Художественная культура (Dec 2023)
The Warsaw Autumn International Music Festival — Overcoming the Boundaries between East and West
Abstract
In the late 1940s — early 1950s, a huge gap appeared between the development of musical cultures of Western and Eastern Europe, and it was Poland that initiated bridging it. Therefore, the emergence of the Warsaw Autumn Festival of contemporary music, which has become the largest, was not coincidental. The article is devoted to studying this cultural phenomenon, which has a significant scientific novelty, because the Warsaw Autumn has not yet been subjected to a detailed scientific analysis in Russian musicology. According to the organizers of the new festival — young Polish composers Tadeusz Baird and Kazimierz Serocki, — Warsaw was to become a center of contemporary music, no less important than the avant-garde music festivals in Darmstadt, Donaueschingen, Cologne or Milan. However, the purpose of the Warsaw Autumn is more ambitious — to provide a complete aesthetic and stylistic picture of modern music, and not just avant-garde music, as was the case in Western European countries. The repertoire policy of the festival covered several areas: avantgarde music, more traditional music, the classics of the 20th century, and promotion of Polish music. The festival laid claim to being a reliable display of contemporary music in the world, reacted to the changes in global music, and soon became the largest music arena of the 20th century. It was attended by the most prominent composers of the East and West. For the socialist countries, it became a true “window on Europe” and a platform for mastering new techniques of composition. Without the Warsaw Autumn festival and its profound influence on composers of socialist countries, it would be utterly impossible to imagine the development of musical art of the entire region. This article suggests focusing on the early period of the festival, from 1956 (when it was established) to the early 1980s.
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