Krzysztof Knittel's chamber opera and Agnieszka Stulgińska's music theatre: Examples of a new syncretistic medium in contemporary Polish music

Abstract

This essay analyses and interprets the scores, recordings, and media used in Knittel and King's The Heart Piece - Double Opera (1999) and Stulgińska's Three Women for three women and ten instruments (2017), two semi-improvised Polish operas using performance art and interaction between sound, text, choreography, lighting, theatrical form and electronic medium. In Stuglińska's modern music theatre, the listener follows different sound sources and the setting: choreography, performers' and speakers' arrangement on stage, props and lighting, whose intensity dictates the form. The Heart Piece chamber opera is a two - Polish and American - composers' take on Müller's play Herzstück, with separate movements in their native languages. Music and text create an interactive setting, and their notation and semantics make music both seen and heard. These works use the concept of hybridization and, in Wolf's terminology, intracompositional intermediality, where different means of expression create an intermedial discourse, a complementary whole and a new syncretistic medium.

Keywords

• intermediality
• intertextuality
• live performance
• contemporary polish music
• modern musical theatre and opera