Lisa Cooper Vest on Defining Avant-Gardism in Postwar Poland
Join us for the first lecture of the 2019–2020 UCI Musicology Guest Lectures series. Lisa Cooper Vest will speak on Bogusław Schäffer vs. the Polish Composers’ Union: Defining Avant-Gardism in Postwar Poland, Thursday Oct. 10 at 4pm in the CAC thrid floor colloquium room.
In 1962, The Polish Composers’ Union intervened when composer Bogusław Schäffer accused his colleagues Henryk Mikołaj Górecki and Tadeusz Baird of plagiarizing compositional techniques from his Concerto per sei i tre (1960). The Union’s Governing Committee referred the matter to its internal Colleagues’ Tribunal, which eventually determined that no plagiarism had occurred and required Schäffer to retract his accusations. This strange episode in the careers of three major composers might easily be dismissed as a case of petty professional jealousy, but, in fact, it underscores larger shifts that were taking place in Polish aesthetic discourse related to definitions of progress and avant-gardism in music.
In this paper, I trace Bogusław Schäffer’s early career in order to understand the significance of these discourses in shaping the Polish avant-garde school of the early 1960s. At the beginning of the political Thaw, in the mid-1950s, Schaeffer’s swift engagement with Western European techniques established him as an enfant terrible, a notorious prophet of the new. When critics began to praise composers such as Krzysztof Penderecki and Henry Mikołaj Górecki as avant-garde leaders in the early 1960s, however, it was clear that they also were also rejecting Schaeffer’s mapping of newness and innovation upon the relentless forward progression of calendar time. Instead, in defining Polish avant-gardism, critics and composers envisioned the new as a flexibly qualitative rather than strictly chronological designation, and they praised music that built connections backwards to national traditions and outwards to international contemporary music worlds. In Schäffer’s case, this (re)definition of newness disenfranchised him; he refused to participate in a Polish avant-garde school conceived as a manifestation of a longer national tradition, and, in so doing, he fell out of the school entirely. Ultimately, Schäffer’s case may allow us to pose important questions about the political and cultural work that discourses of avant-gardism were able to do in postwar Poland, and about the ramifications of those discourses in constructing canons and music-historical narratives.
Lisa Cooper Vest is a musicologist whose work is focused on the aesthetic and political contexts of the post-WWII Polish musical avant-garde. Her work is situated within the field of Cold War studies, as she considers the effects of political ideologies upon musical culture and its meanings. Vest is particularly interested in the complicated power relationships that animated the field of cultural production in communist Bloc nations, and the ways in which artists and intellectuals were able to wield the promise of progress in order to generate consensus across generational, political, and aesthetic divides. Her research on these topics also informs her approach in the classroom, where she encourages her students to think about how music has affected (and is currently affecting) political discourse, and also how music functions as political discourse, shaping perceptions of such fundamental concepts as nation, gender, class, and race.
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