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Female Composers, Gender and Politics in Communist Poland

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Female Composers, Gender and Politics in Communist Poland Marta Beszterda Department of Arts & Culture Female composers, gender and politics in communist Poland Master’s thesis supervised by dr Rutger Helmers Second reader: dr Maarten Beirens 2016 Contents Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 1 Chapter 1. Musical life in communist Poland .......................................................................... 12 Chapter 2. Communist ideology and the gender of composers ................................................ 28 Chapter 3. Polish female composers’ lives and careers during communist times ................... 42 Conclusion. The ambivalence of communist regime’s impact and its consequences .............. 64 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................. 68 Figures ...................................................................................................................................... 72 Appendix 1 ............................................................................................................................... 73 Appendix 2 ............................................................................................................................... 76 Appendix 3 ............................................................................................................................... 78 Acknowledgments I would like to thank the following people and institutions who have helped in many ways with the completion of this work. First and foremost, I express my gratitude to the members of Musicology Department. I would like to thank dr Rutger Helmers for his supervision, engagement, an inspiring working atmosphere, but above all for trusting in my original idea for this project. I would also like to thank dr Maarten Beirens, as the second reader, for his time and contribution to evaluating this work. Moreover, I owe a special word of thanks to dr Barbara Titus for her exceptionally inspiring classes and for instilling in me a passion for the cultural study of music. I also thank dr Conny Roggebond from the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences for her invaluable insights and support during the initial phase of this research. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the composers: Hanna Kulenty, Elżbieta Sikora and Lidia Zielińska for their participation in this project and the will to share their memories and opinions. I also thank Danuta Gwizdalanka and dr Karolina Kizińska for our Skype conversations early this year that inspired me to carry on my research on gender in Polish music history. I would like to thank the Library of Academy of Music in Poznań, whose staff have been particularly kind and helpful during my research. I am also grateful to Poznań University Library and the Library of the Musicology Institute at the University of Warsaw. I also thank Natalia Surma-Filipowska for providing a professional revision of my translations of the interviews run in Polish. Finally, I would like to thank my Parents, without whom this work could never have come into existence, as well as my whole family, Polish and Dutch, for their love and unfailing support. And to my dearest friends, wholehearted thanks for standing by me during the ups and downs of the process of realising another dream. Introduction This work focuses on the position of female composers in Poland between 1945 and 1989. Its goal is to understand how the situation of composing women as well as the discourse on composers’ gender presented itself during the communist times. The problem centres around an interplay between the political regime, the musical life in Poland, the lives and careers of Polish female composers and the problem of gender in classical music realm. Such a focus might seem very narrow and very broad at the same time. Narrow, because I choose a very specific scope where a particular political regime, geographical location, profession and gender intersect. Broad, because answering this question requires not only a multidisciplinary investigation in several fields – history, politics, musicology and gender studies, but also finding a key node that would allow to link the results of every of these investigations. Still, while very challenging, this question remains undoubtedly salient for several reasons, both from the musicological and sociological point of view. The very first inspiration for this research came to me in January 2016 when I first realised that the fields of feminist and gender musicology are barely present in Polish scholarship, and are in the best-case scenario treated as a harmless oddity with doubtful scientific value. One can easily observe that there is a hidden reluctance in Polish musicological scholarship to take the feminist perspective or even to address the issues of gender at all. This led me to comprehend that before I can begin any kind of research on Polish female composers in order to contribute to the feminist musicology in the country, what I should first do is to conduct a research on the state of Polish feminist musicology field itself. The outcome of this research, the starting point of which was simply a question why there is no feminist musicology in Poland, is included in my essay “At the intersection of musical culture and historical legacy: feminist musicology in Poland” completed in June 2016.1 This research played a particularly important role in unveiling the fact that several reasons lying behind the problematic status of feminist musicology in Poland nowadays are actually immersed in the way feminist discourse, classical music scene and musicological scholarship in Poland have been shaped in the communist times. For this reason, taking a closer look on how composers’ gender was handled in both musicological discourse and everyday life during that period seems not only to be a valuable contribution to enlarging the scope of music history studies, but also – and primarily – an 1 Marta Beszterda, “At the intersection of musical culture and historical legacy: feminist musicology in Poland” (Working paper, University of Amsterdam, 2016). 1 endeavour which could potentially provide a better understanding of how the challenges of today’s feminist musicology in Poland should be approached. First of all, even though it has been 27 years since the communist regime in Poland collapsed, its consequences are still palpable in the society of today. The problematic status of feminism is one of the cases where this palpability manifests itself the most. Because of the past regime, the discussion about feminism and gender equality in Poland is marked with a strong political prejudice, difficult to fight – or for a long time even to discuss. Based on the feminist discourse in Poland, it seems possible to point out at least three sources of this prejudice marking feminism and unveiling how the communist legacy has caught Polish women in a serious trap.2 First, as during the communist times the official political agenda strongly imposed gender equality as part of a propaganda, some people in a post-communist society link women’s rights to the communist ideology. Second, while imposing the official gender equality, at the same time the communist authorities fiercely discredited feminist movement as an invention of so-called “degenerate West” which might have contributed to the general distrust to feminism among the society. And finally, the Church being a politically subversive space during the communist times and as a result gaining a real political power during the political transformation in the early 1990s, has obviously depreciated feminism and promoted traditional gender roles, which resonates with Polish society up to the present times. These interrelated factors have resulted in a quite common reluctance towards feminism in Poland and this is why coming back to communist times seems indispensable in order to understand feminism’s problematic status. Being aware of this reluctance of course sheds a new light on the absence of feminist musicology from Polish scholarship and on the fact that the feminist perspective is either avoided, either discredited and ridiculed, or misrepresented. Second, the communist times were a very important period for the Polish classical music scene and the crucial one in terms of how today’s canon in formed. The most prominent careers of twentieth-century Polish composers owe their course to the foundation of the annual Warsaw Autumn Festival in 1956. In a political sense, the Festival was an artistic island of freedom, a significant breach from communist censorship. In a musical sense, it became a platform for several important compositional debuts (such as Henryk Mikołaj Górecki, Krzysztof Penderecki, Andrzej Panufnik), giving rise to some of the greatest careers in Polish composition. As a result, this contemporary compositional pantheon has shaped the construction of Polish classical music canon, the school curricula and the repertoire performed in the concert halls. At 2 See for example: Agnieszka Graff, Świat bez kobiet. Płeć w polskim życiu publicznym (Warszawa: W.A.B., 2001). 2 the same time, it is a very masculinised one, despite the alleged gender equality on the musical scene. One of the reasons why it is not addressed as problematic in musicology, might be the figure of Grażyna Bacewicz, who as an already fully-fledged artist and composer in the post- war period continued her career during
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