain notes on the history of art of Ancient Greece in French, the history of the culture of Ancient Rome in German and Russian, extracts from the history of the origins of Christianity, the culture of Sicily and the life of King Roger II, notes from the letters by Seneca, Leonardo da Vinci, Machiavelli, works of Novalis, studies on oriental culture, etc. The composer was fascinated by the ideas of the synthesis of cultures (Ancient Greek, Ancient Roman, Byzantine, Arabic, Proto-Slavic), of religious syncretism in various forms (Christian modernism, paneroticism, etc.). Embodying his creative intentions, Szymanowski went through a fascination with a wide variety of aesthetic ideas. In the process of realizing artistic synthesis, along with the idea of cultural syncretism, signs of aesthetics of romanticism and impressionism, symbolism and modernism, expressionism and neo-folkloric trend often coexisted and intersected in his works. As a conclusion, we note: the creative formation and evolution of K. Szymanowski took place in multicultural conditions. Realizing himself a descendant of the Polish gentry family, he was at the same time a citizen of the Russian Empire and was formed as a person under the influence of many cultures, which were intricately intertwined in the space where the formation of his individuality took place, which, eventually, determined the multicultural profile of his artistic work. Szymanowski’s cultural positioning we propose to consider, to a certain extent, according to the formula: “one of our own among strangers, a stranger among our own”, because his creative searches, in which the polylogue of cultures acquired signs of multiculturalism, were not always perceived adequately by his contemporaries, especially in those cultural centers, where the traditional values of the national culture were considered priority. The artistic, aesthetic and cultural paradigms of the 21st century turn out to be largely consonant with those that determined the creative preferences of the Polish artist, which leads to the actualization of the creativity of the latter in the conditions of the dominance of the postmodern situation in the contemporary cultural space.

Examining Keyboard Bitonality in the Middle-Period Music of Karol Szymanowski

A characteristic technique of Karol Szymanowski’s middle-period style (1914–18) is “keyboard bitonality”: the juxtaposition of the black-key pentatonic and white-key diatonic scales. To explore Szymanowski’s treatment of keyboard bitonality, I introduce the scalar alignment network, a biscalar landscape of all possible pairings of black- and white-key pitch classes that highlights the effects of a particular alignment, such as the resultant pitch-class pairings and intervallic patterns. To accomplish this, I employ a variety of transformational tools, including diatonic transpositions, Julian Hook’s (2007) interscalar transformations, and what I call SHIFT transformations. Analyzed works include: Masks (1916), Métopes (1915), Myths (1915), Twelve Etudes (Op. 33, 1916), and Violin Concerto No. 1 (1916).

Mieczysław Tomaszewski. Muzykolog wolny, niezależny i zaangażowany

The article discusses the culture-creating activities of Mieczysław Tomaszewski (1921–2019) at the Polish Music Publishing House and within the context of Musical Encounters at Baranów Sando- mierski (1976–1981). The text is mainly concerned with Tomasze-wski’s publications relating to twentieth-century Polish composers: Karol Szymanowski, Witold Lutosławski, Krzysztof Penderecki and Henryk Mikołaj Górecki. The reflections of the Polish musicologist are closely entwined with the theoretical conceptions developed by himself: the conception of Wort-Ton, the method of integral interpre-tation of a musical work, the conception of nodal points in the lives of composers, or intertextuality in music. Applying these conceptions allowed him to describe Polish twentieth-century compositions at different levels and in different contexts: beginning with a synthetic periodisation of creative development, up to masterly analyses and interpretations of individual works that take into consideration their intertextual references. The Polish musicologist also paid careful at-tention to composers’ statements testifying to their original views and inner transformations. The problem of freedom was of particular im-portance to him, both in its personal, artistic aspect and in its histor-ical dimension. Tomaszewski as a person reveals himself throughout his activities as someone both free and committed.