From Warsaw to the World

Chapter 4 details the structural arrangements that facilitated foreign travel to the Warsaw Autumn. It focuses on the non-performers who went to Poland to hear the festival concerts, either as invited special guests or as tourists. The chapter argues that these travelers’ journeys contributed to the circulation of information, ideas, values, financial assets, and objects that took place via the Warsaw Autumn; consequently, their journeys enabled the festival’s effects to extend far beyond Poland. Moreover, the festival’s foreign travelers served an economic function, in that they allowed composers and other players to mobilize resources, accumulate prestige, access new distribution channels, and expand their personal and professional networks. Drawing on work by Stephen Greenblatt as well as Steven Vertovec, this chapter introduces the themes of literal versus metaphorical mobility, and international versus transnational forms of cross-border contact, that will be important throughout the second half of the book.

Introduction

The introduction presents the book’s primary themes and concepts: music and the Cold War, the roles institutions and networks have played in shaping musical practices, Stephen Greenblatt’s model of cultural mobility, and Howard Becker’s model of the art world. It gives relevant background information on the history of new music institutions in the twentieth century, as well as a concise account of the development of state socialism in postwar Poland. It also provides an overview of the book’s structure as well as brief summaries of the chapters. The introduction explains that book’s first half examines the festival’s organization and reception in Poland, whereas the latter half explores the Warsaw Autumn’s worldwide ramifications.

The Limits of Exchange

By way of a case study of the 1968 Warsaw Autumn/ISCM Festival, chapter 6 revisits the question of what it meant for a music institution in socialist Poland to be international as well as contemporary. The chapter shows that transnational bonds were put to the test in 1968, when the Warsaw Autumn co-hosted the ISCM Festival in the wake of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. On the one hand, the co-hosting arrangement was a sign of the Warsaw Autumn’s successful integration into border-spanning new music networks. However, this integration only went so far: a significant number of the festival’s Western performers boycotted to protest Poland’s military involvement in the Prague Spring’s suppression. Through an investigation of these problems, the chapter argues that the joint Warsaw Autumn/ISCM festival demonstrated both the limits and the potential of 1960s transnationalism.

A Raucous Education

Chapter 3 considers the effects that festival performances had on Warsaw Autumn audiences, as well the work these audiences performed through their listening practices. Public response was what demonstrated the Warsaw Autumn’s legitimacy as a socialist education project. Concertgoers’ uninhibited behaviors had additional meaning as forms of political action and strategies to accrue social and cultural prestige. Drawing on political scientist Michael Chwe’s theory of common knowledge formation, the chapter further argues that scandals were an important aspect of public education and taste formation at the Warsaw Autumn. The public contributed to the genre-making that took place via festival events, for their concert-hall behavior suggested that, in addition to various compositional styles and techniques, “contemporary music” entailed certain modes of audience response.

Building an Empty Frame

Chapter 2 argues that self-conscious pluralism enabled festival advocates to negotiate a secure institutional position during a period of cultural retrenchment that began in Poland in the late 1950s. This approach to concert programming developed behind the scenes, during planning meetings in which Warsaw Autumn organizers selected repertoire, grouped works and composers into stylistic and geopolitical categories, and determined of what the festival should consist. Equally important were the maneuvers that took place in printed discourse, wherein critics and other commentators positioned the Warsaw Autumn as an empty frame—that is, a neutral zone in an otherwise polarized world of new music performance. The chapter contends that these negotiations were necessary because, despite rhetoric to the contrary, few observers thought the Warsaw Autumn was truly objective.

Epilogue

The epilogue begins with a concise overview of the aesthetic, political, and economic shifts that have affected the festival since 1968. It then considers how “new music” is being defined and disseminated at the Warsaw Autumn today. The epilogue demonstrates that, although the old East-West divisions no longer apply in post-socialist Poland, new music at the Warsaw Autumn continues to be defined relationally. Some of these connections are with the present: festival organizers are increasingly willing to admit links between new music, society, and politics. Other relationships are with the past: the Warsaw Autumn is actively engaged in a self-reflexive exploration of its own history. The festival also continues to define contemporary music by what it is not: its marketing strategies and programming maintain a clear division between elite conceptions of new music and commercialized forms of popular culture.

Mobilizing Performers, Scores, and Avant-Gardes

This chapter details festival organizers’ efforts to seek out the latest avant-garde musical trends in the 1960s and provide a stage for them in Poland. It shows how this process differed depending on whether the desired performers and compositions were from East or West, official or unofficial, or émigrés from the Eastern Bloc. The chapter argues that performances of avant-garde music at the Warsaw Autumn promoted the formation of cross-border cultural ties that were based on shared aesthetic values of sonic exploration and ongoing technical innovation. These transnational connections destabilized presumptive hierarchies of cultural influence within the Soviet sphere and mitigated Cold War divisions. At the same time, the festival’s organizational procedures reinforced nation-state and geopolitical borders by attaching musicians and musical works to singular, specific points of origin.

The Sounds of Revolution?

This chapter makes a case study of the Warsaw Autumn’s founding and first season. It argues that the 1956 concerts, which coincided with the political upheaval of the Polish October Revolution, offered a first answer to the question of what it would mean for a music festival in socialist Poland to be “contemporary” as well as “international” during the Thaw. As they crafted the 1956 Warsaw Autumn, festival participants were constructing an institutional paradigm that still depended on interwar patterns of cultural contact and Stalinist-era practices of state investment in the arts, but also transformed the art world in which elite Polish composers worked. The moves the Warsaw Autumn’s first participants made not only reflected what was possible in mid-1950s Poland: these actions also created a framework for the future.