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 the communist times and is considered to be one of the key twentieth-century creators next to the aforementioned male composers. While at face value it might seem that her presence could become a perfect take-off point for a discussion about gender in Polish musicology, during my research I realised that in fact she has become an excuse to wash one’s hands of a responsibility to engage in such a discussion, or at least a very common answer that is always at hand with regard to any questions concerning female composers in Poland.3 This is why re-examining gender dynamic on a post-war musical scene and the role gender played in Bacewicz’s life and career seem particularly important in order to open the door of Polish musicology for the subject of gender. Last but not least, it is very probable that the contemporary reluctance to seriously address feminism in Polish musicology is an element of a wider phenomenon, namely the reluctance to address any sociological aspect of music. This reluctance might have its sources in the 1945- 1956 period, when it was required to interpret the reality, including music history, aesthetics and musical styles, through the lens of class conflict and Marxist rhetoric. The abstract dimension of music was dissembled in official scholarship and any evaluation of a musical work was subjugated to strict rules of socialist realism aesthetics. Anything that did not meet its requirements would be damned as “formalist”. Formalism – understood also as lack of a social aspect in music – was the most common allegation levelled against artworks in communist times and the usual excuse to ban or censor them. This resulted in a problematic status held by musicology’s sociological aspect later on - due to a certain backlash, scholars started to specifically avoid referring to any non-musical aspects of interpretation. Mieczysław Tomaszewski, one of the leading Polish musicologists, said:
The sociological aspect (...), despite all reservations, can (and should) be included in the scope of an artwork’s interpretation. The situation both here and in the East seems to resemble the “better safe than sorry” attitude, due to the memory of the years when the sociologizing was vulgar and all-embracing. It is however difficult to imagine the history of music and the theory of the work without the sociological aspect. Social function is, obviously, directly constitutive of musical genres and types. It simply creates them (...). We live in an age in which the scope of interest of mainstream musicology still encompasses music dominated by only one function: the aesthetic one. Other aspects of research come to the fore rather accidentally and marginally. Of course, the sociology of music - and above all
3 Danuta Gwizdalanka, interviewed by the author, April 2016. 3
ethnomusicology - are developing very well, but they are usually practiced as separate disciplines, not methodologically coordinated with the mainstream.4
What is crucial to emphasise here is that this call, made as early as in 1979, is unfortunately still valid in Polish musicology today. The deep wariness with which Polish scholars approach the sociological aspect of music, despite their alleged awareness of its importance, is still very much existent in contemporary scholarship. In an interview run in April 2016, Karolina Kizińska, a young Polish musicologist addresses this problem by saying:
I get the impression that New Musicology is generally treated with scepticism in Poland, whether it is about the connection between music and political matters, whether it is for instance about music and women’s studies. Generally speaking we are traditionalists, and most musicologists in Poland in fact feel closely related to the mindset typical for music theory rather than musicology. They have a very traditional approach to their studies, they usually like to lean solely on “music itself” and have an allergic reaction to any attempts to explain music through its cultural context, gender, politics or anything else that is not purely musical (…). I have the impression that most of the issues that could be categorised as New Musicology are taken with a grain of salt, they are perceived as a sort of light, and not necessarily serious, “humanizing music” (…).5
Bearing in mind the above, I hope this work will be a step further towards first, addressing this implicit but tangible attitude in Polish musicological scholarship, and second, finally incorporating more of the rich sociological and cultural context into musical studies. I believe this work holds such a potential for at least three reasons. First, it deconstructs the mechanisms through which communist ideology influenced understanding of concepts that are fundamental for music, particularly the concept of composer. Second, it sheds light on a strong interdependence between the political climate in communist Poland and the fact that musicologists and female composers do not address gender as a valid element of musical life. And third, it proves that despite this silence covering the topic of gender, it did play and still plays an important role in understanding Polish musical life. The current state of research on musical life in Poland between 1945-1989 shows an uneven level of interest dedicated to its various aspects: while some of them are thoroughly covered, other still demand much more attention. For example, Ewa Rzanna-Szczepaniak has dedicated several books to the post-war situation in Poland with regard to the foundation and functioning of musical institutions (particularly the Polish Composers’ Union), the organisation of musical life and the ideological fundaments of communist system in the context of musical
4 Mieczysław Tomaszewski, “Muzykologia wobec współczesności”, in Intepretacja integralna dzieła muzycznego, ed. Wiesława Berny-Negrey and Herbert Oleschko, (Kraków: Akademia Muzyczna w Krakowie, 2000), 14. 5 Karolina Kizińska, interviewed by the author, April 2016. 4
activity.6 As far as the aesthetics of socialist realism is concerned, more attention has been given to it in the context of literature and arts than in music. Tomasz Tarnawczyk’s book Optymistyczna i monumentalna. Symfonia w muzyce polskiego socrealizmu (Optimistic and monumental. Symphony in the music of Polish socialist realism)7 published in 2013 is so far the only monograph dedicated to socialist realism in Polish music. An exceptionally important source for the study of socialist realism was the protocol from the Polish Composers’ Union’s Łagów Lubuski Conference in 19498 and together with Ewa-Rzanna Szczepaniak’s books, especially Działalność Związku Kompozytorów Polskich na tle sytuacji w kraju 1945-1956 (The Activity of the Polish Composers’ Union in the context of the situation in the country 1945-1945)9 based on the protocols from the Polish Composers’ Union’s General Assemblies, they formed a strong theoretical basis for the second chapter of this work. Moreover, there are two works that proved to be particularly useful in the study of Warsaw Autumn Festival. One of them is Cynthia Bylander’s PhD dissertation from 1989 which provides a very elaborate review of the circumstances leading to the foundation of the Festival and of its first editions. The other one is Anna Brzezicka-Kamińska’s Master’s thesis from 1997 on Polish female composers’ participation in the Festival – probably the first work in Poland that could be classified as feminist, although it was never published and is generally unknown to the wider public.10 A lot more could still be written on the resonance Warsaw Autumn Festival had with society and the interplay between political thaw in 1956 and the subsequent renaissance in Polish music. Moreover, not much is known about Polish Composers’ Union as a social group. We have the access to the official protocols and transcripts of their assemblies, but it for sure does not comprise the full spectrum of the opinions, beliefs composers held and the conversations they must have had in the backstage. Many biographies of composers and
6 See: Ewa Rzanna-Szczepaniak, Działalność Związku Kompozytorów Polskich na tle sytuacji w kraju (1945-1956) (Opole: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Scriptorium, 2012). Ewa Rzanna-Szczepaniak, Polityka kulturalna a rozwój kultury muzycznej w Polsce w latach 1944-1956 (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Contact, 2009). Ewa Rzanna-Szczepaniak, Rozwój kultury muzycznej w Polsce w świetle polityki kulturalnej PZPR 1956-1970 (Poznań: Akademia Muzyczna im. I. J. Paderewskiego, 2013). 7 Tomasz Tarnawczyk, Optymistyczna i monumentalna. Symfonia w muzyce polskiego socrealizmu (Łódź: Akademia Muzyczna im. Grażyny i Kiejstuta Bacewiczów w Łodzi, 2013). 8 “Konferencja Kompozytorów w Łagowie Lubuskim w dniach od 5. VIII do 8. VIII 1949. Protokół”, Ruch Muzyczny, October 1949, 12-31. See also: Sokorski, Włodzimierz. “Ku realizmowi socjalistycznemu w muzyce”. Ruch muzyczny, October 1949, 3-5. 9 Rzanna-Szczepaniak, Działalność Związku Kompozytorów Polskich. 10 Anna Brzezicka-Kamińska, “Polskie kompozytorki na Festiwalu Warszawska Jesień” (MA thesis, Uniwersytet Waszawski, 1998). Cynthia Bylander, “The Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music, 1956-1961. It's goals, structures, programs and people” (PhD dissertation, Ohio State University, 1989). 5
musicologists (both female and male) active in communist times are also still waiting to become covered in monograph literature. At the same time, Polish publications of the last decades of the twentieth century are very often dedicated to the compositional techniques and stylistic innovations, in other words: to the music itself.11 This aspect of musical studies is surprisingly well covered and it seems to resonate with the earlier mentioned words by Karolina Kizińska who said that most musicologists in Poland are “traditionalists” in a sense that they commonly engage in the work typical for music theorists.12 As for collecting sources for this work, the biggest challenge was to get hold of first-hand female composers’ testimonies and their personal perspectives on composing in communist times. In order to provide myself such a source, I eventually decided to interview three composers: Hanna Kulenty, Elżbieta Sikora and Lidia Zielińska on my own.13 There is of course a significant amount of materials coming from and written about Grażyna Bacewicz; the most useful one was the book Znak Szczególny (The Birthmark)14 written by her as a set of short stories from her life, and quite a few coming from Krystyna Moszumańska-Nazar.15 I also managed to collect a few press interviews with the living composers.16 Still, proportionally little attention has been dedicated to the issues relevant to my research question, which made the opportunity to run the interviews particularly helpful.17 Of course at the same time it also raised a few problems. While choosing my interviewees, I was trying to provide the voice of representatives of different generations and different academic environments. It is important to
11 See for example: Krzysztof Baculewski, Polska twórczość kompozytorska 1945-1984 (Kraków: Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, 1987). 12 Karolina Kizińska, interviewed by the author, April 2016. 13 See Appendix 3 of this work. 14 Grażyna Bacewicz, Znak szczególny (Warszawa: Czytelnik, 1970). 15 See: Krystyna Moszumańska-Nazar, “Szkic biograficzny”, in Krystyna Moszumańska-Nazar. Katalog tematyczny utworów, ed. Katarzyna Kasperek (Kraków: Akademia Muzyczna w Krakowie, 2004), 143-148, Krystyna Moszumańska-Nazar, “Autorefleksja kompozytorska”, in Krystyna Moszumańska-Nazar. Katalog tematyczny utworów, ed. Katarzyna Kasperek (Kraków: Akademia Muzyczna w Krakowie, 2004), 149-153 and Małgorzata Woźna-Stankiewicz, Lwowskie geny osobowości twórczej. Rozmowy z Krystyną Moszumańską-Nazar (Kraków: Musica Iagellonica, 2007). 16 See: “Elżbieta Sikora. Talent w Polsce zapomniany”, Dziennik.pl, accessed October 4, 2016, http://muzyka.dziennik.pl/artykuly/88808,elzbieta-sikora-talent-w-polsce-zapomniany.html., Hanna Kulenty, interview with Tomasz Cyz, Ruch Muzyczny, July 2014. Elżbieta Sikora, interview with BoardroomMum, accessed October 4, 2016, http://www.boardroommum.com/interviews-archive/elzbieta-sikora/. Elżbieta Sikora, inteview with Wojciech Sitarz, “Gdyby nie trema, zostałaby pianistką”, Wojciech Sitarz, 8 May 2011, accessed October 4, 2016, https://wojciechsitarz.wordpress.com/2011/05/08/gdyby-nie-trema-zostalaby- pianistka-%E2%80%93-rozmowa-z-elzbieta-sikora/. 17 See: Małgorzata Gąsiorowska, Bacewicz (Kraków: Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, 1999). Judith Rosen, Grażyna Bacewicz. Her life and works. (Los Angeles: Polish History Music Series University of Southern California, 1984). Adrian Thomas, Grażyna Bacewicz. Chamber and orchestral music. (Los Angeles: Polish History Music Series University of Southern California, 1985). 6
note that the lives of the oldest and the youngest among studied women were substantially different and this is the fact I intend not to overlook despite the similarities and common patterns in their experiences. Similarly, despite placing in this work’s title the indication that I am studying “female composers in communist Poland”, I stay aware of the problematic, all- encompassing nature of such a category and I intend to present its chronological and geographical (or, in other words, vertical and horizontal) diversity. Drawing from the interviews with living composers and combining them together with the sources coming from earlier decades (in the case of Bacewicz and Moszumańska-Nazar) also results in a problem of the perspective one has on a certain period. Living composers perceive communist era through the context of present times and present times inevitably influence their opinions on the past, whereas for instance Grażyna Bacewicz’s opinions concerned the reality she actually lived in at the time of commenting on it, so she did not have the luxury of comparison. Another challenge while collecting the sources was the very limited amount of literature dealing with the topic of gender in Polish music and composition, let alone discussing them specifically in the context of the communist period.18 This shortage, both in the first hand sources (such as published interviews with composers) and in the academic literature, of course mirrors the aforementioned state of feminist research in musicology and proves that this work is necessary in order to fill a significant gap in the scholarship. An important theoretical basis for this work was of course built thanks to the Western literature, particularly Marcia Citron’s Gender and the musical canon19 from 1993, Ruth Solie’s contribution on feminism in music in the New Grove Dictionary20 and Susan McClary’s article Towards a feminist criticism of music from 1990.21 Having said that, there are also two Polish musicologists, whose works and opinions have been particularly helpful in conducting this research. The first one is Danuta Gwizdalanka who is considered to be the first musicologist in Poland who raised the topic of gender in music and is an author of the book Muzyka i płeć (Music and sex) published in 2001, and the other one is Karolina Kizińska, a young scholar who has become acquainted with this field of research during her studies in the United States. 22 Besides the contribution they
18 I provided a more detailed overview of the available literature as well as a diagnosis of the state of feminist research in Polish musicology in an already mentioned unpublished article: Beszterda, “At the intersection of musical culture and historical legacy: feminist musicology in Poland”. 19 Marcia Citron, Gender and musical canon, (Cambridge University Press, 1993). 20 Ruth A. Solie, “Feminism”, in The New Grove Dictionary of music and musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie and John Tyrell, vol. 8 (London: MacMillan, 2001), 664-667. 21 Susan McClary, “Towards i feminist criticism of music”, Canadian university music review / Revue de musique des universités canadiennes 10, no. 2 (1990): 9-18. 22 In fact, the first reflection on women in music in Poland comes from the 1997’s article published in Ruch muzyczny where Anna Maria Harley – already living in North America at the time – comments on International 7
provided through their academic writings, each of them brought important issues to my attention during our conversations, especially what is the climate around the subject of gender in Polish musicology.23 An important note should be made here about the historical and geographical context of this work. Namely, how this research can be related to the state of feminist research in musicology internationally. It is common to date the beginnings of feminist musicology in the West back to the late 1980s and early 1990s.24 Among other events, the 1988’s annual meeting of American Musicological Society (AMS) featured a significant amount of feminist contribution, while Susan McClary’s ground-breaking text Feminine endings was published in 1991.25 Ever since, both musicological and ethnomusicological Western research have been regularly influenced by women’s studies and feminist, gender and queer theory. The fact that musicologists started to shed light on intersections between musical culture and women / gender in this particular epoch seems to be a result of, on the one hand, the development of women’s studies in the 1970s (and their subsequent entrance into various fields of research in the humanities and social sciences), and on the other hand, the birth of New Musicology. In The New Grove Dictionary feminist musicology is understood as:
A body of scholarship “dedicated to the understanding of women’s roles, experiences and contributions as well as the various ways in which gender as social construct has defined those roles in different cultural settings. Feminist scholarship has also been concerned with the retrieval of women’s compositions and the study of their activities as composers, performers and users of music (…) and with a critical approach in which the understanding of gender and gender ideology is brought to bear upon the entire musical realm. Specifically, feminist musical scholarship sees music as both product and promulgator of a gendered social order.26
While the inspiration as well as a great part of a theoretical framework for this project come from the above understanding of feminist musicology, it is particularly important for me to emphasise that my goal is by no means to kick off a trend in Polish musicology that would consist in an attempt to simply copy the Western, already a twenty-five-year-old version of
Congress for Women in Music in Los Angeles. (Anna Maria Harley, “Po polsku i po babsku”, Ruch muzyczny, September 21, 1997). 23 Karolina Kizińska, interviewed by the author, April 2016. Danuta Gwizdalanka, interviewed by the author, April 2016. 24 However, The New Grove Dictionary of music and musicians dates the earlier, pre-feminist phase or “women's studies phase” to emerge as early as in the 1970s, when its main focus was to include forgotten female musicians and their works into the focus of music history. (Solie, “Feminism”, 664.) 25 Susan McClary, Feminine endings: music, gender and sexuality (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1991). 26 Solie, “Feminism”, 664. 8
feminist musicology and apply it to the Polish scholarship in an unreflective mimicking way. I feel like this is essential to note, because as I am indeed relying on scholarship that is no longer recent from the Western point of view, and I am applying it to the ground where no similar movement has ever aroused, I assume this interpretation is probable to occur. But in fact, my intention is substantially different. I believe that Polish scholarship (as well as all the other scholarships that are in some ways more or less distinct from the Western academia) needs to work out its own approach to the problem of gender in music by integrating the accomplishments of existing feminist musicology scholarship with country-specific problems. Otherwise it will not truly develop Polish musicology and – above all – it will not last as an integrated, fully-fledged element of musicological research. This is why in this dissertation I am not limiting my research to a simple compensatory history by invoking and shedding light on biographies of female composers (which is of course still a necessary and valuable type of scholarship for Polish music history and is – unfortunately very occasionally – practised)27, but I am also trying to examine the problem of gender in composing vis-à-vis the values and symbols promoted by the communist regime. This solution leaves some space to acknowledge that due to the course of historical events, Polish and West European / North American experiences of femininity, the meaning of feminism, as well as the specificity of music studies, are different, and that consequently the ensuing challenges for scholars differ as well. But above all, this approach has a power to counter an argument common in Poland that feminism is a “foreign invention”, by proving that despite the aforementioned differences, feminism is absolutely relevant to Polish history and necessary in Polish musicology. With this intention, it is recommended for the future research to also encompass an overview of the situation of feminist and gender studies in musicology in other non-Western European scholarships in order to open a dialogue, provide a reciprocal exchange of ideas and ask whether similar problems occur. This would be particularly recommended for other countries from the former Soviet Bloc, as in those countries, similarly to Poland, the process of negotiating women’s rights and the status of gender studies is often difficult to understand
27 See: Magdalena Dziadek and Lilianna M. Moll, Odrodźmy się w muzyce! Muzyka na łamach polskich czasopism kobiecych I “kobieca” krytyka muzyczna 1881-1939 (Katowice: Śląskie Towarzystwo Muzyczne, 2005). Magdalena Dziadek and Lilianna M. Moll, Oto artyści pełnowartościowi, którzy są kobietami...Polskie kompozytorki 1816-1939 (Katowice: Związek Kompozytorów Polskich Oddział w Katowicach, 2003). Aleksandra Kłaput-Wiśniewska, “Artistic work of women – female works in self-reflection of Grażyna Bacewicz, Krystyna Moszumańska-Nazar and Agata Zubel”, in The musical work and its creators, ed. Anna Nowak (Bydgoszcz: Wydawnictwo Uczelniane Akademii Muzycznej im. Feliksa Nowowiejskiego, 2015), 55-69. 9
without acknowledging the communist past.28 Unfortunately, for now, it is difficult to establish the exact state of such a research in Poland’s neighbouring countries. In light of the above, it is important to note that the research presented in this work obviously holds a potential to build a bridge between the Western and non-Western musicological scholarship. I strongly hope that the combination of Western and Polish perspectives will make this research gain attention of the scholars from both these traditions – even though for each of them there are issues in this work that they so far rarely recognize (for Polish musicologists that would be the feminist perspective and for Western feminist musicologists that would be the context of East European region). Coming back to the main concern of this work, the core problem which has led me to formulate my research question is a central paradox one can easily observe when making a brief overview of the situation of female composers in communist Poland. On the one hand, the regime declared full gender equality and indeed no Polish woman composer has ever declared having felt discriminated within the musical scene in the country during the period. On the other hand, the numbers show a limited participation of women in institutions and festivals and the classical music canon created in the second half of the twentieth century is clearly masculinised. On top of that, the topic has been covered with a conspicuous silence. In order to deconstruct this complex and multi-layered paradox I originally leant on Joan W. Scott’s definition of gender presented in her article from 1986 “Gender: A useful category of analysis”:
As a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes, gender involves four interrelated elements: first, culturally available symbols that evoke multiple (and often contradictory) representations (…). For historians, the interesting questions are, which symbolic representations are invoked, how and in what contexts? Second, normative concepts that set forth interpretations of the meanings of the symbols, that attempt to limit and contain their metaphoric possibilities. These concepts are expressed in religious, educational, scientific, legal and political doctrines (…). [The third and fourth aspects are] social institutions and organisations (…) [and] subjective identity. (…) No one of them operates without the others. Yet they do not operate simultaneously, with one simply reflecting the others. A question for historical research is, in fact, what the relationships among the four aspects are.29
The above concept played an important role in organising my research as I bore in mind that invoking all four elements would be essential to understand where in the reality I want to
28 Janet Elise Johnson and Jean C. Robinson, Living gender after communism (Bloomington, IN : Indiana University Press, 2007). 29 Joan W. Scott, “Gender: a useful category of analysis”, The American historical review 91, No. 5 (1986): 1068- 1069. 10
investigate gender was placed and how it actually influenced the situation of female composers. Scott’s definition sheds light on the fact that gender as a system is something that incorporates several different parts of reality: symbols, their interpretations, institutions and individual identities, and that the ultimate challenge is to recognise the links between them. While this work, due to its strong focus on concrete female individuals should mostly be considered as a contribution to women’s studies rather than a theoretical treatise about the concept of gender, I decided to try to solve my “paradox” by addressing all four elements listed by Scott. As a consequence, the first chapter explains the general situation of musical life in Poland after the war and provides an analysis of the key institutions and organisations shaping this life. The second chapter explains how socialist realism aesthetic, using political doctrine, redefined symbols, their interpretations and its consequences to the perception of gender in the musical discourse. Finally, the third chapter provides individual testimonies and places concrete identities on a matrix outlined through the previous elements. On a final note, I feel obligated to indicate that the question posed in this work holds a very personal value to me. As a cultural musicologist, my ultimate goal is to understand in what way music serves “as a social discourse: as a medium in which the fears and hopes of people are played out, negotiated, and shared, a medium which is both shaped by social values and in turn contributes to the organisation of conduct and beliefs”30. As a woman and a feminist researcher, I want to understand on what basis certain spaces in the society were, or still are, not equally accessible to men and women. Finally, as a Polish feminist musicologist, I want to know how the above have influenced the creation of traditions and canons which later became the part and parcel of Polish culture – the one that has contributed to shaping my own identity.
30 McClary, Towards a feminist criticism of music, 15. 11
Chapter 1. Musical life in communist Poland
The period of communist regime in Poland took place between the 21st of July 1944, when the Polish Committee of National Liberation was created in Moscow, and the 4th of June 1989, when the first partially free elections took place and the official name of the country has been changed from Polish People’s Republic to Republic of Poland. From the perspective of a musicologist studying Polish classical music this period stands out as exceptionally interesting and important for at least two reasons. First of all, it was a time of several ground-breaking events in the country’s musical scene, which not only influenced the shape of Polish classical music canons, but also led to building the prominence of Polish composition in the world. For example, this was the time when the Polish Composers’ School arose, when sonorism first emerged and when the great history of Warsaw Autumn Festival, the icon of contemporary musical life in Poland, has started. It is also when many of today’s leading musical institutions were founded, such as the Polish Music Publishing House or Polish Composers’ Union. Second, it was a period when both private and professional life of composers, as well as the whole musical activity, were strongly and inevitably bound to the political life, to an extent rarely encountered in other historical periods (even considered the clear bond between the political and the musical in the period of foreign occupation in the nineteenth century and the World War II). Given the above, it is clear that trying to understand the essentials and specificity of twentieth and twenty-first century Polish musical culture without acknowledging the intricacies of musical life in communist times would be a futile endeavour. At the same time, an attempt to provide an exhaustive review and analysis of musical life during a period of forty-five years would obviously be an extremely challenging undertaking that lies beyond the scope of this work. The aim of this chapter is therefore to draw a general outline of the system standing behind the official musical activity in the discussed period in order to understand the reality female composers used to function in, as well as to recognise where the power to administrate the musical life was located. The period of the strongest political influence and censorship in music was the early phase of communism in Poland, when all the ideological foundations of the new system were laid down and following them was strictly carried out, up to the political thaw which resulted in the foundation of Warsaw Autumn Festival in 1956. From that moment on, Polish composers could experience greater artistic independence, although the ideological surveillance of the cultural life in the country remained active – even if less strict – throughout the whole communist period. For this reason, a significant space in the literature describing
12
musical culture under the communist regime is usually dedicated to this initial period: the phenomenon of socialist realism in music between 1949-1956 as well as the circumstances leading to the foundation of Warsaw Autumn Festival. Consequently, the 1944-1956 period will also stand as a main focus of this chapter. Two authors, whose works turned out to be particularly useful in order to draw a thorough image of this period are Ewa Rzanna- Szczepaniak and Cynthia Bylander. The former has dedicated two publications to the issues of musical life between 1944-1956, one of them discussing the cultural policies in the country and the other one specifically devoted to the activity of Polish Composers’ Union (Rzanna- Szczepaniak has not yet covered the Union’s activity in later years with a similar work, this is why the detailed description of the Union’s General Assemblies in this chapter is provided only for those that took place up to 1956).31 The latter is the author of an extended and revealing review of the circumstances leading to the foundation of Warsaw Autumn Festival, presented in her PhD dissertation “The Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music, 1956-1961. Its goals, structures, programs and people”.32 Another intention of this chapter is to provide a set of names, facts and figures in order to illustrate female composers’ presence in the classical music world of the period. Next to addressing the key challenges of a post-war musical life, a special emphasis will therefore be put on the presence of women in the Polish Composers’ Union and on the Warsaw Autumn Festival’s scene.
Musical life after the World War II
After the World War II the musical life in Poland required a profound reconstruction. Not only did the war bring a significant number of casualties among Polish musicians and a loss of many musical resources from the libraries and archives, but also the musical culture in general was kept from flourishing under the German occupation in order to undermine Polish sense of self as a nation. As all the official musical institutions in the country were either closed, either transformed into German ones, the concert activity within the group of Polish musicians became very limited and a great part of musical life moved to unofficial spaces such as cafés and bars. Several underground activities were of course initiated during the war. In order to proliferate musical culture and to integrate professional musicians, a Secret Union of Musicians (Tajny Związek Muzyków) was created. Cultural awareness was also kept up through the release of
31 See: Rzanna-Szczepaniak, Działalność Związku and Rzanna-Szczepaniak, Polityka kulturalna. 32 Bylander, “The Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music”. 13
underground publications, magazines and books. Moreover, the Secret Union of Musicians administrated a conspiratorial system of musical education: officially the occupant only allowed the musical education to reach the secondary level, but both in Kraków and Warsaw the Union provided illegal conservatory classes with the opportunity to obtain an academic degree in composition, conducting and performance.33 One of the Union’s important accomplishments was also to prepare a draft project for future development of musical life in the country after the war (their plans encompassed projects concerning educational system, publishing, radio broadcasting, as well as rebuilding Opera Theatre and Concert Hall in Warsaw). When the Red Army entered Polish territory (as it was shaped before 1939) in 1944, the Polish Committee of National Liberation (Polski Komitet Wyzwolenia Narodowego) was created in Moscow, taking control over the country (eventually, new Polish authorities approved by Stalin officially became in charge of the country in 1947, as a consequence of falsified elections). The Committee initiated actions aiming to rebuild cultural and musical life in Poland as early as in 1944, its involvement soon leading to build a full state patronage system. As a consequence, the period of 1944-1945 was a very active and intense time for musical culture in the country. By the end of 1945 the state launched nineteen music schools for kids and several professional symphonic orchestras, Polish Radio opened five regional broadcasting stations and the Polish Music Publishing House (Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne) was founded in Kraków in April 1945, followed by the foundation of Ruch muzyczny magazine (both the Polish Music Publishing House and Ruch Muzyczny still remain the key contributors to musical life in present times). Many among such initiatives were possible to undertake so quickly not only thanks to the state, but also thanks to the former planning of the Secret Union of Musicians. Here, it should be noted that in the context of a pervasive control that communist authorities took over the artistic life in Poland, one cannot overlook that their great desire to fully control all musical activity went hand in hand with a genuinely dramatic situation of the country and its people and with the musicians’ strong anticipation to finally rebuild musical life after the war. As a result, the emphasis the communist system put on the importance of culture would raise high hopes among people dedicated to music. Ewa Rzanna-Szczepaniak writes:
The fact that the state took a role of the patron of culture and art was determined by two factors: ideological – arising from the implementation of the democratisation of culture postulate (...), and practical – since in the political system built after 1945 culture had been recognised as one of the essential factors shaping social consciousness. (…) Despite a very difficult general situation, the reconstruction of musical culture in Poland in all its aspects – organisational and administrative
33 Rzanna-Szczepaniak, Polityka kulturalna, 52-53. 14
(rebuilding and running institutions) as well as artistic - was proceeding fast thanks to the fact that culture in general, including music, had become a field of an immediate interest of the state.34
For this reason, despite the ambivalent status of the new political situation, the promising vision of a vivid and well-supported musical life in the country resulted in the fact that a lot of people welcomed this new system of a full state patronage with their arms wide open.35 The implementation of a new political system was obviously followed by an attempt to apply the ideological foundations of communism to the realm of music and consequently to restrict composers’ artistic freedom. As a result, between 1949 and 1956, the only acceptable aesthetics of musical composition was that of socialist realism (see Chapter 2). While it provoked a strong objection among several composers (some of them even stopped composing), many of them agreed – implicitly or explicitly - to follow the new rules for a few reasons. First, “all the objections of a theoretical or aesthetic nature were interpreted as ideological – and therefore political – acts, and consequently subjected to repression”.36 Second, some composers accepted the belief about so-called historical necessity: “After years of war and occupation, some among the people representing culture wanted to actively participate in the process of transformation and to take action (...). Some of them also truly believed in the correctness of new cultural politics.37 Third, the subordination was often conditioned by the financial factors: “Those who accepted the political system and the cultural politics of the party, could expect a housing allocation, publications, paid radio broadcast, concerts, travelling abroad and artistic prizes”.38 In general, the first cracks in the severe censorship system began to appear in 195439 , following Stalin’s death in March 1953 and heralding a general political thaw that took place in Poland in 1956, known as Gomułka’s thaw or Polish October.40 This resulted in a historically symbolical event – the foundation of Warsaw Autumn Festival.
34 Ibid., 55. 35 Rzanna-Szczepaniak, Działalność Związku, 22-23. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid. 39 Bylander, “The Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music”, 71-77. 40 Władysław Gomułka (1905-1982), the First Secretary of the Polish Workers’ Party between 1943-1948, later removed from the Party’s authorities and imprisoned; again the First Secretary (of the United Polish Workers’ Party) from 1956 to 1970. In the months following his election in 1956 he was implementing reforms that slightly liberalised the political regime. For this reason, the initial period of his governance is known as “Gomułka’s thaw”. 15
The Polish Composers’ Union and the role of its General Assemblies
One of the most significant events for the Polish composers’ community right after the war, was the official renewal of activity of the Polish Composers’ Association in 1945 under the name of Polish Composers’ Union (Związek Kompozytorów Polskich). Ever since their first official General Assembly that took place between the 29th of August and the 1st of September 1945, the Union has been the key institution in the country in regard to ordering, performing, publishing and promoting new music. As such, during the communist period the Union stood also as a field of influences and actions of the Ministry of Culture and Art, the two working in a very close collaboration with each other. Part and parcel of Polish Composers Union’s activity, and a key event in the musical politics of the period, was the Union’s annual General Assembly, where composers and musicologists41 not only discussed together the desired directions of musical life’s development, but also explicitly aspired to give it a certain shape a priori (this was especially the case during the period of strong enforcement of socialist realism between 1949-1956). It is important to note then that a significant part of classical music official life in Poland until 1956 was in fact taking place outside of concert halls, conservatories or schools. The reason was that in communist system congresses, meetings, gatherings and conferences, all of which aimed to meticulously plan and control all activity in the country, were generally considered as an exceptionally valid manner of governing the country and its people, no matter in what field. This emphasis originally came from Stalin, who believed that gatherings are crucial in order to integrate the Party and to give the answers to all people’s problems.42 Among the goals of Polish Composers Union’s assemblies, Rzanna-Szczepaniak enumerates: 1. Formulating guidelines for the musical composition, compatible with the official political line of the Party; 2. Creating a fixed, binding description of reality and a mindset that could not be challenged (the participants of assemblies could not reject or oppose to the imposed perspective on reality – by doing so, they would risk becoming an enemy of the system in the eyes of the authorities); 3. Working as a prerequisite for composers’ presence in the musical life and their professional status (artists who wanted to actively participate in musical life were expected to attend the assemblies and to approve of political projects voted during them, otherwise they risked being vanished from the artistic scene).43
41 Initially the Union involved exclusively composers; nonetheless during the 4th General Assembly the Musicologists’ Section was created. 42 Rzanna-Szczepaniak, Polityka kulturalna, 124. 43 Rzanna-Szczepaniak, Działalność Związku, 8. 16
Each of the Union’s General Assemblies between 1946 and 1955 was attended by Włodzimierz Sokorski (the Minister of Culture and Art between 1952-1956) who presented the guidelines for the artistic activity, later discussed and approved by other participants. Rzanna- Szczepaniak also reports the participation of Stefan Dybowski (former Minister of Culture and Art) in the assemblies of 1950 and 1951, as well as other politicians from the Party.44 As a consequence, the Union’s assemblies were in fact a hybrid, a perfct intersection of political and cultural life, where musical discourse stood both as a product of and a contributor to the political regime. As the composers’ community was organised in such a way, until 1956, the prominence and position of a composer in the country was not necessarily based on the quality of their works, but rather dependent on their participation in official gatherings and the approval they did or did not receive from the Party. In other words, an active participation in the life of Polish Composers’ Union was the only possible way to influence the discourse about music and at the same time the main space for one to exist and be acknowledged as a composer. For this reason, it is the structure of this institution that should be examined in order to assess women’s contribution to the musical life.
Period of holding a position in Function the Union’s Board Grażyna Bacewicz 1947-1950 Treasurer 1950-1951 Board member 1955-1957 Vice president
Elżbieta Dziębowska 1973-1975 Board member
Anna Maria Klechniowska 1950-1951 Vice secretary
Zofia Lissa 1948-1950 Board member 1951-1954 Vice president 1954-1955 Board member
Bernadetta Matuszczak 1967-1969 Board member
Grażyna Pstrokońska-Nawratil 1981-1983 Board member
Table 1. Female members of the Polish Composers’ Union’s Board between 1945-1989.45
The proportion between male and female members who joined Polish Composer’s Union between 1945 and 1989 is the following: forty-three female composers and two hundred and
44 Ibid., 57-71. 45 Erhardt, 50 lat Związku Kompozytorów Polskich, 17-19. 17
ninety-five male composers as well as seventy-five female and ninety-two male musicologists since the foundation of musicologists’ section in 1948 (for the full list of female members see Appendix 1).46 This reveals a striking gap between the number of women and men who chose and performed the composing profession at the time (almost seven times more men than women), but also shows that the situation was substantially better among the musicologists. Eight General Assemblies of Polish Composers’ Union took place between 1945 and 1956 and one very significant conference, which took place in Łagów Lubuski in 1949 and is known to be the official starting point for the socialist realism rule in Poland (similar conferences took places around this time, inaugurating socialist realism in film, art, architecture or literature).47 During the assemblies, chosen people presented their papers or speeches that were further a subject of discussion among all the participants. Most of the time the voice was given to the Union’s president. He presented an opening and a closing paper of an assembly. The opening paper always included “a report and an assessment of the current state of musical culture in Poland”, while the closing speech involved a summary of all the discussion during an assembly and was considered as “an official standpoint of the Polish Composers Union members in front of the touched-on issues”.48 Additionally, one or two more speeches could be presented during an assembly. During the period between 1945-1956 no woman held the president position, but three women were members of the Union’s board: Grażyna Bacewicz, Zofia Lissa and Anna Maria Klechniowska (see Table 1). Still, only one of them presented her papers during the assemblies – Zofia Lissa did so during the fifth and the seventh General Assembly. She was also very active during the Łagów Lubuski Conference when one could clearly observe her true engagement in the issues of formalism and socialist realism.49 Interestingly, Lissa was much more of a musicologist than she was a composer. She was considered to be one of the most prominent scholars of the period; it was also due to her initiative that the musicologists’ section was officially founded within the Polish Composers’ Union in 1948. Tracing Rzanna- Szczepaniak’s report of the eight General Assemblies, Lissa appears to have been the most influential female figure at the Union’s assemblies between 1945-1956.50 Next to her high level of musicological expertise, the strong political dedication to Marxism as well as a great need of
46 Ludwik Erhardt, 50 lat Związku Kompozytorów Polskich (Warszawa: Związek Kompozytorów Polskich, 1995), 6-15. The list includes a few people marked as composers and musicologists at the same time. Those people have been counted as composers in the numbers presented above. 47 Rzanna-Szczepaniak, Działalność Związku, 21. 48 Ibid., 8. 49 Ibid., 50-54. 50 Rzanna-Szczepaniak, Działalność Związku, 9-84. 18
a musicological insight during the assemblies definitely contributed to her prominence during the period. Between 1956 and 1989 another seventeen General Assemblies took place. The women who performed functions in the Union’s Board during this period were: Grażyna Bacewicz, Bernadetta Matuszczak, Elżbieta Dziębowska and Grażyna Pstrokońska-Nawratil (see Table 1). Again no woman was in charge of the president position.
Men Women 1945-46 7 0 1946-47 7 0 1947-48 6 1 1948-50 4 2 1950-51 7 2 1951-54 10 1 1954-55 11 1 1955-57 8 1 1957-59 9 0 1959-60 8 1 1960-63 8 1 1963-64 8 1 1964-67 10 1 1967-69 10 2 1969-71 9 0 1971-73 9 0 1973-75 8 1 1975-77 9 0 1977-79 11 0 1979-81 11 0 1981-83 10 1 1983-85 11 0 1985-87 13 0 1987-89 13 0 Total number of men / women assigned a position in 70 6 the board at least once between 1945-89 Total percentage 92,10% 7,90%
Table 2. Men and women in Polish Composers’ Union’s Board between 1945-1989.51
51 Ibid. 19
During the whole period of 1945-1989 seventy men and only six women were assigned a position in the Union’s Board at least once. This obviously mirrors the general disproportion between female and male members who joined the Union, but here the difference is even bigger – over eleven times more men than women were Board members throughout the whole discussed period (see Table 2.). An interesting topic to cover in further studies would certainly be to examine in details the activity of those six composers in the Union and try to assess their contribution to its functioning, as well as to generally characterise their status within the composers’ community at the time. One of them, Grażyna Bacewicz, is going to be a subject of further investigation in the following chapters of this work.
Festivals and the participation of women composers
As the political authorities attempted to thoroughly control musical life in the country, it was also their initiative to organise and run major musical events such as competitions and festivals. As a result, the festivals of contemporary classical music taking place in the country: the Warsaw Autumn Festival (starting from 1956, initially under the name of International Contemporary Music Festival), as well as its short but significant precursor, the Festival of Polish Music (it took place twice, in 1951 and 1955), became the most prominent events on the musical scene, holding a great potential to enable young composers a starting point for their career. The first project to launch an official festival presenting the composition of contemporary composers was mentioned as early as during the Łagów Lubuski Conference in 1949. Eventually the event took place between April and December 1951 under the name of the Festival of Polish Music (Festiwal Muzyki Polskiej). It was organised by the Polish Composers’ Union together with the Ministry of Culture and Art and in reality it encompassed all musical life in the country in that period, engaging most of the cultural institutions such as Polish Radio and the General Administration of Theatres, Operas and Philharmonias.52 According to Adrian Thomas, the Festival stood as a central musical event in the country throughout most of the year:
It began on 13 April 1951 and concluded on 13 December, with three periods of intense activity: (i) 13- 27 April in Warsaw and elsewhere, including major cities such as Katowice, Kraków and Poznań;, (ii) the summer months (mainly involving small-scale and amateur events), and (iii) 30 November to 13 December in Warsaw. In fact, much of the other musical activity in Poland between May and November
52 Bylander, “The Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music”, 52. 20
was also by implication aligned to festival events, if only as a point of comparison with the main program.53
The two main reasons behind the idea to launch such a festival were the following: first, it was organised in order to celebrate and promote the work of young Polish composers, and second, it was above all to create an event with a political resonance, reinforcing the development of socialist realism trend in music; a proliferation and a celebration of the new musical aesthetics. Eventually, the Festival’s program also involved some of the older Polish music (including Moniuszko, Chopin and others), nevertheless the emphasis was laid on contemporary works. The organisers wrote:
Our task is not only to widely popularise contemporary music, but to show its artistic heritage of which the contemporary composers are the true heirs and continuators. In this way the fight for the music of socialist realism was cast on a broad background of the historical development of the Polish tradition of realist music. (...) The goals of the Festival reach far beyond the usual demonstration of so-called "achievements". Because the chief task of the Festival is a fight for the new, socialist face of Polish music.54
Moreover, Witold Rudziński, the president of the Polish Composers’ Union, stated that “Polish composers were actively participating in the battle for socialist realism, and that the Festival would permit the evaluation of the degree to which Polish composers had advanced in that campaign”.55 It therefore seems apparent that the Festival’s organisation was clearly in line with the propagandist cultural politics of the Party. If one takes a look at the program of the Festival, it is quite clear that the goal of celebrating socialist realism aesthetics was achieved. Many pieces written specifically for this event took the form of cantata or a mass song (very desirable by the propagators of this aesthetics), moreover the musical style of the composition drew on folklore and Polish national traditions. Even the titles of some pieces are very telling themselves: A word about Stalin (1951) by Alfred Gradstein or Symphony of peace (1951) by Andrzej Panufnik arouse obvious associations with political propaganda. As far as women’s participation in the Festival of Polish Music is concerned, assessing it is challenging due to the aforementioned all-encompassing, broad and not necessarily consistent form of the Festival, which resulted in the fact that there was no concrete program. Bylander reports that during the first edition of the Festival, one hundred and ten works by thirty-eight living composers were performed in the whole country and in most cases the pieces
53 Adrian Thomas, “File 750: Composers, politics and the Festival of Polish Music (1951)”, Polish music journal 5, No. 1 (2002), accessed July 23, 2016, http://pmc.usc.edu/PMJ/issue/5.1.02/thomasfile.html. 54 Ibid. 55 Bylander, “The Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music”, 53. 21
were performed more than once. In other words, great number of performances of Polish music that took place anytime between April and December 1951 was considered to be part of the Festival.56 Cynthia Bylander mentions two pieces by Bacewicz performed during the Festival in 1951: Violin Sonata No. 4 and the Second Symphony. Further research would be necessary in order to recapture all the music repertoire performed during the Festival. Still, one may risk to say that finding another female composer’s work within the Festival’s program is not highly probable given that Bacewicz was the only female composer performed during the first six editions of the Warsaw Autumn Festival (from 1956 up to 1963, when Krystyna Moszumańska- Nazar’s festival debut took place). The second and last edition of the Festival took place four years later, between January 17th and May 20th 1955 (afterwards, its place has been taken by the Warsaw Autumn Festival). As Bylander pointed out, the difference could be felt between the two editions. The 1955’s Festival was influenced by the general political and musical relaxation that was proceeding since Stalin’s death in 1953. While the post-festival press reviews in 1951 all focused on commenting the level of socialist realism or formalism in performed pieces, no such critique could be observed after the second edition.57 Similarly to the first edition, it is difficult to estimate the exact festival program. First, because of the broad form it took, and second, because contemporary scholars seem to focus more on the general meaning of the Festival as a cultural and political event, rather than to thoroughly analyse its course. Bylander only generally characterises the Festival’s second edition by writing:
The Festival was similar to the one held in 1951 in that its concerts took place throughout the country, both professional and amateur ensembles from Poland were involved, and compositions by both living and deceased composers were presented (…). Of the approximately 450 compositions performed during the Festival, 320 were written by 80 living Polish composers.58
Again, among a few names of composers who were performed she does list Bacewicz. 59 Nevertheless, further research is still needed in order to assess exactly which female composers (and how many of them) had their pieces performed during the Festival. After the second edition of the Festival of Polish Music, during the Polish Composers Union’s eighth General Assembly in 1955, the decision was made within the Union to launch an international festival of contemporary music (Kazimierz Sikorski, Tadeusz Baird, Kazimierz
56 Ibid. 57 Ibid., 81-82. 58 Ibid., 84. 59 Ibid. 22
Serocki, Andrzej Dobrowolski, Włodzimierz Kotoński and Stefan Jarociński are generally listed as the initiators).60 It took place for the first time in October 1956 in Warsaw (and starting from its second edition in 1958 received the name of Warsaw Autumn Festival). It is important to emphasise that while the Festival of Polish Music was no more than a tool in the service of communist propaganda, the circumstances and potential of creating Warsaw Autumn Festival were significantly different. Its ground-breaking character was already heralded by several signs preceding its foundation: a political relaxation, first cases of critique of the socialist realism rule within the country, as well as first contacts Polish artists started to develop with the Western musical world. The change Warsaw Autumn was bringing was truly tangible for several reasons. First of all, it had a great educational aspect, as well as an international networking potential. It was organised on a wave of a general relaxation after ten years of isolating musical scene from the Western influences. As 1956 was the time of Gomułka’s thaw61 , which resulted in a short political liberalization of the hard communist regime in terms of political, social and cultural life, the censorship became slightly weakened, which enabled new publications or film productions not permeated by communist propaganda. Moreover (and most importantly), the 1956’s thaw resulted in a retreat from imposing socialist realism aesthetic rule both in music and visual arts. And even before the official proclamation of socialist realism as a binding aesthetics in 1949, the repertoire in the country was composed in a very limited manner. What could be found in the programs of concerts taking place in Warsaw during the first few seasons after the war (between 1944-1949), was a very traditional nineteenth-century repertoire: Brahms, Rossini, Chopin, Moniuszko, Wieniawski. Performing twentieth-century foreign composers such as Stravinsky, Bartók, Schoenberg, Berg or Webern was particularly rare.62 As Bylander points out, only a few of the Polish composers (including Andrzej Panufnik, Witold Lutosławski, Kazimierz Serocki and the only female composer – Grażyna Bacewicz) had the opportunity to travel abroad between 1945-1949 in order to hear works by Messiaen, Stravinsky or Schoenberg. Following the decisions made during the Łagów Lubuski Conference in 1949, the international exchange presented its lowest level between 1949-1955, the period of the strictest isolation in post-war Poland, which resulted in the fact that Polish
60 Ibid., 87. 61 The factors that contributed to Gomułka’s thaw are multifold, including Stalin’s death in 1953 and the following proccess of destalinization, as well as protests and tensions inside the country. 62 Bylander, “The Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music”, 27. 23
composers were generally not familiar with the trends of the 1950s Western musical scene.63 For this reason, the first editions of Warsaw Autumn Festival held an exceptional status of a long-awaited breath of fresh air, a space to finally exchange musical ideas with the West and to catch up on the most important trends of European composition of former decades. Tadeusz Wielecki, the current director of the Festival, adds:
After years of isolation (...), Poles were now decided to make up for lost time, learning the works of (...) Webern, Varèse, and even Bartók or Stravinsky (…). Warsaw Autumn was also an opportunity to follow the latest avant-garde experiments of those years: Boulez, Nono, Dallapiccola, Maderna, and Cage. Composers, performers, critics, and musicologists from the West were eager to come to Warsaw, too: out of curiosity about the countries on the other side of the curtain and simply because Warsaw Autumn gained worldwide recognition as one of the most important places for new music.64
The goal of the Festival was therefore multifold: it was supposed to educate Polish (and Eastern European) composers and audience in terms of Western classical repertoire and trends from preceding decades, keep them up to date with the current ones, present contemporary music from the East to the listeners from abroad, and most importantly, enable the development of personal contacts between the artists from across the Iron Curtain.65 Besides its educational potential, the Warsaw Autumn Festival entailed an enormous prestige. It is probably hard to assess to what extent young composers at the time were aware of how ground-breaking could their debut on the Festival be. Still, from the time perspective, debuting on Warsaw Autumn Festival figures as a key take-off point for the career both in composers’ memoirs and in the works of musicologists documenting their lives. It would not be an overstatement to say that the most prominent contemporary Polish composers’ (such as Lutosławski, Penderecki, Kilar) careers all trace back to the Warsaw Autumn Festival. Interestingly, the Warsaw Autumn stood as a significant crack in the imposed and pervasive socialist realism aesthetics (and therefore held a subversive potential), while at the same time remaining an event that was officially organised by the authorities. It is therefore important to take a closer look at how the Festival’s great prestige was intertwined with its ambivalent status. This is how Tadeusz Wielecki describes the Festival’s subversive character:
Paradoxically, the communist era was a golden age for Warsaw Autumn. The Festival was an obvious crack on the Iron Curtain, an island of creative freedom in a sea of compulsory Socialist realism. Here,
63 Ibid., 26. 64 Tadeusz Wielecki, “About Warsaw Autumn”, accessed July 23, 2016, http://warszawska- jesien.art.pl/en/wj2015/o-festiwalu/intro. 65 Despite immense political changes in the country that have taken place since 1989, the Festival’s mission remains to provide an exchange of people, repertoire and inspirations in the field of contemporary music. 24
the most varied forms of artistic invention were possible. That created a sense of general freedom of expression, and the Festival was seen as a form of political protest. Audience attendance reached 120 per cent; (…) Of course, there was censorship, and a permanent threat of the authorisation being annulled, especially under pressure from the Soviet government, who considered avant-garde music and the entire atmosphere of Warsaw Autumn as ideological diversion.66
Why would then the authorities allow this “sense of general freedom of expression” to flourish and why would they support the subversive “island of creative freedom”? In fact, by supporting Warsaw Autumn, the government achieved two important political goals. First of all, by appropriating and controlling contemporary music, the authorities gained the opportunity to control its subversive potential. Keeping the Festival alive would let them avoid the growth of an underground musical life and stay in power. Second, Warsaw Autumn was more than a perfect tool of an international propaganda as it served the government to present itself “as a liberal patron of the arts”.67 Bylander writes:
[The Festival’s] success was already recognised throughout Europe by 1958 and in many countries as early as 1956; hence, its continuation can be seen as an effort by the Polish government to portray itself to the Western world as being liberal in artistic matters (…). If the Festival had been cancelled after 1958, that action might have created an international scandal which the government wanted to avoid68.
As a result, Warsaw Autumn became a space in musical life where the symbiosis between the political interests of the authorities and the artistic freedom aspirations of artists could meet, something that resulted in an incredible attractiveness of the Festival’s scene. For all of the above reasons, addressing female composers’ participation in the Warsaw Autumn Festival is a key step in order to better understand the general character of their presence in musical life at the time. In her work “Polskie kompozytorki na Festiwalu Warszawska Jesień” (“Polish Female Composers at the Warsaw Autumn Festival”), Anna Brzezicka-Kamińska has documented all the performances of Polish female composers’ pieces during the Festival up to 1997 (see Appendix 1).69 On the whole, between 1956 and 1989, only fourteen Polish female composers participated in the Festival. Table 3 presents the number of performances each of them had between 1956 and 1989, together with the date of the first performance. Graph 1 shows the general number of female performances throughout the period and illustrates its gradual growth between the 1950s and the 1980s.
66 Wielecki, “About Warsaw Autumn”. 67 Ibid. 68 Bylander, “The Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music”, 540-541. 69 Brzezicka-Kamińska, “Polskie kompozytorki na festiwalu Warszawska Jesień”, 40-44. 25
Year of first Number of performance performances up to 1989 Grażyna Bacewicz 1956 20 Krystyna Moszumańska-Nazar 1963 14 Bernadetta Matuszczak 1967 3 Barbara Buczek 1975 2 Elżbieta Sikora 1976 3 Marta Ptaszyńska 1977 4 Grażyna Pstrokońska-Nawratil 1980 3 Joanna Bruzdowicz 1983 2 Lidia Zielińska 1983 2 Grażyna Krzanowska 1984 1 Hanna Kulenty 1986 4 Magdalena Długosz 1986 2 Anna Zawadzka 1986 1 Renata Kunkel 1988 1
Table 3. Female composers at Warsaw Autumn Festival between 1956-1989.70
Up to 1962 Grażyna Bacewicz was the only female composer performed and up to 1974 no other names appear than Bacewicz, Moszumańska-Nazar and Matuszczak (see Appendix 1). The number of women participating was clearly growing with time, but none of the younger composers achieved a number of performances comparable to those of Bacewicz and Moszumańska-Nazar (see Table 3). The diversity of female composers participating in the Festival was therefore growing, but many of them, even those debuting as early as in the 1960s or 1970s, participated in the Festival only occasionally up to 1989. Obviously such a low level of female composers’ participation resulted in a significant disproportion between the number of male and female composers having their pieces performed during the Festival. To evoke a few numbers as reliable examples: during the 1956’s edition there were 21 Polish composers, including 1 woman; in 1965’s edition 20 composers were Polish, including 18 men and 2 women; during the 1970s edition there were 16 Polish composers, including 1 woman.71
70 Ibid. 71 Warsaw Autumn Festival, concert booklets, 1956-1970. 26
Female participation in Warsaw Autumn Festival between 1956-89 6
5
4
3
2
1
Number of performances / female performances Number female / of composers 0
1965 1976 1956 1958 1959 1960 1961 1962 1963 1964 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989
Graph 1. Female participation in Warsaw Autumn Festival between 1956-1989.
Unfortunately, Anna Brzezicka-Kamińska’s work does not provide a critical analysis of the social factors that could contribute to this disproportion. And there are several questions that could be asked. How were female composers perceived in the discussed period? Did the disproportion in any way mirror the activity of male and female composers in the Polish Composers’ Union and in the conservatories? What does it say about female composers’ aspirations at the time? Who had the power to make the decisions about the Festival repertoire? And above all – how can this disproportion be interpreted in the context of an official gender equality proclaimed in the communist country? These are some of the questions I hope to answer in upcoming chapters, by first analysing the ideas and beliefs about composers and about gender, that were transmitted by the communist ideology (especially socialist realism), and second, by examining the experiences of individual female composers and trying to understand what kind of relationship between their gender, profession and the communist reality emerges from their memories.
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Chapter 2. Communist ideology and the gender of composers
Most attempts leading to assess the impact of communist regime on musical life in Poland dedicate much attention to the concrete, everyday life issues, such as the functioning of musical institutions, the characteristics of concert life, benefits and limitations the new system generated for composers, their reactions to censorship, emigration, and so on. The aesthetics of socialist realism is of course also eagerly discussed in the literature, nonetheless much more with regard to its musical elements and its impact on composers as individuals, rather than as a theoretical construct. Meanwhile, the phenomenon of socialist realism brought a wide new perspective on the notions of art, beauty, artwork, aesthetics, and above all the notion of an artist. The prevalence of this ideology in communist Poland, particularly perceptible between 1949 and 1956, not only influenced the shape of everyday musical life, but also challenged the role of the composer in society and set some new standards in regard to how she or he was perceived and presented in a musical discourse. Even though this impact might not seem related to the issues of gender at face value, the intention of this chapter is to argue that the complex nature of socialist realism in fact might have contributed to excluding gender from the musical and musicological discourse and influence female composers. Interestingly, this avoidance of addressing gender in music generated by socialist realism went hand in hand with a problematic status of gender in society and reaching far beyond the musical realm. This was in turn intertwined with an impasse women got caught in through the official gender equality agenda imposed by the communist authorities. In that sense, sweeping the subject of female composers under the rug in communist times, as something that does not need to be debated, was part of a wider social problem and lasted long after the collapse of socialist realism rule in 1956. In order to present how socialist realism contributed to the perception of composer’s gender, the first of below sections aims toward a deeper understanding of what socialist realism was and what it meant in the Polish context. The second section provides an explanation of how this doctrine became partly responsible for the process of erasing gender from musical discourse and helped avoiding the negotiation of female composers’ position. The last section places problematic status of gender in musical discourse in a wider social context.
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Socialist realism in Poland: style, aesthetics, ideology
The term “socialist realism” is considered to have been used for the first time in 1932 in the Soviet Union with reference to literature and later in 1934 with reference to music. 72 In musicological study it usually appears in the context of twentieth-century Russian composers (such as Shostakovich or Prokofiev). According to Christopher Norris’s article in The New Grove Dictionary of music and musicians, it is a “doctrine with sources in 19th-century aesthetics but now chiefly associated with Marxism or communism [that has had] a somewhat chequered ideological career”.73 In terms of a more specific explanation, one can read that socialist realism adopted “a conservative canon of aesthetic values (…) [that] resulted in a favouring of such forms as the program symphony, the dramatic cantata and other such genres (opera, ballet, epic film score) (...)”74 and that the two basic characteristics of all its applications in the music history were “a realist (mimetic) theory of representation and a belief that art can promote human emancipation by offering a truthful yet affirmative vision”.75 The principle of mirroring reality through music might have resulted into a formation of several concrete, distinguishable musical features that are usually classified as representing socialist realist style (tonal harmony, primacy of melody, simple rhythms, etc.), yet coming up with a consistent definition of what socialist realism in literature, art, or music was, remains particularly problematic. In fact, no consistent definition has ever been agreed on. It is even difficult to unequivocally classify it as an artistic trend, a compositional school, a style or an ideology, and in order to be closest possible to the truth, one should probably answer: all of them at once. The vagueness of the idea and the ensuing struggle, emerging when it comes to find a definition, originally come from the fact that the socialist realism, while being an aesthetics, is actually dependent on political reality. For example, this vagueness is a direct result of the Marxist theory that socialist realism is derived from. According to Norris, it lies in the sole attempt of applying realism, as something very fixed and material to the realm of abstract, elusive, intangible, i.e. music. Norris writes: “Wider problems have to do with what ‘realism’ means in the case of music and with defining how, in Marxist terms, economic base is related
72 Edward Możejko, Realizm socjalistyczny. Teoria, rozwój, upadek (Kraków: Towarzystwo Autorów i Wydawców Prac Naukowych Universitas, 2001), 15. Baculewski, Polska twórczość kompozytorska 1945-1984, 24. 73 Christopher Norris, “Socialist realism”, in The New Grove Dictionary of music and musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie and John Tyrell vol. 23 (London: MacMillan, 2001), 599. 74 Ibid. 75 Ibid. 29
to cultural superstructure”.76 He goes on by shedding light on another, even more underlying problem when applying the socialist realism idea to the music, which is that illustrating something socialist and something realist through music seems to state as two entirely different things. “If material forces are bound to prevail, it would be hard for art to be at once realist, in the sense of reflecting things as they are, and socialist, in the sense of providing an image of things as they might be”.77 This original difficulty and ambiguity, lying in a sole concept of socialist realism as an artistic doctrine, has been perpetuated by two further phenomena, deepening the vagueness of what this aesthetics held for musical composition. One of them is that the development of socialist realism aesthetics was gradual and spread over time. The other one was a constant variability and fluctuation of its meanings. Tomasz Tarnawczyk writes:
As a matter of fact, the aesthetic assumptions of socialist realism (regardless of how we define this phenomenon) (…) have never been explicitly expressed. In vain would be to look for a treaty or a manifesto among the writings of proponents and practitioners of the doctrine, and the main reasons for this state of affairs should be sought in at least two areas. [On the one hand] the maturation of aesthetic claims of socialist realism - their crystallization and expansion - was spread over time and took about twenty years. (...) On the other hand, the meaning of individual components of the doctrine was subject to constant fluctuation (…).78
All the above issues cannot be overlooked when one tries to understand socialist realism in Poland. As for the first reason for the doctrine’s indeterminacy given by Tarnawczyk, even though the prevalence of socialist realism in Poland did not last as long as 20 years (as it was in Soviet Union) - it first appeared shortly after the World War II and lost its prominence around 1956 - it was widely and vividly discussed by composers and musicologists throughout the whole period, never acquiring any generally agreed and ultimate status. The establishment of socialist realism as an official policy and a binding aesthetics in music is dated back to Łagów Lubuski Conference which took place between the 5th and the 8th of August 1949. Interestingly, even on the twentieth page of a very long and detailed protocol from the conference, one can read Włodzimierz Sokorski summarizing four days of debating by saying: “What should the realist national art be like? For now, it is still difficult for us to give a direct answer to this question. Our conference was supposed to be the beginning of our path towards this art (...)”.79
76 Ibid. 77 Ibid. 78 Tarnawczyk, Optymistyczna i monumentalna, 11-12. 79 “Konferencja Kompozytorów”, 30. 30
A person who later on has put an exceptionally big effort in defining and classifying the postulates of socialist realism was Zofia Lissa, who wrote several works on socialist realism in music, for instance Podstawy estetyki muzycznej (The fundaments of musical aesthetics) or O specyfice muzyki (On the specificity of music) (both written in 1953). And it was already during the Łagów Lubuski Conference when she also acknowledged that: “Defining realism is a very difficult thing today. Primarily for the reason that realism is still just a postulated trend”.80 It is important to note here that the reason why defining socialist realism was so difficult did not only lie in the fact that the development of this aesthetics was spread in time, but also in its postulative nature, i.e. in the fact that its tenets were set in advance and only later applied to music. Furthermore, even though the idea of socialist realism was already very thoroughly discussed during the conference, afterwards the papers and debates during the General Assemblies of the Polish Composers’ Union were still often dedicated to the intricacies of socialist realism and the way it should be displayed in the music composed in Poland (this was the case especially during the assemblies following Łagów Lubuski Conference – in 1950, 1951 and 1954 when the explicit critique of this aesthetics first took place). As Tarnawczyk writes, “it was at the moment of attaining its ultimate, therefore the most dramatic form (between 1951 and 1953), that it turned out this concept was a kind of utopia, impossible to achieve and carry out, and when the last phase of this concept begun”.81 In other words, the discussion on socialist realism in the composers’ and musicologists’ group slowly shifted from an attempt to define it to the realisation of its utopian character and following criticism, however without, at any point, giving any clear and common understanding of what the term exactly encompassed. With regard to Tarnawczyk’s second argument which is the constant fluctuation of meanings behind this doctrine, one should above all remember that socialist realism in art and music had an innate political dimension. It was by no means a coincidence that the period when this aesthetics had its heyday in classical music, overlapped with the most severe political regime in the country and that, consequently, its first critique as well as the first cases of breaching the style in composition co-occurred with the political thaw in Poland between 1953 and 1956 (the thaw which itself was in turn a consequence of Stalin’s death in 1953). As such, socialist realism as a musical style was a useful tool in the hands of political authorities, one that was supposed to facilitate the control over musicians as well as ultimately over the society in its whole entity. For this reason, the vagueness of not only the term “socialist realism”, but
80 Ibid., 13. 81 Tarnawczyk, Optymistyczna i monumentalna, 12. 31
also of other intertwined terms (such as “formalism”) worked in favour of their propagandist potential as their meanings could be constantly changed and adjusted to the context and used according to political goals. Tarnawczyk points out that changing, adding and limiting possible meanings of the doctrine’s components enabled to juggle with the values and as a result, led to their relativisation. As a consequence, the more vague the categories of realist socialism or formalism were, the more useful they proved to be as propagandist tools. It was exactly in the vagueness and the obscurity of socialist realism’s meaning where its great functionality lied. Given these points, when talking about the aesthetics of socialist realism, one has to keep in mind that it was much more of a vague and puzzling construct with constantly fluctuating meanings and blurred contours, rather than a consistent and complete idea. Having said that, the study of socialist realist music, musicological literature and several historical sources enables to draw a general set of musical and non-musical traits that are usually classified as characteristic to socialist realism aesthetics. This set of socialist realism’s features is usually displayed through an opposition to what were considered formalist features, as presented in Table 4. For instance, a clear form, an easy-to-remember melody, tonal harmony, conveying a non-musical message, which were all required in socialist realist music, are usually opposed to abstraction, atonality and irregular forms identified as formalist. But this division on purely musical level in fact manifested a deeper ideological outlook on music and society that communist propaganda was trying to force. A study of musical features classified as socialist realist brings to the fore the one, all-encompassing, major goal that the music in the communist era was supposed to serve and it was obviously a political one. This goal was to provide a solid and convincing propaganda that would resonate with the society and make people believe that all they need to do from now on is to build a completely new state together. Music being concrete and understandable was to ensure that people would identify themselves with the message it conveyed. At the same time, music becoming an egalitarian phenomenon after the decades of its highly elitist nature was to create an atmosphere of solidarity and an illusion of equality among Poles. Moreover, the optimism and a simplistic image of reality would aim to make people hopeful and enthusiastic. The critique of the past musical order in Europe, of the pessimism in the art of the early twentieth century would give people faith that only the creation of a completely new order could bring justice and peace. And finally, by basing the message on patriotic values and by emphasizing the Romantic tradition, the aesthetics of socialist realism set people’s minds on the state as a paramount concern and constantly reminded them that their contribution in rebuilding it is indispensable.
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Formalist music Socialist realist music
Idea Musical Idea Musical realisation Composer’s task realisation
- music in - using - music as - favouring vocal music - creating music which which compositional something over instrumental music conveys an emotional technique techniques deeply as lyrics can convey a and semantic message and form such as humanistic, and more concrete message; accessible and outweigh dodecaphony, therefore understandable to emotional serialism, focused on - favouring program everyone; using lyrics; expression punctualism; emotions and music; preferring tonality and a legible legible content; - choosing means of over atonality, vocal content; - favouring music over instrumental expression that evoke music that is clear emotions: instrumental music; abstract; music over vocal music; - music as functional harmony, - looking for new - music as something symmetrical forms, means of expression something - atonal illustrating characteristic melodic and a new musical detached harmony, non- every-day line; language as fulfilling from every- symmetrical tangible reality a political duty and forms; and common - favouring program day tangible music and using means not as an aesthetic and goals; 82 reality; - using such as title, non- artistic quest; - expressing metaphors that musical program, - proliferating the idea individual are not musical quotes etc. all of a commonly shared emotions necessarily referring to the life of goal that all the people and readable to proletariat and everyday want to achieve impressions; everyone; events, as well as (which is building the building patriotic spirit new state); (for example pieces titled Warsaw - cementing the bricklayer, A ballad stability of a new about a soldier’s cup, system through the The symphony of peace) single-track nature of all the composition;83
- - avoiding any - music as a - musical quoting from - highlighting tradition cosmopolita connotations basic means of folk pieces; stylization and history in order to n, with folk evoking one’s for folk music, build a stable sense of international music; national incorporating folk national identity;84 music (not identity; music dances; referring to - avoiding of a deeply musical - referring to national any nation- national style; specific quotes style;
82 “Every composer uses the language they can afford to use. If this language turns out to be incomprehensible, it is the composer’s duty to look for another one, such that would appear as easier to them”. (“Konferencja kompozytorów”, 15.) 83“[The attitude to the surrounding reality] must rely not only on the political awareness of the composer, but also on the sensitization to the most vital issues of the everyday life.” (“Konferencja kompozytorów”, 25.) 84 “(...) A detachment from the experiences, struggles and the emotional content of the nation (...) inexorably leads to the cosmopolitan coldbloodedness, to the music that is not only incomprehensible, but also strange to the nation.” (“Konferencja kompozytorów”, 25.) 33
characteristi displaying - archaizing trend in cs); national style; music: referring to the aesthetics of medieval times and important historic events from that period;
- music that - atonality, - music as - solemn spirit, - influencing social evokes minor mode, something functional harmony, moods and setting pessimism, lack of evoking major mode; them optimistic by arouses fear, symmetry, positive avoiding complex, uncertainty, unclear emotions and abstract and / or hopelessnes structure; optimism; pessimist emotional s; charge in music;85
- music as - difficult - music as - musical forms that - educating people, something musical something arouse solemn patriotic encouraging them to elitist, language, concrete and spirit (symphony, perform or listen to usually also involving tangible, cantata) but also forms music on a regular decadent, serialism, dedicated to that are easy to grasp basis in order to requiring atonal masses; and remember (mass eliminate elitist specific harmony, lack universally songs); character of classical musical of concrete available and music and therefore competence; non-musical universally - characteristic melody; realise the postulate of references; understandable social justice;86 - easy to understand (“democratised” lyrics; ); - music composed with - music as a a pedagogical means of destination; educating society;
Table 4. The features of formalism and socialist realism and their consequences for composers.
Degendering composer – the creator in the ideology of socialist realism
The overarching political agenda built by the authorities in communist Poland and standing behind the socialist realism rule, as well as behind the whole cultural politics, had its particular impact on the official image of a composer and, consequently, on approaching the issue of female composers’ gender. However, before I try to explain the specific perspective socialist
85 “Getting to the hearts and the sensitivity of the whole nation as well as forming its psyche in a constructive, optimistic and creative way. To tackle these tasks may be the greatest pride and the supreme goal to every true artist.” (Zygmunt Mycielski, “O zadaniach Związku Kompozytorów Polskich”, Ruch muzyczny, October 1949, 9.) “Composers should primarily try to express optimistic and constructive ideas in their pieces. They should demonstrate their positive attitude to social issues.” (“Konferencja Kompozytorów”, 21.) 86 "The composer changes their style once they get to understand the new functions of music, when they cease to feel fulfilled with writing for a small handful of selected listeners." (“Konferencja Kompozytorów”, 1.) "In a socialist state art is supposed to move and to appeal to the broadest possible mass of recepients, using an artistically perfect language, while not seeking for unnecessary complications for the sake of a sole craft ( ... ).” (Mycielski, “O zadaniach Związku Kompozytorów Polskich”, 9.) 34
realism gave on a composer, some general remarks concerning the perception of female classical music composers should first be made. Similarly to several other creative professions, such as director, architect or painter, the art of music composing was, until very recently, strongly based on male legacy. For this reason, as no composer could ever escape from relating themselves to the tradition, the situation of female composers who had little (and sometimes did not have any) female predecessors in the past and equally little companions in the present, resulted in an often problematic way in which they could relate themselves to the compositional tradition. Marcia Citron asks in her book Gender and the musical canon:
Can a female find a place in a male tradition, i.e. can she relate to male figures, male stylistic paradigms? Can she locate her identity in a tradition that has been male? Obviously, in the sense that for women before c. 1950 a male past was “the only game in town”, a woman had to relate to that tradition. (…) Yet how could a woman composer feel validated psychologically if she had no history, no precursors?87
Following Virginia Woolf’s remarks from 1929 on the situation of female creators, Citron concludes that a female composer always has two ways to go in order to ease this tension between her presence and the tradition and to be socially accepted: 1. Claiming recognition as a composer by cutting herself off from her femaleness and as a consequence “marking herself off from other female composers and women in general”88; 2. Acknowledging her femaleness and therefore placing herself as a second category composer who as such may only occasionally prove to be “as good as man”. While Citron emphasises the above process as taking place internally and having its sources as well as consequences primarily in a composer’s psychological state, I propose to trace it as a process working also externally and marking the social reception of a female composer. After all, whenever female composers were breaking a new ground, it was challenging not only for them to position themselves vis-à-vis the tradition, but equally for their environment to integrate their presence with the existing order. As a consequence, male composers, music critics, audience, would usually follow one of the above paths: either ignore the composer’s femininity, or acknowledge it and put her into a “different” category. The post-war period in Poland was no different in terms of the aforementioned two-paths solution. Even though Polish audiences recognised Maria Szymanowska as an important figure of nineteenth-century composition and despite the successful ongoing career of Grażyna
87 Citron, Gender and musical canon, 68. 88 Ibid. 35
Bacewicz, a female composer was not a common phenomenon in the Polish musical world (which is also mirrored in the numbers showing the disproportion between female and male composers at the time, presented in the previous chapter). In order to integrate the femaleness of women composers with the tradition, the two patterns mentioned above became part of the discourse. The second approach (recognizing a composer’s gender and therefore placing her in a “worse” category) found its reflex in statements such as this by Stefan Kisielewski, one of the leading music critics in post-war Poland, who wrote a press review of Grażyna Bacewicz’s Concerto for string orchestra premiere in 1950:
One can say with a clear conscience that this time the dignity of the Polish composers was saved by a woman, Grażyna Bacewicz. Her Concerto for String Orchestra, written with gusto and energy, brimming with fluent inventiveness and excellent instrumentation ideas, finally has woken us up from lethargy. (...) Here we have at last tasted a “red-blooded piece” of healthy and tasty music written with a male-like creative power.89
It seems obvious that what Kisielewski intended to achieve through these words was undoubtedly to express his great appreciation for the piece and its composer. But what makes his review problematic, is that he tries to do so by comparing her music to the standards that he perceives as intrinsically male. He seems to claim that all creative power is necessarily male and that therefore the greatest compliment for a female composer would be to recognise her creative power as “male-like”. This review definitely placed Grażyna Bacewicz into a “second category” box, showing that to acknowledge composer’s femaleness automatically means to condemn her to inevitable comparisons with her male colleagues. Despite the above example, making direct references to composer’s gender was rather uncommon in communist times.90 The first approach (ignoring composer’s gender) was much more ubiquitous and it contributed to the process of making a figure of female classical music composer seemingly a genderless one. Interestingly, the part and parcel of how the process of degendering composers was constructed in post-war Poland was a direct consequence of the prevalence of socialist realism ideology and its postulates. It was exactly this philosophy that made this process escalate, in the end using it as a one more valuable element of communist propaganda. As has already been explained before, the first and most important goal lying behind the socialist realism ideology and, consequently, its aesthetics, was to create a credible and tempting
89 “Grażyna Bacewicz, Koncert na orkiestrę smyczkową”, Culture.pl., accessed June 2, 2016, http://culture.pl/pl/dzielo/grazyna-bacewicz-koncert-na-orkiestre-smyczkowa. 90 Based on an overview of journals, books, concert reviews and composers’ testimonies. 36
vision of a new state and encourage people to truly and faithfully engage themselves in building it. For this reason, composers were given very strict guidelines on how and what to compose. Their work and creative potential were supposed to serve a set of non-musical goals and as composers they were charged with a set of non-musical responsibilities. As Norris writes, “what most distinguishes socialist realism is its conception of the artist’s prime responsibility as being to fellow participants in the effort to construct a genuine democratic culture”.91 I will argue here that this particular kind of responsibility imposed on composers in the era of socialist realism resulted in the depersonalization and consequently degendering the image of composer. This depersonalization took place as a consequence of several postulates inherent to the doctrine, such as denying composer’s individualism or degrading them to the role of craftsmen. Tomasz Tarnawczyk describes such a mechanism by writing:
The artist becomes depersonalised, downgraded to the role of a manufacturer, and the outgrowth of the function over the person and the originality becomes synonymous to the progress. In spite of the official nomenclature, the creator becomes subjected to dehumanization and degraded to the role of service provider.92
Interestingly, what rendered the above possible, was not solely the political constraint of communist authorities. In fact, the key to degrading composers’ role lied in the musical aesthetics since the expectations put on them were placed in music itself. The last column of Table 4 shows how individual ideas and musical features typical for socialist realist aesthetics resulted in concrete requirements posed to composers and contributed to depersonalizing and disempowering them. A composer was charged with a responsibility to proliferate a purely political message (emphasise the optimistic vision of a future state, evoke faith, optimism and trust towards the authorities) and became obliged to musically educate the society (which would often mean drastically lowering the level of their compositions). The tasks of a composer creating in the era dominated by socialist realism were, first of all, mostly of an ultimately non-musical nature, and second, never involved any kind of recognition for the composer as an individual. In the discourse imposed by socialist realism, the relation between composer, artwork and the outer world was constructed in a way that the object of main interest was always the people and the political meaning of music, rather than composer and their art. The piece as an artwork, as well as its author, were of minor importance. As Tarnawczyk states, what counted, was always a value in the system:
91 Norris, “Socialist realism”, 599. 92 Tarnawczyk, Optymistyczna i monumentalna, 27-28. 37
The wish list reported to the composers and their works was very clearly articulated and often took a form that was extremely onerous for composers. The basis of the discussed aesthetic situation was the objectification of all its participants. Between 1949 and 1955, ergo in the period of not only the greatest heyday, but also the bankruptcy of socialist realism, its theorists did not question the entity of an artwork, the creative process or the perception, but the function of each component in the system.93
In other words, while in a traditional (contemporary, but strongly based on Romantic heritage) approach to the act of composition the starting point for a piece is commonly understood as composer’s individual creativity and vision, in socialist realism the take-off point was always an agenda planned in advance. The reason lied in an already mentioned postulative nature of socialist realism. During the Polish Composers’ Union’s General Assembly in 1950, Zofia Lissa stated:
The Marxist aesthetics is a postulating aesthetics, which means that basing on the cognitive theories of dialectical materialism it is possible to predict the direction of the development of culture, including the musical one. For this reason, musicologists cannot limit themselves to investigating the products of the past alone; they have to interpret and synthesise new phenomena that come around in musical culture in Poland nowadays (…). The role of musicology in a socialist society is to formulate guidelines for musical creativity, arising from the Marxist outlook.94
To put it another way, what bolstered this specific intellectual construct of a relation between the composer, the composition and society, was a strong belief (promoted by the propagandists) that the direction for development of classical music should and can be not only predicted, but literally planned in advance. This is something that deprived composers of their significance to the progress of musical culture’s development and ultimately also of their subjectivity. Interestingly, this kind of depersonalization of an artist was even at work when it came to referring to the Romantic tradition by communist propagandists. It should be noted here that evoking the leading Polish artists of Romantic Era as role models was a very common practice during the communist era. The reason was that their art was usually immersed in patriotic spirit and highlighted national values - something that communists wanted to cultivate, but also because Polish people in general had positive associations with artists such as Fryderyk Chopin or a poet and writer Adam Mickiewicz, so invoking them helped to legitimise the new ideology among society. That being said, propagandists put a lot of effort into shifting the attention away from the creators as individuals. For instance, when an exhibition was organised in Warsaw in
93 Ibid,, 25. 94 Rzanna-Szczepaniak, Działalność Związku, 61. This quote also sheds light on the extraordinary role assigned to musicology in the times of socialist realism. 38
1949 in order to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Chopin’s death, it was not the composer whose portrait was displayed, but Karl Marx. These stories reveal the common practice of objectifying composers as well as a generally utilitarian attitude toward art and its creators. As a result, depersonalizing composers with the socialist realism doctrine obviously worked in favour of perpetuating the previously mentioned degendering mechanism, and vice versa, avoiding to address composers’ gender facilitated maintaining the propagandist image of a composer.
Beyond the musical realm – the gender problem in communist times
The process of degendering composers should be perceived as an element of a wider context, reaching beyond the musical realm and beyond the period of 1949-1956. First of all, addressing gender was also avoided in the visual arts of socialist realism. Second, during the communist times, also long after the socialist realism had faded out, there was a very unclear status of women in the society. The situation in arts reveals that one of socialist realism ideology’s inherent elements was a tendency to gender unification rather than gender distinction. One of the most evident examples is how women used to be depicted in artworks created in socialist realism aesthetics. Following the ideological demand, works of art were strongly centred around realistic presentation of people working in construction, agriculture or in the factory (see Illustration 1). This sort of image involved both men and women workers, blurring the traditional division of gender roles established in Polish society built on conventional European and Catholic values (for this reason, as refusing to recognise gender differences, socialist realist art was often accused of masculinizing women)95 . Furthermore, the propagandist slogans encouraging to fight for peace and to contribute to rebuilding the new country were addressed equally to men and women. Aneta Garanty writes: “Everybody got harnessed to the fight for peace, all the workers, farmers, students, and also women. ( ... ) From the posters, sculptures and paintings, women shout to us: ‘We do not want war’, ‘We want peace’.”96 In a political sense, women living in communist Poland received equal rights on labour market and abortion rights, therefore the authorities claimed to have provided full gender equality in the society. In reality, the situation of women was much more complex and their role appeared to be much more ambivalent. Garanty points out that next to the image of a working
95 Aneta Garanty, “Dwa spojrzenia na kobietę doby socrealizmu: matki, żony i traktorzystki – czyli o Polkach w socrealizmie kontra listy z przeszłości”, in: Oblicza utopii, obłudy i zakłamania II, ed. Wojciech Łysiak (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Eko, 2014), 91. 96 Ibid., 101-102. 39
woman, another equally proliferated female image in Soviet art was a mother and that an “ideal woman” was in fact charged with two opposite types of expectations: working as hard and as much as men and simultaneously remaining a symbol of hearth and home.
Illustration 1. Eugeniusz Grotto-Ślepikowski, Traktorzystka, 1952.
Furthermore, the official political line was no guarantee of a real-world emancipation. While having their rights on the labour market, women’s roles in the family still remained very traditional. Moreover, their actual agency in the public sphere was limited:
The experience of realist socialism shows that legalizing emancipation postulates is not a clearly unequivocal emancipatory action. It may even influence emancipatory discourse in a constricting, repressive way. This was the case with the common labour rights, but without the possibility to get promoted on an equal footing with men (...); abortion rights not complemented by sexual education
40
(...); legal prohibition of discrimination against women, but without the possibility of grassroots forms of protest in cases where the ban was being breached.97
In light of the above, the process of degendering women in art, including women composing music, might have been an effective way to maintain the image of an ubiquitous gender equality in the country, in turn being a strong evidence for a communist state to be just and spotless; in other words – ideal. All in all, the communist era had a significant impact on how the discourse on composer’s gender was shaped. First, by politicizing the profession, socialist realism generated depersonalization of composers and embraced the “cutting off the femaleness” approach. Second, by maintaining the ambivalent image of a woman both in art and in society, the communist ideology left no space to address both the problem of gender in musical composition and the position of women in the country. This situation was of several consequences to female composers. On the one hand, their professional opportunities were often much wider than those of their colleagues from across the Iron Curtain in the sense that the communist authorities cared for maintaining the official gender equality line on the labour market, including artistic professions. On the other hand, the image of a seemingly gender-free composer deprived composers, both male and female, of an opportunity to discuss, challenge and set gender standards for their group on their own. The degendering process did not eliminate the gender problem – it only swept it under the rug. What is important, is that even though the socialist realism collapsed and the musical aesthetics in Poland has changed after 1956, it did not result in any changes with regard to addressing composer’s gender as something worth discussing. This is something that will be shown in the next chapter by presenting women composers’ experiences coming from different decades of the communist era and investigating whether the absence of gender from the musical realm in Poland was or was not problematic for them. Regardless of that, it is sure that this situation resulted in several long-term consequences, reaching as far as contemporary classical music scene and scholarship in Poland, where there is still no room to openly discuss sex and gender and up to these days the subject is barely addressed by both composers and musicologists.
97 Monika Ksieniewicz, “Specyfika polskiego feminizmu”, Kultura i historia 6 (2004), 98. 41
Chapter 3. Polish female composers’ lives and careers during communist times
The intricate relationship between communist regime, musical life and the ensuing way of dealing with gender in composer’s profession in Poland found its consequences in individual biographies of female composers and the way gender is situated in their narratives. The aim of this chapter is to draw a multi-faceted image of female composers’ lives in communist Poland using articles, memoirs, interviews and other literature both from the discussed period and more contemporary ones, including interviews run specifically for this work. This image, often full of ambivalence, reveals the unclear status of gender in the musicological discourse during the discussed period and is helpful in order to not only better understand women composers’ situation in communist times, but also to take a closer look at the interplay between politics, musical life and gender. The analysis will be based on the cases of five Polish composers: Grażyna Bacewicz (1909-1969), Krystyna Moszumańska-Nazar (1924-2009), Elżbieta Sikora (*1943), Lidia Zielińska (*1953) and Hanna Kulenty (*1961); occasionally other individuals will also be invoked. While making the selection, I bore in mind factors such as: the individual’s prominence in twentieth-century Polish music history, the availability of source materials and / or the feasibility of running an interview with an individual, as well as generational and geographical diversity (i.e. the fact that they represent different academic environments in Poland and some of them also live in different countries). Special attention should be paid to the fact that Grażyna Bacewicz is considered to be one of the most prominent Polish composers of the twentieth century and is the only woman figuring in the “top of the top” group (next to Szymanowski, Lutosławski, Panufnik, etc.). Her vibrant career and professional activity as both composer and violinist, a great appreciation for her music, and the important role she played in Polish Composers’ Union, have resulted in numerous publications about her life and music, both in Poland and abroad, and in the fact that her music is still alive in the concert halls, especially, but not exclusively, in Poland. Most of her life she studied and worked in Łódź and Warsaw, but also spent some time in Paris learning from Nadia Boulanger. Her style is generally classified as neoclassical. The next – and so far, the only – female composer who managed to work out a comparable position for herself in the Polish canon is Hanna Kulenty. She represents the last generation of composers educated in the communist Polish People’s Republic. After her studies in Warsaw, in 1985 she was awarded the second prize of the European Young Composers’ Competition 42
organised in Amsterdam and the following year she moved to the Netherlands to study with Louis Andriessen. This is when she started a family later on and up to now she divides her life between two homes – Warsaw and Arnhem. Currently, as an independent composer she receives orders for compositions from all over the world and her music is regularly performed. As a teacher, she runs her composition class in Academy of Music in Bydgoszcz. Krystyna Moszumańska-Nazar, a representative of an in-between, pre-war generation among the selected group, was a particularly significant figure for Kraków compositional school. Born in Lviv, she studied composition and piano and worked in Kraków, later becoming the rector of the local Academy of Music Lidia Zielińska played a particularly important role as a creator and representative of electronic music scene in Poland. She studied in Academy of Music in Poznań, where she is now a professor of composition. For several years she has also been engaged as a member of program committees of Polish contemporary music festivals – Warsaw Autumn Festival and Poznań Musical Spring. Elżbieta Sikora, also engaged in electroacoustic composition is today considered to be a Polish-French composer, as after her studies with Groupe de Recherches Musicales and Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique in Paris she eventually settled in Paris and is mostly involved in French musical scene. Born in Lviv, she started her education and career as a student of Academy of Music in Warsaw. All composers started families and had or have husbands and children (Hanna Kulenty is a mother of two, the other four composers have one child each). It is important to mention that in order to understand how the situation of Polish female composers presented itself between 1944-1989 I found it necessary to run personal interviews at least with a few among those who have already been professionally active at the time.98 It was not only useful in order to provide a first-hand information, but simply indispensable in order to obtain a satisfactory amount of source material whatsoever, as the current state of literature involving the figures of twentieth-century Polish female composers only enables to draw very limited conclusions about the relationship between their gender and professional career. The problem of gender in Polish musical realm is something neither composers nor musicologists and journalists have been eager to discuss in detail. In the monographs and memoirs of both Grażyna Bacewicz and Krystyna Moszumańska-Nazar, gender does not come up as a strong interest point.99 As far as younger composers are concerned, one has to scan
98 The full transcripts of the interviews are included in Appendix 3 of this work. 99 Moszumańska-Nazar, “Autorefleksja kompozytorska”. 43
through the interviews available in press and here discussing gender is also not a common practice, or is mentioned briefly and managed with a set of stereotypical answers. Of course, what plays a significant role here, is also the fact that the discussed period is still relatively recent. It is quite natural that detailed biographies of important composers do not usually appear until they reach a very advanced age or have already passed away, so it would be difficult to expect at that point numerous biographical positions covering this period and this subject, especially if we talk about people born from the 1940s onwards. As far as the older generation is concerned, there are more biographical books and testimonies published (for instance the monographs about Lutosławski or Panufnik), but Grażyna Bacewicz is the only female case among them (together with Krystyna Moszumańska-Nazar, although here the amount of materials is significantly more limited100). Another general problem is also that composers (both women and men), for the sake of their artistic output, want to primarily talk about their music rather than discuss the subtleties of their biographies, let alone politics or society. Similarly, this is also something that interests music journalists and critics the most and therefore the majority of published interviews with living composers naturally focuses on, so called, “music itself”. The opportunity to interview the composers and to gain first-hand information significantly enlarged the amount of source material coming from the three youngest in the researched group. It inevitably resulted in a disproportion between the amount of testimonies from Hanna Kulenty, Lidia Zielińska and Elżbieta Sikora on one side, and Grażyna Bacewicz and Krystyna Moszumańska-Nazar on the other. This is why the last two may seem less present in the upcoming sections, something that I nevertheless tried to balance with the information derived from existing literature dedicated to them. The aim of this chapter is by no means to provide an exhaustive description of reality or to answer all possible questions about what a female composer’s life in communist Poland looked like. It would be difficult to encompass such a complex and rich historical period in such a short work and of course only a few study cases have been involved. While trying to avoid essentialist judgements and shortcut conclusions, the focus of this chapter will be to discuss the most apparent aspects of the relationship female composers had with the communist reality, both
Moszumańska-Nazar, “Szkic biograficzny”. Bacewicz, Znak szczególny. Gąsiorowska, Bacewicz. 100 The memoirs of Krystyna Moszumańska-Nazar (deceased in 2008) can be found in two aforementioned publications: Krystyna Moszumańska-Nazar. Katalog tematyczny utworów and Lwowskie geny osobowości twórczej. Rozmowy z Krystyną Moszumańską-Nazar. 44
(and simultaneously) as composers and as women. In the first place, the impact of the state patronage system on composers’ professional opportunities will be analysed. The next sections will focus on the difference in situation of female composers between the Western countries and Poland, the composers’ memoirs of their participation in Warsaw Autumn Festival, the examples of discriminating treatment and stereotyping in the context of composition during the discussed period, as well as the problem of combining work and family life. Finally, I will try to investigate some general patterns in composers’ attitude towards addressing the problem of gender in their profession.
Being a (female) composer in communist times – the benefits of a state patronage system
The first thing women composers unanimously mention when asked about communist times in Poland is that despite all the indubitable downsides of the system, it provided excellent conditions for composers (and artists in general) for performing their profession and developing their careers. Elżbieta Sikora points out that the state’s support manifested itself in a great availability of education and taking care of young composers already at the beginning of their careers (this relation concerns the early 1960s, when Sikora started her career):
As far as arts are concerned, the system of welfare state made it much easier to make art than it does now. The state promised a lot and it kept these promises. It was easier to live in general, but when it comes to artistic fields, it was particularly better organised. (…) Moreover, the professional start for young composers after the graduation was quite easy, facilitated, I would say. Usually there was some sort of a competition organised by the Polish Composers’ Union that young graduates took part in, and then if you at least received an honourable mention in such a competition, it was generally easier to start out on your career. (…) One thing is sure: in terms of education, communism was a great period. This was one of this system’s assets and I think it was organised that way for a purpose. The state wanted to have something to be proud of, and particularly to have artists that they could show off.101
Lidia Zielińska recalls that the communist authorities kept the musical life vibrant and gave composers numerous opportunities to perform their pieces:
In those socialist times, it was particularly expedient for the authorities to care about music and to look after composers, because well, it wasn’t as dangerous as for instance literature. So there were quite a lot of opportunities to perform, many concerts and festivals. (…) We were satisfied that there was a lot going on, that we got to meet several times a year. As a consequence, there was also nothing to compete for. Nowadays, in turn, with all the (more and less prestigious) festivals, with all the market for compositional orders, you can feel competition (…).102
101 Sikora, interviewed by the author, September 2016. 102 Zielińska, interviewed by the author, September 2016. 45
Zielińska mentions that the authorities supported music, since it was not as dangerous as literature. It can be assumed that maintaining a vibrant musical life was something communist authorities found as not entailing any greater political risks while being potentially helpful in consolidating the system. This is something she is very explicit about in another statement where she refers to the situation in Poland in the 1960s:
Polish artists, musicians and visual artists, turned out to be a gold mine for the communist system, because suddenly it turned out that they were doing something very original, very modern, they were sought after. After all, look how many artistic careers were launched at the time [meaning the Polish compositional school of the 1960s]. Penderecki, Górecki, Kilar, Lutosławski and so on, but there were many such names in fine arts too. So for the government it absolutely wouldn’t pay off to keep putting the screws on at the time, as it would cause too much noise internationally.103
Here, Zielińska points out that enabling the most talented composers to grow would give the authorities a chance to have something they could boast about internationally and it was for sure one of the reasons the conditions for composers were so favourable; something also Sikora points out in her statement. The great success of the Polish School and of the Warsaw Autumn Festival have however turned this potential into a double-edged sword in a sense that from the moment Polish compositional scene became a point of interest internationally, using censorship or introducing any other restrictions would ruin the political image of an open-minded, culture-supporting country104. This led to another positive aspect of the situation on compositional scene after 1956. While in the initial period of communist regime composers paid a price of censorship and restrictions for the patronage system and generous subsidies on culture, it became a minor problem after 1956. When asked about political censorship, composers born from the 1940s onwards do not recognise it as anything that influenced them in any significant way. The youngest among them, Hanna Kulenty, even recalls a non-political type of censorship which was not intertwined with communism. When asked about ever experiencing a censorship, she responded:
There was a kind of censorship, in some aspect, at the time when I was studying. You couldn’t say, for example, that you like the music of Shostakovich. It was a big faux-pas. (...) At this time, you just had to write the “noises and scrapings” type of music. And I’ve always hated these 20th-century techniques and wanted to smuggle my music. (...) When I started conservatory studies, it was impossible to
103 Ibid. 104 Cynthia Bylander invokes this as one of her arguments why communist authorities let Warsaw Autumn Festival grow and maintained its financing even though it has, in a sense, become a politically subversive space. (Bylander, “The Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music”, 540-541.) 46
compose tonally in Poland (...). Later on, this changed, but at the time it was “the more scrunches, the better” type of thing (...). In that aspect, I had to face some kind of censorship.105
This was of course a very specific type of “censorship”, characteristic also to other European countries at the time, but suggesting that in the 1980s, when Kulenty was a student, there was not the slightest sign of political censorship anymore. Lidia Zielińska, when asked about having been censored, responses:
Generally, no, at least not that I’m aware of. However, in my student days I was very fascinated by Messiaen and I used to write some articles about him. There was a situation when someone told me that the censors had cut my article, took out this, took out that (…). But with reference to my music, I don’t think so.106
Even Elżbieta Sikora denies that growing up in the 1950s would be something in any way influential on her later musical language:
When I was a student, there were absolutely no aesthetic restrictions anymore. My memories of socialist realism are quite vague. I was still very young at the time, hence not particularly interested in the problem. And I was primarily focused on playing the piano, which was my main concern. Only later, while attending the Polish Composers’ Union meetings, did I realise how hard the 1950s had been for composers in Poland.107
It is worth mentioning that the situation was significantly different for older composers. While Kulenty and Zielińska were starting their careers in the 1970s and 1980s, it was only a few decades after when their predecessor, Grażyna Bacewicz, together with other Polish composers, had to deal with the official requirements from communist authorities and follow the rules of socialist realism. In general, musicologists studying Bacewicz’s musical output agree on the fact that she was in a way “lucky”, as her style (classified as neoclassical) enabled her to reconcile her individual musical language with the prevailing aesthetics. Still, it can be discussed to what extent was it a coincidence and to what extent the political reality made Bacewicz’s (at least partly consciously) shift her stylistic tendencies in certain directions more than in others. In any case, her presence in a compositional mainstream was not without compromises. Adrian Thomas suggests for instance that the numerous incorporations of folk music into her pieces composed in 1948-1949 were at least partly a response to the call of Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts for more folk content or that her “sudden emphasis on large- scale orchestral works [in the early 1950s] was an answer to the stated public need for grand
105 Kulenty, interviewed by the author, September 2016. 106 Zielińska, interviewed by the author, September 2016. 107 Sikora, interviewed by the author, September 2016. 47
symphonic music”108 . He also invokes a “lone concession to the concept of music with a message” - the Olympic Cantata written by Bacewicz in 1948, as something unusual for the composer who for the most part avoided politicizing her art.109
Gender equality on the artistic scene – the gap between the West and the East
While the consequences the political regime had for the artistic freedom might have shifted throughout the years (as has been shown in the previous section, they were still very tangible for Bacewicz, but not at all for Kulenty), the consistent effect of the communist ideology was certainly a generally gender-inclusive character of compositional scene in the country. All interviewed composers admit that the official political agenda and the state patronage system had a great impact on how they felt as women composers. The state’s emphasis on education and labour market being egalitarian spaces, accessible to everyone, resulted in a fact that it was considered absolutely normal for women to study composition and later on, perform their pieces and make their living as composers. Elżbieta Sikora recalls that during her conservatory studies in Warsaw between 1970-1977, the number of male and female students studying composition together with her was close to equal. She also states that both her professors: first Tadeusz Baird and then Zbigniew Rudziński treated all the students equally. Hanna Kulenty, who studied a decade later, also recalls an equality atmosphere at the Conservatory, by saying:
The good thing was that everyone was equal, in the sense that all women and men worked, everyone was getting into college. I didn’t have any kind of inferiority complex as a woman. The idea of feminism? I didn’t get it at all. I was just a composer, you know. So, once again, I am not a fan of communism as it was (…). But we could all get education and we could all be equal (...).110
This equality also manifested itself in academic opportunities. It should be noted that Krystyna Moszumańska-Nazar, who has been a professor of composition in Academy of Music in Kraków since 1963, has become a dean in 1975, a vice rector in 1978 and finally a rector of the Academy in 1987, which shows her powerful position in this institution. The most important consequence of such situation in Poland was the ensuing Polish female composers’ state of mind: the inner conviction that a woman is capable of composing great music no less than a man and that women and men are fundamentally equal. And none of the composers realised how crucial and deeply rooted this conviction of gender equality in their profession was, until they first started travelling abroad. The gap between Poland and Western
108 Thomas, Grażyna Bacewicz, 32-36. 109 Ibid., 36. 110 Kulenty, interviewed by the author, September 2016. 48
countries in terms of how official gender equality policy, the social awareness and the following state of women’s minds looked like, also manifested itself outside of the musical context. In her memoirs, Grażyna Bacewicz included a story that happened to her when she was in Belgium in 1950 and a bank employee refused to cash her cheque only because it did not include a signature of her husband or another male “guardian”. She writes that when she learned that this was the Belgian law, she was “dumbfounded” and later comments on it, clearly expressing her perplexity by saying: “I repeat that it happened in Anno Domini 1950”.111 The interviewed composers unanimously state that the gap between the situation of female composers in Poland and Western Europe together with the United States, was almost shocking to them and made them, for the first time, start reflecting on the gender problem in composer’s profession. And their memories from different decades show that this was the case basically throughout the whole communist period. Elżbieta Sikora, who went to Paris for her studies with Groupe de Recherches Musicales in 1968, says that even though there were more women studying together with her in France, she still happened to be asked about her gender:
I have to say that there were actually a lot of women at these courses. French, Canadian, and from other countries. It’s not that there were no women. But mind that in France there had also been Nadia Boulanger. So yes, it’s probably true that it’s generally more difficult for female composers, but the situation isn’t as tragic as some might think. (…) But of course I remember that when I landed in France in 1968, I was constantly asked what it looked like to be a woman-composer. And it made me very surprised, because for me this question had never existed.112
Sikora invokes the figure of Nadia Boulanger here and one can assume that she must have played an important role in the process of accepting women composers on the French scene, something that most probably made France more open to the idea of composing women than it was in other Western countries. Hanna Kulenty invokes how she first realised the existence of a mental gap between her and the Western composers, making it difficult to come to a common understanding:
When in 1985, after winning a composition competition in the Netherlands, I started out on my career as a composer for good (...), I started travelling around the world and I noticed something very interesting: female composers very often treated me like a sensation... How can you actually live and create and have orders, being a woman?". And I would reply, very relaxed, “What do you mean – how? I’m just a good composer, I get orders, I compose, I’m happy to simply do what I do and how I do it, and life in general is beautiful." (laughs). They couldn’t really understand me at all, and frankly
111 Bacewicz, Znak szczególny, 102. 112 Sikora, interviewed by the author, September 2016. 49
speaking, I also couldn’t understand what their problem was. I had heard a little bit about feminism at the time, but I was somehow not interested in it at all (...). Anyway, it was not until I started to live in the Netherlands that I found out that it was harder for women [than for men].113
Lidia Zielińska emphasises that as much as a woman composer would often be treated as a sensation in the West, even in the 1990s, the interest she was arousing was even stronger because she was coming from the former communist bloc:
My first time abroad as a composer was here in Utrecht. It was just a few months after my graduation (…). I guess I was the only woman in this international company at the courses. And I do not recall any women there for several years in a row (...). Then in the 1990s, after 1989, when I already had a passport in my hand, I was travelling a lot to concerts and festivals, but I was aware that I was perceived as a kind of an oddity: "Oh, a woman, a woman from the East, let’s invite her, it’ll be fun and exotic". This "exoticism" of mine was based equally on both of these reasons – that I was a woman composer, and on top of that, I was from the former socialist bloc. I imagine I must have been a veritable oddity for them indeed, because back in 1989 (and even still 10 years later) people from the East were easily recognizable in the street, let alone on composition courses. But the moment it turned out that this woman composer from the East was also sensible and smart, the situation of course improved.114
At the same time, Zielińska points out that one should be careful not take make the clear-cut conclusions, as she remembers that for instance in Sweden she could experience a great gender equality and partnership as early as in the 1985, while she admits that in Germany she can sometimes observe surprised reactions even nowadays:
I do still feel it, especially in Germany: “Oh, a woman, and she’s in electronics. At that age?!” (because now also my age plays a role, obviously).115
It is important that Lidia Zielińska is of course quite an exceptional and even more interesting study case, because as a representative of electronic music world she is a subject of even stronger gender stereotypes, together with the age ones. All in all, one can say that in comparison with how the situation of female composers during the discussed period looked like abroad, the conditions female composers had in Poland were almost luxurious. And this is something that certainly must have made them less critical of any inequalities in the country and even less eager to discuss their gender as problematic – after encountering the situation in the West, they probably felt like at the end of the day they really had nothing to complain about.
113 Kulenty, interviewed by the author, September 2016. 114 Zielińska, interviewed by the author, September 2016. 115 Ibid. 50
A look back on Warsaw Autumn Festival
Interestingly, despite the significant disproportion between women and men composers’ performances at Warsaw Autumn Festival described in the first chapter of this work, the interviewed composers do not recall it as anything discriminating. They all remember their compositional debuts at the Festival as a natural event in a composer’s career and they do not perceive the Festival space as gender-exclusive. It is also difficult to find Grażyna Bacewicz and Krystyna Moszumańska-Nazar mention it as problematic in any of their memories. It seems that women composers did not find this disproportion disturbing (they maybe even found it natural?) and as long as they themselves had the access to the Festival scene, it did not make them question this state of affairs (that would explain even more why Bacewicz and Moszumańska-Nazar do not mention it anywhere, as they had relatively many performances at the Festival, much more than their younger colleagues (see Table 3 in the first chapter). For instance, Elżbieta Sikora admits that she even “tried to forget” that being a woman composer could be problematic when she debuted at the Warsaw Autumn Festival:
At the time when I started to work as a professional composer, it was an absolutely normal thing. And as I said before, I always tried to forget that being a woman could possibly be problematic. Having said that, I am aware it could, but I see it more as just an additional factor you need to take into consideration when you choose this profession as a woman. But of course for me it was not unusual at all that women presented their works at the Warsaw Autumn and I thought it was absolutely normal. I think most of my male colleagues felt the same way. We had already studied composition together, we were there together, men and women, so it was something you just had to acknowledge and deal with.116
Lidia Zielińska, who in 1989 became a member of Warsaw Autumn program committee and joined Polish Composers’ Union in 1981, also finds those institutions gender-inclusive and describes possible reasons which in her opinion might have naturally caused the disproportions in the past. Even though Zielińska refers mostly to the post-communist period and might not have a full knowledge about how the situation presented itself in former decades, her opinion seems to be worth invoking here. When asked whether men were more influential than women in the structures of Polish Composers’ Union, she answers:
No. Well, I’m probably the best proof of this since I’ve been a member of the Board for twenty years now, and on top of that I was even a vice president for six or eight years. So they wouldn’t let a woman in if they didn’t want to. It was the same with the Warsaw Autumn program committee. In the beginning, I was probably the only woman there, but then it changed and now it is probably even fifty-fifty, or
116 Sikora, interviewed by the author, September 2016. 51
almost fifty-fifty. And I think I was perhaps the only woman there mostly because I was just the only one who happened to do anything effective at the time while other women did not (in that actual moment).117
Again, one can clearly see that she does not interpret the former gender disproportion in the institutions’ governing bodies as discriminating. Here, Zielińska seems to be focusing on the fact that the percentage of women involved in the decision-making processes in musical institutions was not intertwined with any specific gender-related policies, but was simply proportional to the percentage of women generally active as composers at the time and that therefore it was its natural consequence. This openness of the institutions however obviously does not make it easier to understand why this percentage was so unimpressive in the first place. All in all, given 1. The favourable conditions the state offered to all composers, including women during the discussed period; 2. A very significant advantage of such situation in comparison with Western countries; 3. The fact that all the investigated composers found Warsaw Autumn scene and Polish Composers’ Union accessible to them, the image depicted by them strongly focuses on benefits the system held for women composers. At the same time, the next sections will reveal much information showing its imperfections and will unveil the fact that single social behaviours and individual members of society do not always go with what is declared as an official agenda. This wider, society-oriented look might also be a right direction to search for an explanation of the aforementioned unequal proportion between women and men composers in the concert halls.
The “gentlemanly” behaviours and other stereotypes
While the described situation obviously resulted in many positive consequences to women composers in Poland when it comes to the opportunities for professional growth, the way composing women were perceived in communist times was in fact very ambivalent. And while Polish composers consistently underscore that they have never felt discriminated in the country, there are situations and attitudes between the lines of their stories that unveil the existence of gender stereotypes at the time. And even though they generally express that they never felt personally affected by the “problem of gender”, and emphasise that the situation in Poland was always better than in the West, they sometimes explicitly admit that the problem in the country actually also existed.
117 Zielińska, interviewed by the author, September 2016. 52
Hanna Kulenty and Lidia Zielińska recall some thought-provoking facts about the male conservatory professors at the time, revealing that the idea of a woman composer might not have been entirely embedded in social awareness. Lidia Zielińska, who studied in Poznań in the 1970s, says:
There had already been other female students in Poznań before me (…). These were only single cases. But to me it wasn’t really relevant – I wanted to study composition and that’s it. And I wanted to be in Andrzej Koszewski’s class and that’s it. He accepted me in his class and it wasn’t until years later when I found out that he didn’t believe in the idea of a woman studying composition. He was convinced that once a female student got married and has a child, it would all go to hell. Because this was obviously the case with my predecessors, they stopped composing quite soon (...).118
Hanna Kulenty, who studied in Warsaw between 1980-1986, recalls a similar story:
In fact, my professor, Włodzimierz Kotoński, may he rest in peace, did not officially accept women in his class. So such chauvinistic traces were present among the men of the old school (and the young ones too). In fact, right after I started my studies, at the second lesson I had with him, I announced that I was pregnant and soon getting married. And I remember how later my fellow composition students told me that they had laughed at me saying "This one! She got into hot water”. But in the end I proved my skills not only to women, but in general to my colleagues-composers, by making an international career. And, as I’ve already said, I did not really have any problems as a woman composer; I only started to notice the issues of gender inequality once I was already here in the West.119
Given the above memoirs, one can clearly see that despite the officially declared lack of gender differentiation when it came to education and work, a lot of women were choosing family life over career. And so many people found this path as something you can expect a woman would certainly do, to the point where professors would become sceptical about female students in their classes. This attitude that professors had towards the idea of a woman composer, was probably also intertwined with the generation they were coming from and sheds light on the fact that introducing official gender equality by the communist authorities did not automatically vanish traditions and values that great part of a pre-war generation grew up in. Moreover, conservatories apparently have always been quite autonomous places, the kingdoms of their own, considered it was possible to say that a certain professor “officially” did not accept female students. Apparently, no one in the artistic institution like this cared too much about what was politically correct. And even if such a situation was not something that would become an
118 Zielińska, interviewed by the author, September 2016. Andrzej Koszewski (1922-2015) – Polish composer. He was Lidia Zielińska’s professor at Ignacy Jan Paderewski Academy of Music in Poznań in the 1970s. 119 Kulenty, interviewed by the author, September 2016.Włodzimierz Kotoński (1925-2014) – Polish composer. He was Hanna Kulenty’s professor at Frederic Chopin Academy of Music in Warsaw in the 1980s. 53
obstacle on interviewees’ professional path, it is something worth addressing when trying to see a bigger picture of how gender influenced compositional scene. Another key issue is that composers very often invoke the figure of Grażyna Bacewicz as someone who paved the way for them. Krystyna Moszumańska-Nazar wrote in her memoirs, where she explains her professional path, that:
When it comes to making a so-called “career", I have never been fighting for it or seeking it. I used to compose quite regularly and work earnestly, with the involvement. (...) I always had to tenaciously strive for performances, I still do, as everybody does. (...) Moreover, in Poland the way for women composers and their creative output had already been paved by Grażyna Bacewicz. Maybe it had been easier for her because she came from a family of prominent musicians and artists.120
Here, it is important to say a few words about the phenomenon of Grażyna Bacewicz and its influence on the next generations. Namely that because of how successful she became and how important place she took in Polish musical culture, she became sort of a handy answer to the question about women composers in Poland. In that sense, as much as her figure brought a positive change and became the main woman composer to look up to for the next generations, her success and position for some reasons invalidated most attempts to seriously discuss the situation of female composers in Poland. This is something Lidia Zielińska reveals when she says:
[I believe that women composers in Poland definitely had it] easier. Moreover, in composition there was a great person: Grażyna Bacewicz. She must have been an amazing woman, well liked, well respected, and she had simply paved the way for us. So I would say it all depends on a single case. If a woman composer can make an impression, also on her male colleagues, from that moment they will perceive all of the other women differently. They will think “oh, what if there is actually a potential there” (of course followed by “it would be best not to let it come to the fore” but that’s another story) (laughs). All in all, it is not that bad.121
In this statement, Zielińska presents a very common, constantly repeated opinion about Bacewicz and the fact that she has changed the general attitude to female composers in Poland. What is very interesting, is the little comment she gives in the parentheses – which unmasks the inner contradiction present in how people used (and still use) the “Bacewicz case”. On the one hand, she is treated as kind of a self-explanatory proof of no discrimination, while on the other hand what is missed out is that she was a generally accepted exception rather than a norm and that it might not necessarily have brought a big, systematic, social change. And looking at the
120 Moszumańska-Nazar, “Szkic biograficzny”, 148. 121 Zielińska, interviewed by the author, September 2016. 54
percentage of women among composers up to 1989, it certainly has not, or at least for sure not on its own. Important to realise that, for example, all women composers discussed in this chapter had exclusively men as their composition professors in Poland. Another interesting anecdote concerning academia, brought back by Lidia Zielińska, is the following:
I also remember how later on, not only in Poznań but in the whole country (and it is so up until now), composition professors had a minimum number of students they needed to fill the class with (because otherwise they would have to teach other courses, like counterpoint, due to the obligatory teaching load), so what they did was when a pretty female student of music theory caught their eye, they would persuade her she had a big talent for composition and will certainly be a good composer, and this way they just kept their jobs safe. And this was unfortunately quite common, especially in the 1980s.122
This story seems particularly puzzling. Putting aside the apparent institutional defects of the system that triggered professors to seek for this sort of solutions, the important question here would be why would they choose “a pretty female student of music theory” rather than a student who would be male and from a different department? While the answer might be that of course music theory has always been institutionally, and in terms of its curriculum, the closest faculty to composition and that it has indeed been always quite feminised,123 this anecdote might suggest that to some extent female prospect composers were not treated as seriously as the male ones. Furthermore, Lidia Zielińska observes that the official political idea of full partnership between men and women in Poland might not necessarily go hand in hand with the everyday reality. When invoking her experiences from travelling to Sweden, she said:
In Poland it was just a faux-pas to differentiate while in Sweden it was a matter of an authentic partnership, a full balance. In the beginning, it would surprise me in the West that no man would hold the door open for me or help me with my coat. But while I was missing these nice gestures, it is a really minute price to pay for the fact that one is finally treated seriously. And in contrast, when I was in Ukraine, Belarus or Moldova, I could see that "gentlemanly" behaviour is still very common there.124
When asked about whether this kind of behaviour was also the case in Poland, she said:
Yes, this "gentlemanly" behaviour was there as well. The equality was external, imposed from above, while men in Poland had completely different ideas in their minds. It was not a partnership, it was only
122 Ibid. 123 In Polish academic tradition, music theory has generally been a much more popular faculty among women than men. This is the case probably because this education typically leads to theory teaching jobs in music schools that are more popular among women. 124 Zielińska, interviewed by the author, September 2016. 55
an external, formal equality. But at the same time, I don’t know, the composers’ community is a group of individuals, and individuality counts, sense of humour also counts, things like that. So we liked and respected each other because of the other person’s personality, and it was not important whether someone was a man or a woman. I think this is how I would describe it. But it’s a tiny community (…).125
Shortly speaking, Zielińska suggests that even though the compositional environment was sort of a safe island when it came to gender equality (its small size and specific nature contributed to its gender-inclusiveness), it was not necessarily the case with the society in its entirety. She shows that in comparison with Sweden, the focus on gender partnership was not an authentically intrinsic social conviction in Poland. Another key problem was that even though women composers received respect and appreciation from their male colleagues on a personal level and in every-day life, the stereotypical thinking could reveal itself in the perception of music. In her memoirs, Grażyna Bacewicz recalls a situation when after the performance of one of her pieces in Vienna, some critic wrote that “it is a commonly known fact, that there is a man, standing in a shadow of Grażyna Bacewicz, who writes all of the compositions for her”.126 While some decades later the level of acceptance for female composers has of course been raised, Hanna Kulenty (over fifty years younger than Bacewicz!) recalls situations which reveal that during her career people still acted on gender stereotypes when listening to music. She says:
My music has often been described simply as a music written by a strong man. When they realised that Kulenty is a woman, they thought "oh, it must be a big, fat, strong butch". So when it turned out I’m a tiny chick, well, there was a great surprise.127
Grażyna Bacewicz was also often receiving letters starting with “Dear Mister Bacewicz” or addressed “Cher Monsieur Grażyna Bacewicz”. As composer wrote, she kept those letters, as they were a “proof that my music elbowed its way in the world on its own”.128 It shows that Bacewicz, even though it might not have been so evident in Poland, must have been aware of the problem her gender potentially held in a composer’s profession.
Composers and family
A very important issue that women composers mention when discussing gender is combining composer’s profession with family life. Their testimonies usually present it as a challenging
125 Zielińska, interviewed by the author, September 2016. 126 Bacewicz, Znak szczególny, 38. 127 Kulenty, interviewed by the author, September 2016. 128 Bacewicz, Znak szczególny, 38. 56
task, but at the same time they do not present starting a family as anything that could have stopped them from composing. In her memoirs, Grażyna Bacewicz describes the conversation she had with Nadia Boulanger in which Bacewicz was complaining that women composers have it much more difficult than men composers as the former need to do household chores and spend more time with children, while the latter can fully dedicate themselves to the composition.129 Bacewicz invokes Boulanger’s answer: “Grażyna, what do you say? – asked Nadia with a clear surprise. - I thought you were tougher. You must not pity yourself. Remember, if you want to be a real composer, there is no mercy for you”.130 Interestingly, this mindset is something that Grażyna Bacewicz incorporated into her life. In one of her memoirs, she writes:
Nature, while graciously bestowing on me compositional abilities - additionally equipped me with something that allows me to cultivate these abilities. Namely, I have got a tiny, invisible motor, thanks to which I do in ten minutes what others do in an hour. (...) I don’t see my own merit in the fact that I have it, and I only reveal having it in order to formulate a general answer to the questions that I am often (…) surprised with by the journalists: - Why are there so few female composers? - Can women be valuable composers? (...) - Can a female composer have children? Etc. Well, it’s a simple thing. A woman possessing composing skills can be a serious composer, can get married, have children, can travel, have adventures, etc., provided she has such a tiny motor. If she doesn’t have it, it’s better for her to not bother.131
The above quote is particularly interesting, because Bacewicz seems to be saying that while she personally is perfectly capable of being a composer, not every woman is. In that sense, she admits that a woman needs to meet some extra requirements in order to be a composer, however once she does meet them, her gender is no longer a problem. It is an interesting attitude, somewhere on the border between recognizing and disregarding woman composer’s gender. While Boulanger’s and Bacewicz’s statements might seem like a predictable answer to the problem given that it comes from the 1930s and that they come from two European pioneers of twentieth-century female composition, what is intriguing is that to some extent this approach has not shifted much since: the interviewed composers do address many challenges they encountered combining their profession with raising children, however they usually state that “this is just the way it has to be”. Everyone in their times took for granted that women composers need to work harder because they have to take care of their children at the same time.
129 The exact date of the conversation is not given in the memoir, but it can be assumed it took place around 1932- 1933, as this was when Grażyna Bacewicz studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. 130 Bacewicz, Znak szczególny, 25. 131 Ibid., 25-26. 57
The women composers seem to feel by no means entitled to complain about it. Elżbieta Sikora says:
I’m not sure how to put it in order not to blunt, but if a woman, or anyone in general, decides to choose a profession such as composer, painter, sculptor, writer, it is obvious they will have to dedicate virtually their whole lives to it. And not everyone wants to sacrifice this much, and I’m not talking only about women. (...) There are so many pleasant things to do, (…) so why would we compose, right? Something pushes us towards it and when it does, you just have to commit yourself. And I think this is the most important thing, regardless of gender. If this is the most important thing you want to do in your life, then the problem whether you’re a man or a woman just no longer exists, because you’ll do it one way or another. Even if there are difficulties, whatever their size, even if your works end up in a sock drawer.132
Following this mindset, all composers describe combining a composer’s career with being a mother as a challenging, but ordinary task. Still, they address several compromises they needed to make. Krystyna Moszumańska-Nazar writes in her memoirs that due to both giving birth to her son in 1949 and her husband being often transferred, she stopped her piano studies at Academy of Music in Kraków for two years and only returned to them in 1951.133 It is important to point out that combining the two required certain conditions, and it was certainly not accessible to all the women graduating from composition, which might be one of the reasons many women in fact did not pursue professional careers as composers. Lidia Zielińska says: “some women just love children more than they love music”.134 There are certain similarities in the investigated composers’ biographies that seem to confirm this correlation: having an empathetic partner understanding their ambition, who was ready to share the domestic duties as well as having usually only one child (in case of Hanna Kulenty – two). At the same time, all of them express that family has been very important to them. This is how Lidia Zielińska put it:
Even with an ideal situation, an ideal partner, such as mine, it was still difficult, let alone the cases when the husband is equally busy or not willing to make such compromises. (…) So it is very difficult even in favourable circumstances, let alone unfavourable ones. (…) A lonely composer’s life is very comfortable, especially if someone is egocentric, but personally I would never give up my family life for freedom, chill, lack of responsibilities, no.135
132 Sikora, interviewed by the author, September 2016. 133 Moszumańska-Nazar, “Szkic biograficzny”, 145. 134 Zielińska, interviewed by the author, September 2016. 135 Ibid. 58
All in all, the above reveals that during communist times next to the progressive, equality- centred attitude promoted by the state, several spaces in social life were very traditional and based on stereotypical thinking. This concerned academia, concert halls and family life. What particularly complicated the situation of women composers as a result, was that this ambivalence was not officially addressed or discussed and in the realm of composition it was, ironically, the figure of Grażyna Bacewicz who particularly prevented the discussion from coming forth. Consequently, it led to an ambivalent and complex relationship Polish women composers developed towards the problem of gender in their profession.
“We should not make any differentiations...”
Looking at the above testimonies, a few general patterns can be observed in composers’ mindset about gender in their compositional careers. On the one hand, they explicitly say, that building a career as a woman composer was generally something quite challenging – one had to work harder than men, combine working with raising children to a lesser extent than men, and needed to prove herself vis-à-vis the initial distrust of male professors who sometimes would rather see exclusively male students in their classes. On the other hand, they all seem to stand against any kind of gender differentiation when it comes to composers’ professional life. They do not want their gender to be visible, to play a role. This mostly manifests itself in their attitude – both in the past and in the present – towards the associations of female composers popular in Western countries, as well as towards the problem of feminine versus masculine grammatical forms of the word “composer”. As for the female composers’ associations, all three interviewed composers – Hanna Kulenty, Elżbieta Sikora and Lidia Zielińska expressed a very sceptical attitude towards them. They all first became acquainted with such associations during their first travels abroad – in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. This is how they recall their impressions. Elżbieta Sikora says:
A very strong movement of women musicians - not only composers - started up in the USA. They were organizing themselves into various associations etc. Personally, I was afraid to follow this path from the very beginning. I didn’t want to be classified as a member of such a group of women composers fighting for their rights, because it seems to me that one should fight with the means of music and not with such actions. Still, I do think it’s good sometimes to help those movements. For some time, I was even a member of such an association in the USA, but I’m not anymore.136
136 Sikora, interviewed by the author, September 2016. 59
Interestingly, also Lidia Zielińska very strongly opposes to the idea of fighting for performances through such organisations:
Now I am also thinking about all those ghettos that women composers create for themselves. It’s very American of course. I remember that after one of my successes in an international competition, it was in the late 1970s, some American ladies signed me up to the International League of Women Composers (…). And thus, I used to receive their monthly newsletter. Thanks to them I figured how it worked, how it flourished, what these American women of my profession were actually doing and after a few years I was sure that this method would never be for me, certainly not. Nowadays there is also a European organization of this sort, in Italy – “Donne in Musica". I observe how they are fighting for performances, fighting for performances. While all you have to do is to turn on the Internet, there are plenty of offers: some need a piece for this festival, some for that conference. So I just simply send my scores and see if I succeed or not. And this is in my opinion the only reasonable way not to dishonour yourself, not to get humiliated (…).137
The composers express their disapproval for those initiatives also through the language – both Zielińska and Kulenty call them “ghettos”, which suggests that it might be a common way to refer to such organisations in Poland. Hanna Kulenty says:
I always rebelled against being performed in such ghettos as "women’s music", "female composers", "festival of female composers". I simply said: "No. Either I am an equal as a composer or thank you”. (…) I think that here, in the West, this issue [of inequality] is more pronounced [than in Poland]. And, as a consequence, people gather into such women’s ghettos. For example, recently I’ve received an order for a saxophone quartet for an event where only female composers will be performed. Moreover, I have to find myself a patron from the past, Jesus Christ...and on top of that she has to be from the nineteenth century. So I think to myself, who am I going to choose...I say: okay, Maria Szymanowska, at least I’ve heard something about her (laughs). It just seems artificial, forced.138
In the above anecdote, Kulenty shows that she rather treats the activity typical for female composers’ associations with a grain of salt. It seems that she finds them a bit ridiculous and, as she says, “forced”. This is clearly a consequence of the fact that she has never felt discriminated in the country and of her strong inner conviction that as a composer she is in no way different from men. For this reason, she even goes further and expresses her disapproval for using feminist perspectives on art. She says:
I believe we’ve been created equal for everything. (...) That some artists, mostly women, have not been allowed to join this profession is another thing. But we should not make any differentiations. I actually think that the departments dealing with feminism or gender in art shouldn’t be established [at
137 Zielińska, interviewed by the author, September 2016. 138 Kulenty, interviewed by the author, September 2016. 60
universities] ... "Women’s art”? Absolutely not. (…) Now the times have changed and I also feel strong enough as a composer, as a creator, so it no longer makes any difference to me whether I am [performed] with men or with women; but I prefer mixed company.139
What is interesting, is that she points out she now allows herself to be performed in an exclusively female company mainly because she feels like her position is established. This unveils that she perceives being performed only among women as something that inherently threatens the prominence of a woman composer. being performed It is important in that context to note that Krystyna Moszumańska-Nazar recalls in her memoirs that her career had started for good particularly thanks to winning the competition in Buenos Aires, that was organised especially for female composers.140 Unfortunately, she does not comment on the idea of competitions for female composers in any way, and she does not refer to the problem of being a woman composer anywhere else in the memoirs. Still, she emphasises that it was exactly the Buenos Aires competition that turned out to be a starting point for a wider career, so one can expect her opinion on such initiatives would probably be less critical than their younger colleagues’. Another context where composers’ reluctance to identify themselves as women composers occurs is when they have to choose between the feminine and the masculine form of the word “composer”. In the Polish language the masculine form of the word is “kompozytor”, while the feminine version only requires adding an ending “-ka” in order to obtain “kompozytorka”. While most nouns in Polish have two forms, feminine and masculine, it is quite common to use masculine form with regard to women in certain cases. Sometimes the reason is that the feminine version has never been necessary – this is usually the case when the noun designates a job hardly ever performed by women, for instance a soldier or a miner. But very often the feminine form is avoided despite the fact that it would actually be useful as women do perform certain profession. In that case, the reason is that the feminine version is considered by many people as implicitly less serious and automatically making the person called with the feminine form less prominent. Lidia Zielińska admits that at the beginning of her career, she preferred to be called the masculine version and only later she stopped paying attention to it so much and came to terms with the feminine version as more natural:
“Kompozytorka” sounds slightly dismissive in my opinion. There was a time when in Polish aesthetics and musicology there was a discussion about women’s art, its special features. And while I have never observed those features in my female colleagues’ pieces, I could give some names of the male ones
139 Ibid. 140 Moszumańska-Nazar, “Szkic biograficzny”, 146-147. 61
who perfectly met the requirements of women’s art (laughs). (…) So at the time I found the form “kompozytorka” a little disrespectful, derogatory, well, because this is how it sounds in Polish, with the suffix (…). But now it just makes me laugh. (…) Talking about myself like: "I, the composer [“kompozytor”], I composed something" sounds funny, it doesn’t sound good. So let it be “kompozytorka”.141
Hanna Kulenty in turn still prefers to avoid the feminine form even today. She said:
I use the form “kompozytor” on purpose (…), because we say “profesor”, not “profesorka” and we say “minister”, not “ministerka”. Just a composer, a man – creator. Man. Creator. I am a creator.142
In order to present the inner ambivalence of female composers’ attitude toward gender, one last pattern should be mentioned. Namely, that the composers do address the problem of gender inequality and discrimination. They say:
In fact, even now many men still believe that music – art in general - can only be created by men. That it is only them who understand metaphysics, whatever it would mean, that it is them who are capable of deeper feelings and that they are better in all strategy games, and composition is a game. But we already know that in fact it is women who are better managers, better strategists.143
The problem [of gender] exists. You can’t say there is no problem at all, even nowadays. The problem exists, but definitely not to the same extent as it did in the 1950s and the 1960s, and of course even earlier, in the nineteenth century. (...) I think it is definitely much better now. The world has moved forward, women are emancipated (in some situations even too much and it can work against them at times) and the access to professions such as a composer or a plane pilot is open for them. It is perhaps not as widely open as for men, but it’s open.144
Unfortunately, we live in the age of patriarchy. In the cultures of matriarchy, people live a better life. Women indeed have this sense, it is them who are called upon to give birth to children, not men. Women live longer, they are more sensitive. I adore women and I think they have a great strength. It is truly a pity that they are so discriminated against. If we reversed the world in this aspect, it would probably look different. And what does it look like right now? We all see. And who’s in charge? Men.145
To sum up, the interviewed composers, perfectly aware of the injustice lurking out there in musical world, seem to have learned to protect themselves from it by marking themselves off from other women composers. On top of that, developing their careers in the country that gave them great conditions to grow and – in comparison to the West – a good position in the composers’ community, inevitably must have led to the fact that their attitude towards gender
141 Zielińska, interviewed by the author, September 2016. 142 Kulenty, interviewed by the author, September 2016. 143 Zielińska, interviewed by the author, September 2016. 144 Sikora, interviewed by the author, September 2016. 145 Kulenty, interviewed by the author, September 2016. 62
was, and still is, fundamentally different from their colleagues in the West. Their experiences, memories and opinions clearly unveil the ambivalence that characterises both the situation of female composers in communist Poland and their general attitude towards the problem of gender in a composer’s profession.
63
Conclusion. The ambivalence of communist regime’s impact and its consequences
The complex interplay between the communist regime, musical life and composers’ gender in Poland between 1945-1989 resulted in an inner paradox, already mentioned as a kick-off point for this work, emerging when one tries to diagnose the state of a “gender problem” within the classical music community of the discussed period. The origin of this paradox seems to lie in the fact that the communist reality affected the status of female composers in ways that were disparate and sometimes even contradictory, which rendered its general impact very ambivalent. On the one hand, as has been presented in the previous chapters, the cultural life and the situation on the musical scene arranged by the state worked in favour of female composers’ professional activity. They had the access to conservatory education, started in compositional competitions and benefited from rich opportunities for performances provided thanks to the state’s generous funding allocated to culture. Moreover, they did not experience open gender discrimination since it was officially forbidden by the communist authorities and they were welcome in the Polish Composer’s Union - the most important institution for composers and musicologists. On top of that, there was a striking gap between their situation and the struggles of female composers living in the West, which definitely showed the system they lived in in an even better light. On the other hand, the very same system caused several troubles, which have in fact rendered both the situation of female composers and the status of gender in musical discourse problematic. While these troubles might have been systematically disregarded in previous scholarship, in light of the materials and arguments invoked above, they come across as particularly valid. The first one of them is how socialist realism ideology contributed to eliminating the topic of gender from musical discourse. As has been discussed in the second chapter, by depersonalizing the figure of composer, socialist realism deprived the notion of composer of a gender, which also became one of the political tools sustaining the official gender equality agenda in the country. This leads straight to the second problem, which was the fact that the official, imposed gender equality did not necessarily manifested itself in the real life (which was proved by the numbers presenting women’s participation in musical life in the first chapter) and also did not eliminate discriminative behaviours within the society. And similarly to how giving women political, labour and reproductive rights did not truly eliminate inequalities in the society, welcoming women composers in the official system and bragging 64
about promoting female artists internationally did not truly deal with the gender problem in music in all its aspects. There were several consequences of this situation, and some of them are still valid nowadays. First of all, the avoidance of the discussion about where to place female composers in a discourse and the absence of attempts to negotiate their status in the society, have resulted in the fact that the way of perceiving female composers – both by the society and by themselves – has remained stuck between the two patterns described by Marcia Citron and presented in the second chapter of this work: either recognizing a female composer and integrating her with a male tradition by detaching her from her gender, “marking her off from other female composers and women in general”, or acknowledging her femaleness but automatically discrediting her competence as composer. When the latter attitude would come about, female composers would experience either subtle or evident cases of gender discrimination – such as Kisielewski’s press review saying that Grażyna Bacewicz composed “a ‘red-blooded piece’ of healthy and tasty music written with a male-like creative power”146 or when the conservatory male professors from the older generation would “officially not accept female students in their class”. Their music would also often be judged through the lens of gender stereotypes, and they would be attributed some features typically considered as male based on the fact that their music did not contain musical elements commonly classified as female. When the former attitude (cutting oneself off from their gender) would in turn be – consciously or not – chosen, suddenly gender disappeared into thin air. This path has become very common during the discussed period and with all probability has been perpetuated by the aforementioned process of depersonalizing and degendering composers. From the political viewpoint, men and women in Poland were perfectly equal. If addressing one’s gender could potentially undermine this perfect picture, the best was to simply not address it at all. This was transferred to the field of composition and resulted in how the discourse about female composers has been shaped. In fact, it manifests itself the most in the way female composers have themselves dealt their gender throughout their careers. As has been shown in chapter 3, female composers who were professionally active during communist times usually: 1. Stated that women composers have to sacrifice more and work harder in order to perform their profession, because as women they need to first, prove themselves and second, combine work with raising children;
146 “Grażyna Bacewicz, Koncert na orkiestrę smyczkową”. 65
2. At the same time did not picture it as unjust; 3. Admitted that they had preferred to be called with a male version of the Polish word “composer” - at least up to the moment when they achieved a reputable status as composers; 4. Described Western organisations for women composers as “ghettos”, emphasizing their irrelevance to their comprehension of composer’s profession and questioning validity of such associations. This shows, that these composers hold a conviction that addressing their gender or their gender- specific aspects of performing composer’s profession (i.e. combining it with having children) would be possibly risky for their prominence as composers. Complaining about the inequalities within the division of household work, using the female version of the word “composer” or being in favour of women claiming the opportunity to perform their pieces based on their gender – this would all shift the attention away from the idea of a gender-free composer and the pivotality of their music towards the more down-to-earth fact, which is that being a composer is an experience in no way identical for men and women. And while the composers, whose testimonies have been studied in this work, might in fact not have experienced their family commitments as problematic and might have indeed functioned very well in the musical environment of their times, it should be remembered that these are the testimonies of women composers who in the end all became successful in their careers. Thus the remaining question is always how many of them dropped out along the way. Furthermore, I believe that the poor state of feminist musicology studies in Poland, which has been discussed in the introduction to this work, was – and still is – strongly underpinned by perpetuating the “degendering” attitude by composers, journalists and musicologists. Along with the possible other reasons already mentioned before (such as the backlash in musicology after strong communist propaganda, the problematic status of feminism in Poland, the ambivalent influence of Grażyna Bacewicz’s prominence), the common practice of erasing women composers’ gender from the conversations, interviews and individual narratives powers the vicious circle of not studying gender as part of musical reality. This is probably one of the most tangible and valid consequences of not challenging this dichotomist choice we have been left with – either to not treat women composers seriously or to disconnect them from their gender. In the long run, I believe the fundamental question is: do female composers really have to fear losing their prominence or losing the appreciation for their music if they explicitly address inequalities? Do they really need to accept and not challenge the fact that they have to put more
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effort into their career in order to become successful? These questions again show that the problem of gender needs to be discussed and negotiated in Polish musicology. It should no longer be disregarded only because “there are female composers in Polish music history” or because “they had it easier than in the West”. I strongly hope that the arguments I presented in this work will make the beginning of such a discussion soon emerge. Moreover, it would be highly recommended for the future research to involve a study on other Eastern European countries’ situation in the field of feminist musicology in order to gain more awareness about the similarities and differences in the region.
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“Konferencja kompozytorów w Łagowie Lubuskim w dniach od 5. VIII do 8. VIII 1949. Protokół”. Ruch Muzyczny, October 1949.
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Kulenty, Hanna. Interview with Tomasz Cyz. Ruch muzyczny, July 2014.
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Mycielski, Zygmunt. “O zadaniach Związku Kompozytorów Polskich”. Ruch muzyczny, October 1949.
Scott, Joan W. “Gender: a useful category of analysis”. The American historical review 91, No. 5 (1986): 1053-1075.
Sikora, Eżbieta. Interview with BoardroomMum. Accessed October 4, 2016. http://www.boardroommum.com/interviews-archive/elzbieta-sikora/.
Sikora, Eżbieta. Inteview with Wojciech Sitarz. “Gdyby nie trema, zostałaby pianistką”. Wojciech Sitarz, 8 May 2011. Accessed October 4, 2016. https://wojciechsitarz.wordpress.com/2011/05/08/gdyby-nie-trema-zostalaby- pianistka-%E2%80%93-rozmowa-z-elzbieta-sikora/.
Sokorski, Włodzimierz. “Ku realizmowi socjalistycznemu w muzyce”. Ruch muzyczny, October 1949.
Thomas, Adrian. “File 750: Composers, politics and the Festival of Polish Music (1951)”. Polish music journal 5, No. 1 (2002), accessed July 23, 2016, http://pmc.usc.edu/PMJ/issue/5.1.02/thomasfile.html.
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Dictionary issues
Norris, Christopher. “Socialist realism”. In The New Grove Dictionary of music and musicians, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrell, vol. 23: 599-600. London: MacMillan, 2001.
Solie, Ruth A. “Feminism”. In The New Grove Dictionary of music and musicians, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrell, vol. 8: 664-667. London: MacMillan, 2001.
Unpublished interviews
Gwizdalanka, Danuta. Interviewed by the author. Tape recording. Skype conversation, April 13, 2016.
Kizińska, Karolina. Interviewed by the author. Tape recording. Skype conversation, April 13, 2016.
Kulenty, Hanna. Interviewed by the author. Tape recording. Arnhem, September 13, 2016.
Sikora, Elżbieta. Interviewed by the author. Tape recording. Skype conversation, September 13, 2016.
Zielińska, Lidia. Interviewed by the author. Tape recording. Utrecht, September 15, 2016.
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Figures
Table 1. Female members of the Polish Composers’ Union’s Board between 1945-1989...... 17 Table 2. Men and women in Polish Composers’ Union’s Board between 1945-1989...... 19 Table 3. Female composers at Warsaw Autumn Festival between 1956-1989...... 26 Graph 1. Female participation in Warsaw Autumn Festival between 1956-1989...... 27 Table 4. The features of formalism and socialist realism and their consequences for composers...... 34 Illustration 1. Eugeniusz Grotto-Ślepikowski, Traktorzystka, 1952...... 40
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Appendix 1
Female members of Polish Composers’ Union between 1945-1989147
Composers Joined in Musicologists Joined in 1 Andrault de Langeron 1956-1958 (+)148 Bauman-Szulakowska Jolanta 1986 (Białkiewiczówna Irena) 2 Bacewicz Grażyna 1945-1969 Bilińska Jolanta 1987 3 Bancer Teresa 1963 Bobrowska Jadwiga 1979 4 Bortkun-Szpotańska 1984 Bogdany-Popielowa Wanda 1972 Katarzyna 5 Boulanger Nadia 1957-1979 (+) Bogucka Aleksandra 1972 6 Bruzdowicz-Tittel 1968 Brzezińska Barbara 1968 Joanna 7 Buczkówna Barbara 1974-1993 (+) Chechlińska Zofia 1961 8 Drège-Schielowa Łucja 1947-1962 (+) Chłopicka Regina 1981 9 Dziewulska Maria 1952 Chmara-Żaczkiewicz Barbara 1977 10 Garr Wiesława Alicja 1979 Chylińska Teresa 1963 11 Garztecka-Jarzębska 1951-1963 (+) Czekanowska-Kuklińska Anna 1964 Irena 12 Grządziel (Grzondziel- 1949-1993 (+) Dadak-Kozicka Katarzyna 1977 Majzel) Eleonora 13 Hussar Małgorzata 1983 Dahling Ewa 1991 14 Iszkowska Zofia 1948 Danecka-Szopowa Krystyna 1963 15 Klechniowska Anna- 1945-1973 (+) Dziębowska Elżbieta 1965 Maria 16 Krzanowska Grażyna 1979 Fabiańska Zofia 1980 17 Kulenty Hanna 1986 Falenciak Joanna 1981-1989 18 Kunkel Renata 1984 Galińska Elżbieta 1980 19 Maciejasz-Kamińska 1976-1988 Gąsiorowska Małgorzata 1982 Anna 20 Markiewiczówna 1945-1982 (+) Gorczycka Monika-Izabella 1960-1962 (+) Władysława 21 Matuszczak Bernadetta 1965 Grzenkowicz Izabella 1973 22 Moszumańska-Nazar 1957 Gwizdalanka Danuta 1986 Krystyna 23 Niewiadomska- 1971 Hanuszewska-Schaefferowa 1970 Michałowicz Barbara Mieczysława
147 Erhardt, 50 lat Związku Kompozytorów Polskich, 6-15. 148 The date of death. 73
24 Pfeiffer Irena 1951 Helman Zofia 1965 25 Piątek Katarzyna 1989 Idaszak Danuta 1965 26 Piechowska Alina 1967-1981 Jasińska Danuta 1979 27 Podgórska Ewa 1988 Kaczorowska-Guńkiewicz 1966 Mirosława 28 Pokrzywińska Maria 1987 Kłobukowska Jadwiga 1963 29 Pstrokońska-Nawratil 1973 Kobylańska Krystyna 1966 Grażyna 30 Ptaszyńska Marta 1988 Kotyńska Marzanna 1968-1978 31 Puchalska Barbara 1988 Lachowska Stefania 1950-1966 (+) 32 Sikora Elżbieta 1978 De Laveaux Teresa 1965-1974 33 Skowrońska Janina 1957-1992 (+) Lissa Zofia 1948-1980 (+) 34 Synowiec Ewa 1975 Łobaczewska Stefania 1948-1963 (+) 35 Szajna-Lewandowska 1957-1994 (+) Malecka Teresa 1980 Jadwiga 36 Szpineter-Kuniecka 1975-1983 Matracka-Kościelny Alicja 1983 Maria 37 Szymańska Iwonka B. 1973 Morawska Katarzyna 1965 38 Trębicka Maria 1984-1985 (+) Motylewska-Wielopolska Bożena 1966-1971 39 Wnuk-Nazarowa 1976-1984 Nowak Anna 1989 Joanna 40 Zakrzewska- 1975 Nowak-Romanowicz Alina 1955-1994 (+) Nikiproczyk Barbara 41 Zawadzka-Gołosz 1989 Obniska Ewa 1976 Anna 42 Zdechlikiewicz Jolanta 1989 Paja-Stach Jadwiga 1986 43 Zielińska Lidia 1981 Pamuła Maria Teresa 1974 44 Piotrowska Maria 1985 45 Poniatowska Irena 1969 46 Porębowiczowa Anna 1960-1988(+) 47 Simon Alicja 1948-1958 (+) 48 Smoleńska-Zielińska Barbara 1989 49 Sobieska Jadwiga 1948 50 Sokołowska-Chwedczuk Zofia 1974-1982 51 Stanilewicz-Kamionka Maria 1978-1984 (+) 52 Stęszewska Zofia 1965 53 Szczepańska Maria 1948-1962 (+) 54 Szczepańska-Malinowska 1983 Elżbieta
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55 Szepietowska Hanna 1967-1980 (+) 56 Szoka Marta 1988 57 Szwarcman Dorota 1988 58 Szweykowska Anna 1980 59 Tarnawska-Kaczorowska 1977 Krystyna 60 Trojanowicz Alicja 1979 61 Turło Teresa Daliła 1961 62 Turska Irena 1963 63 Wilkowska-Chomińska Krystyna 1952 64 Windakiewicz Helena 1948-1956 (+) 65 Winowicz Krystyna 1985 66 Witkowska-Zaremba Elżbieta 1974 67 Woźna-Stankiewicz Małgorzata 1978 68 Woźniak Jolanta 1977 71 Zabłocka Jadwiga 1966 72 Zduniak Maria 1986 73 Zwolińska Elżbieta 1969 74 Żerańska-Kominek Sławomira 1977 75 Żurawska-Witkowska Alina 1987
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Appendix 2
The performances of Polish female composers at Warsaw Autumn Festival, 1956-1989149
Year Composer Piece 1956 Grażyna Bacewicz - String Quartet No. 4 - Concerto for String Orchestra - Overture for orchestra 1958 Grażyna Bacewicz - Variations for Orchestra - Ten Concert Etudes for Piano 1959 Grażyna Bacewicz Music for Strings, Trumpets and Percussion 1960 Grażyna Bacewicz - 4th String Quartet - The Adventure of King Arthur 1961 Grażyna Bacewicz Pensieri Notturni 1962 Grażyna Bacewicz Concerto for Symphony Orchestra 1963 Grażyna Bacewicz Cello Concerto No. 2 Krystyna Moszumańska-Nazar Music for Strings 1964 Grażyna Bacewicz - Music for Strings, Trumpets and Percussion - Quartet for Four Cellos 1965 Grażyna Bacewicz Musica Sinfonica in tre movimenti Krystyna Moszumańska-Nazar Hexaèdre 1966 Grażyna Bacewicz String Quartet No. 7 1967 Grażyna Bacewicz Contradizione Bernadetta Matuszczak Chamber Drama 1968 Krystyna Moszumańska-Nazar Interpretations 1969 Grażyna Bacewicz Violin Concerto No. 7 1970 Grażyna Bacewicz Concerto for Viola and Orchestra 1971 Krystyna Moszumańska-Nazar Variazioni Concertanti 1972 Grażyna Bacewicz Concerto for String Orchestra 1973 Grażyna Bacewicz Desire Bernadetta Matuszczak Salmi per un gruppo di cinque Krystyna Moszumańska-Nazar Pour orchestra 1975 Barbara Buczek Anekumena Krystyna Moszumańska-Nazar Bel canto 1976 Grażyna Bacewicz Concerto for String Orchestra Elżbieta Sikora Journey No. 2 1977 Grażyna Bacewicz In una parte
149 Translation of the table included in Anna Brzezicka-Kamińska’s work (Brzezicka-Kamińska, “Polskie kompozytorki na festiwalu Warszawska Jesień”, 40-44.) 76
Krystyna Moszumańska-Nazar Challenge Marta Ptaszyńska Quodlibet 1979 Krystyna Moszumańska-Nazar Quartetto per archi Marta Ptaszyńska Un grand sommeil noir 1980 Krystyna Moszumańska-Nazar Rhapsody No. 2 Grażyna Pstrokońska-Nawratil Icarus 1981 Bernadetta Matuszczak Canticum per voci e orchestra Krystyna Moszumańska-Nazar Quartetto per archi Grażyna Pstrokońska-Nawratil Arabesque Marta Ptaszyńska Dream Lands, Magic Spaces 1983 Grażyna Bacewicz Concerto for String Orchestra Joanna Bruzdowicz Dum spiro spero Krystyna Moszumańska-Nazar String Quartet No. 2 Lidia Zielińska Saturday Dance 1984 Grażyna Bacewicz Divertimento Grażyna Krzanowska String Quartet No. 2 1985 Marta Ptaszyńska La novella d’inverno 1986 Joanna Bruzdowicz String Quartet No. 1 La vita Hanna Kulenty Ad unum Krystyna Moszumańska-Nazar From End to End Percussion Marta Ptaszyńska Moon Flowers Magdalena Długosz Pulsations Anna Zawadzka Girare 1987 Grażyna Bacewicz String Quartet No. 7 Barbara Buczek Transgressio (String Quartet No. 2) Hanna Kulenty Quinto Grażyna Pstrokońska-Nawratil BIS*JOKE Lidia Zielińska Sonnet about the Tatra Mountains 1988 Magdalena Długosz Mictlan No. 2 Renata Kunkel Symphony Hanna Kulenty Ride Krystyna Moszumańska-Nazar Fantasy Elżbieta Sikora La tête d’Orphée II 1989 Hanna Kulenty Symphony No. 1
Krystyna Moszumańska-Nazar Fresco Elżbieta Sikora Rappel II
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Appendix 3
Interviews150
Hanna Kulenty, interviewed by Marta Beszterda. The interview took place in Arnhem on September 13th 2016.
MB: How did you perceive the problem of gender in a composer’s profession as a composition student in the 1980s?
HK: First and foremost: I do not want to say that I am a great fan of communism (we called it socialism) the way it looked in Poland, because it was how it was: there was poverty, there was nepotism, there was socialist realism, some things were imposed...it was a regime, to put it more simply. Having said that, it wasn’t the idea that was wrong. The idea was very good. I remember a conversation with socialists from the West, such as Luigi Nono, who absolutely didn’t understand the attitude of Poles... He said "how is it that you can’t love communism, it’s so great."
And here, in the Netherlands, there is socialism, I can say it especially when I compare living here and in Poland, there is socialism, but understood differently than it was in communist Poland. In Poland, you know, a group of men grabbed the power and exploited a beautiful idea. So we suffered a lot, of course, because it was all poverty and terror. But the good thing was that everyone was equal, in the sense that all women and men worked, everyone was getting into college. I didn’t have any kind of inferiority complex as a woman. The idea of feminism? I didn’t get it at all. I was just a composer, you know. And I use the form "kompozytor” [male form] on purpose here, because we say “profesor”, not “profesorka” and we say “minister”, not “ministerka”. Just a composer, a man – creator. Man. Creator. I am a creator. Because, as I said, we all studied as equals, I didn’t have these problems.
But when in 1985, after winning a composition competition in the Netherlands, I started out on my career as a composer for good (...), I started travelling around the world and I noticed something very interesting: female composers very often treated me like a sensation... How can you actually live and create and have orders, being a woman?". And I would reply, very relaxed, “What do you mean – how? I’m just a good composer, I get orders, I compose, I’m happy to simply do what I do and how I do it, and life in general is beautiful." (laughs). They couldn’t really understand me at all, and frankly speaking, I also couldn’t understand what their problem was. I had heard a little bit about feminism at the time, but I was somehow not interested in it at all (...).
Anyway, it was not until I started to live in the Netherlands that I found out that it was harder for women. And it was then that realised what it was all about. In the Western countries where there was communism,
150 Some parts of the conversations are not included in the transcripts. Those are mostly digressions, repetitions and the fragments irrelevant to the main subject of this work. 78
where we thought there was "oh, democracy, capitalism, this is the goal we should strive for", it turned out it wasn’t as great as we thought. There was money and there was no poverty – that’s one thing, but for example, women were treated worse, and that’s another thing. I started to experience it first-hand.
For example, during conversations with my [Dutch] husband and with women living here, I learned that my mother-in-law, once she gave birth to her child, automatically had to give up working. So did all the women who, as late as in the 1960s, decided to get married. They had to stop working and that was the law. My husband even read to me something like a "manual for women" from those days. Absolutely unbelievable. Things like “By this and that time you already have to be in the kitchen, then you need to wait with slippers for your husband, you need to have the newspaper ready for him", literally. I was laughing, I said they took it from the Middle Ages, but that’s the way it was (...).
Coming back to the socialism, communism in Poland, you need to remember that university education was for free, health care was for free. Entering the conservatory, I was “angry and young”, I didn’t care at all whether anyone would look at me differently because of my gender. In fact, my professor, Włodzimierz Kotoński, may he rest in peace, did not officially accept women in his class. So such chauvinistic traces were present among the men of the old school (and the young ones too). In fact, right after I started my studies, at the second lesson I had with him, I announced that I was pregnant and soon getting married. And I remember how later my fellow composition students told me that they had laughed at me saying "This one! She got into hot water”. But in the end I proved my skills not only to women, but in general to my colleagues-composers, by making an international career. And, as I’ve already said, I did not really have any problems as a woman composer; I only started to notice the issues of gender inequality once I was already here in the West. So, once again, I am not a fan of communism as it was (…). But we could all get education and we could all be equal (...).
Unfortunately, we live in the age of patriarchy. In the cultures of matriarchy, people live a better life. Women indeed have this sense, it is them who are called upon to give birth to children, not men. Women live longer, they are more sensitive. I adore women and I think they have a great strength. It is truly a pity that they are so discriminated against. If we reversed the world in this aspect, it would probably look different. And what does it look like right now? We all see. And who’s in charge? Men.
I always rebelled against being performed in such ghettos as "women’s music", "female composers", "festival of female composers". I simply said: "No. Either I am an equal as a composer or thank you”. Now the times have changed and I also feel strong enough as a composer, as a creator, so it no longer makes any difference to me whether I am [performed] with men or with women; but I prefer mixed company.
Besides, I believe that it absolutely doesn’t matter whether someone is male or female. Because it is no way transferable into music. My music has often been described simply as a music written by a strong
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man. When they realised that Kulenty is a woman, they thought "oh, it must be a big, fat, strong butch". So when it turned out I’m a tiny chick, well, there was a great surprise. If we, for example, put here on the table different scores by unknown composers, and we didn’t know who is who, I bet no one would ever guess what was written by a woman and what was written by a man.
In an interview with Tomasz Cyz you mentioned that abroad you used to be invited to participate in a sort of little “chats” organised especially to talk with female composers about gender issues in the composer’s profession.
Yes, I was, for example in Denmark and England. They asked me, "How do you do it?" (...). At the time I didn’t understand at all what they meant. I just had never had these problems. If I had been brought up here, I might have this inferiority complex as a female composer, but no, I just don’t have it.
And it is mirrored in my professional situation. For example, in Bydgoszcz, where I’ve had my composition class since last year, there are three professors of composition: Zbyszek Bargielski, Bettina Skrzypczak and me. So there are two women, two strong women more and more students are coming to learn from.
The world is full of so many fantastic female composers, and now finally they have a chance and they can compose, because, well, back in the days, only those who had money could compose, and men only. People don’t know who Maria Szymanowska was, because in those days only men would compose music, and not just anyone, but those who had money (...). I believe we’ve been created equal for everything. (...) That some artists, mostly women, have not been allowed to join this profession is another thing. But we should not make any differentiations. I actually think that the departments dealing with feminism or gender in art shouldn’t be established [at universities] ... "Women’s art”? Absolutely not.
I think that this need to differentiate feminine and masculine art (and music) was a strong reaction to the fact that the history for so long remained silent about female individuals and that everything was always implicitly male.
Yes, I know, because we were indeed absent. We were kept away. So when we were finally allowed, men had to find a way to indulge themselves by saying "Oh, but that’s a woman... oh, she’s got balls...” And why has she got balls? Why when a woman is strong, we immediately say that she’s got balls? In fact, I know many guys without balls. It all depends on character. (...)
Do you think in Poland we could use a discussion about the role of gender in music?
I think it’s not needed in Poland, because we don’t have such a burden, so to speak. I’m from the communist era, I raise my children in an absolute equality, and they do not have any gender issues. Neither do I, because when I "woke up", I was already a fully shaped composer [“kompozytorką” –
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female form]. A fully shaped composer [she corrects herself and says “kompozytorem” – the male form]. Maybe if I had come here just as a beginner, at the start of my studies, maybe then. But fortunately, now I’m a fully developed composer and no one can really tell me things about female or male music, I simply write my music and that’s it. It must be good – that’s what matters. That it’s music people want to listen to, want to play.
So I think that here, in the West, this issue is more pronounced. And, as a consequence, people gather into such women’s ghettos. For example, recently I’ve received an order for a saxophone quartet for an event where only female composers will be performed. Moreover, I have to find myself a patron from the past, Jesus Christ...and on top of that she has to be from the nineteenth century. So I think to myself, who am I going to choose...I say: okay, Maria Szymanowska, at least I’ve heard something about her (laughs). It just seems artificial, forced. In the same way as coming up with all sorts of ideologies about composing the piece seems artificial. I could come up with two totally different interpretations of the exact same musical piece (…).
So what is your opinion on political art?
For me, politics and art are two completely separate issues. I can be politically involved and write a great piece: an anthem, a bugle call, a manifesto. But I don’t need to be politically involved in order to write a great piece.
And it’s a different story when someone is politically involved and writes trashy music only to have it performed, only because they are in the so-called club (...). For example, right now, I could write oratorios for the anniversary of the baptism of Poland etc., and approach the right people, and be flooded with orders. But I just simply don’t give a damn about it, I don’t give a damn. I want to write music (...) and this is what I want to be my responsibility. And whether I support this or that political party is a completely different problem.
Quite frankly, I’m afraid of socialist realism to return, and looking at the current situation in Poland, this is what is beginning to happen right now (...). I believe art should be apolitical.
Have you ever experienced censorship?
There was a kind of censorship, in some aspect, at the time when I was studying. You couldn’t say, for example, that you like the music of Shostakovich. It was a big faux-pas. (...) At this time, you just had to write the “noises and scrapings” type of music. And I’ve always hated these 20th-century techniques and wanted to smuggle my music. For just as not every set of words is poetry, not every set of sounds is music. (...) So I had to smuggle my music through the censorship of the 20th-century techniques. When I started conservatory studies, it was impossible to compose tonally in Poland (...). Later on, this changed, but at the time it was “the more scrunches, the better” type of thing (...). In that aspect, I had to face some kind of censorship. 81
But actually I believe that censorship is good, because it makes the material limited. I tell my students “listen, here is what you have, this and that material, this and that ambitus, and you absolutely shouldn’t exceed it” in order for them to learn how to pull out the most energy from the material (...) instead of immediately reaching for new bricks, new toys. So as a matter of fact, censorship is a good thing, because it makes us learn to smuggle art, to smuggle ourselves. We learn to walk the labyrinths, instead of just always walking the straight path. That would be the easiest. And this way, we learn something.
(…)
And do you think that a composer has certain responsibilities towards the public, the society?
Yes, of course. I think they absolutely do. Well, of course I live in peacetime. But I am socially engaged by reflecting my experiences, also personal tragedies, in my music. There are various situations that affect me, I don’t make music in a purely mathematical way; I’m very emotional. First comes the intuition and all the emotions (...). Anyway, for me conceptualism is negation of art. Either you make a concept, and then you just make things up, or you create, where creation means that this spiritual element of intuition is involved when you just comprehend metaphysics, and not some cerebral concept.
So it is by all means social, connected with life. Let’s take my last piece, a string quintet "Smokey- White" (…). It’s a simple melody of the piano played with the background made of such signals, sounds, which I kept in mind after I participated in a KOD demonstration151 on March 9th. I was just walking surrounded by all these plastic trumpets, constantly playing the notes B♭ and A, and I entered into a trance. I was just walking with the crowd, at first the sound was annoying, but then I simply entered into a trance. And it carried me, I was carried by those sounds of those trumpets, and in my mind there was this sad, nostalgic melody of the piano, which was just a blend, completely mismatched with the trumpets, but exactly for this reason that you cannot see any point of convergence, there is this desire, this curiosity about where it’ll meet, somewhere outside the framework of the piece, somewhere far up, but where? And it’s pulling me. And I wrote this piece. So we can say that in a sense I am by all means social in my music. Because it hurts me, because it touches me, yes, the situation in Poland affects me, the situation in the world affects me. Only I’m not going to make a manifesto out of it, because in a sense it is my private matter. I just simply transmute my pain into music. (…) I feel like as a human I am a part of the planet, following the nature, and I am trying to give something in return, to breathe together with the nature. I take something, but I also give something back and this is my thanksgiving for being alive. This is my calling. That is why I say: an artist is something you are. I have to do it, it’s my calling. I have to hand it over, I’m sort of a filter.
151 KOD is an abbreviation for Komitet Obrony Demokracji (The Committee for the Defence of Democracy), a Polish oppositional civic organisation founded in 2015. 82
Besides, there is another social aspect that I care about a lot. It is for my music to truly get across to the people in orchestras who play it, to be almost contagious. And it’s happening. Orchestra musicians congratulate me after every concert, they thank me, they say that it is a real experience. They are playing and they are happy that this is what they are playing. And this is not a grandstand writing, this isn’t writing some easy notes that we are used to hearing. Because my notes are not easy. My notes are difficult. But my notes are true. And musicians can feel it. And I have a good relationship with orchestras, I am very glad that I am writing for orchestras, for big ensembles. I’m not afraid that they will laugh at me, hoot at me, reject me, no. Because everything I write is natural and honest and they pick it up (...). Of course: craft, technique, experience etc. [are also important] ... and what I have to communicate. A creator should have something to communicate. He needs to have something to hand over. Because what would be the point otherwise? It wouldn’t make any sense.
Thank you for the conversation.
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Elżbieta Sikora, interviewed by Marta Beszterda. The interview took place via Skype on September 13th 2016.
MB: Let’s start with the time when you studied composition at the conservatory in Warsaw. Were you the only female student in the department?
ES: Composition was in fact my second faculty. First, I studied sound engineering [1963-68], then I went to Paris for a two-year course in composition [1968-70] and then, when I came back, I returned to the Academy of Music in Warsaw to study composition [1970-77]. I don’t remember exactly, but I think there were five female students in total studying composition in the department at the time. I don’t remember the names, unfortunately, apart from Dorota Szwarcman [a very successful Polish publicist and critic]. And the number of male students was probably similar, maybe a little bit more, around seven. In any case, it was not easy to get in to the conservatory, but once you were a student, the studies in Warsaw were fantastic, both sound engineering and composition. Moreover, the professional start for young composers after the graduation was quite easy, facilitated, I would say. Usually there was some sort of a competition organised by the Polish Composers’ Union that young graduates took part in, and then if you at least received an honorable mention in such a competition, it was generally easier to start out on your career.
This ‘easy start’ was probably intertwined with a strong state patronage system over the culture.
Of course it was. Well, we need to remember it was generally, in the whole Europe, easier in the 1970s than it is now, not only in Poland. But of course the access to education in communist Poland was particularly good, which should not be overlooked. One thing is sure: in terms of education, communism was a great period. This was one of this system’s assets and I think it was organised that way for a purpose. The state wanted to have something to be proud of, and particularly to have artists that they could show off.
On the other hand, the state patronage system resulted in certain restrictions put on the freedom of musical language, didn’t it?
In my days not anymore. When I was a student, there were absolutely no aesthetic restrictions anymore. My memories of socialist realism are quite vague. I was still very young at the time, hence not particularly interested in the problem. And I was primarily focused on playing the piano, which was my main concern. Only later, while attending the Polish Composers’ Union meetings, did I realise how hard the 1950s had been for composers in Poland. What Lutosławski was forced to do for example, and so on. I hope it’s something that will never come back.
In one of the interviews, you said: "My career began in 1968, a very turbulent year, not only for music. Perhaps it was the spirit of this period that made me turn down everything that could be associated with the past1. Was the avant-garde music language that you chose a symptom of a 84
rebellion against the socialist realism aesthetics previously imposed in Poland? It must have been instilled in you to some extent.
Of course it was, but as I’ve already said, during the worst period I was still in high school, I studied, the piano, I didn’t even think about composition yet. Moreover, I was going to a lot of festivals, obviously with a great enthusiasm: first the Chopin festival, but then also the Warsaw Autumn. There I came in contact with this new, different music. It’s because the pieces performed during the first editions of the Warsaw Autumn were already very avant-garde.
And when I landed in Paris in 1968, after graduating from such technical studies as sound engineering, where I gained knowledge about electronics, I immediately got absorbed in the world of electronic music, electroacoustic music, which at the time was experimental by definition. This was generally a period of extreme avant-garde and as a young person - it is probably natural for everyone when they are young - I immediately joined this trend. It seemed to us then, we all agreed, that we had thrown away the key to tradition into, this deep well and that we would never look into it again. But of course later on it turned out that it was something we still needed and it was indispensable. I think every composer goes through different periods..."Personally, I started from such strict avant-garde composing, and then I obediently returned to studying composition at the conservatory, which is very telling.
Did you notice the gap between the communist bloc and Western Europe at the time, in the sense that it was much more difficult to be a composer for women in the West, while in Poland, thanks to the communism, gender equality was greater?
Yes, I did. First of all, the tradition of an independent woman had already been cherished for a long time in our country. For example, in Poland we gave women the right to vote much earlier than in other countries. But of course, as far as arts are concerned, the system of welfare state made it much easier to make art than it does now. The state promised a lot and it kept these promises. It was easier to live in general, but when it comes to artistic fields, it was particularly better organised.
Still, I would not exaggerate by making clear-cut divisions. After the period of all the political changes that have taken place in Poland, a period particularly difficult for art, there is now sort of a comeback of a model in which the state will look after artists through various institutes and so on. So I would not perceive things as black and white. For me, every system has its better and worse aspects.
But of course I remember that when I landed in France in 1968, I was constantly asked what it looked like to be a woman-composer. And it made me very surprised, because for me this question had never existed.
So when you went to Paris, it looked a little different at the time.
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A little different, yes, but I have to say that there were actually a lot of women at these courses. French, Canadian, and from other countries. It’s not that there were no women. But mind that in France there had also been Nadia Boulanger. So yes, it’s probably true that it’s generally more difficult for female composers, but the situation isn’t as tragic as some might think.
I understand that during the composition studies in Warsaw, the professors treated male and female students equally.
Absolutely. I started studying with Tadeusz Baird. It was his first year of teaching and he admitted he didn’t really know how to teach us because he actually hadn’t practiced this profession before. But we all had a fantastic relationship with him. (...) Then I was transferred to Zbigniew Rudziński, a very young professor at the time, and I was his first student (...). I think he was pleased to have a woman as his student. He treated us all equally, and both me and him were really satisfied with working together.
How would you compare the approach to women composers in Poland and abroad during the 1970s and 1980s?
A very strong movement of women musicians - not only composers - started up in the USA. They were organizing themselves into various associations etc. Personally, I was afraid to follow this path from the very beginning. I didn’t want to be classified as a member of such a group of women composers fighting for their rights, because it seems to me that one should fight with the means of music and not with such actions. Still, I do think it’s good sometimes to help those movements. For some time, I was even a member of such an association in the USA, but I’m not anymore.
The problem [of gender] exists. You can’t say there is no problem at all, even nowadays. The problem exists, but definitely not to the same extent as it did in the 1950s and the 1960s, and of course even earlier, in the nineteenth century. (...)
But there is no straight line, no simple rules you can just follow in order to find a way to be successful in this profession. You simply need to work, and women need to work a lot, as do men. Of course, it is for sure harder for women as they usually want to start a family, take some of this responsibility, have children. Which doesn’t exclude the possibility of being a professional composer, but of course doesn’t facilitate it.
In one of the interviews, you mentioned that a composer is always at work, which makes it harder to be a mother.
Yes, it’s true. Of course you can try and separate the time to compose and the time to take care of your child, and this is what I had to do when my child was little.
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I remember when I was writing my opera "Ariadna" for my diploma and at some point my son came into the room after 2 hours spent on his own, I guess he was 4 years old at the time, and said, "Mom, now I would really like to finally play with you a little bit" (laughs).
But of course, the day is 24 hours long and you can always find a way to gain satisfaction from both being a mom and being a composer. Besides, it is only a certain period of time when the kids are little. Then they grow up, leave the house, and you end up having a lot of free time, sometimes even too much.
During the first seven – eight editions of Warsaw Autumn Festival, Grażyna Bacewicz was the only Polish female composer performed. Later on, in the 1970s, more and more female names started to show up in the program. Was it considered something new or unusual that female composers started to be a significant part of the Festival?
At the time when I started to work as a professional composer, it was an absolutely normal thing. And as I said before, I always tried to forget that being a woman could possibly be problematic. Having said that, I am aware it could, but I see it more as just an additional factor you need to take into consideration when you choose this profession as a woman.
But of course for me it was not unusual at all that women presented their works at the Warsaw Autumn and I thought it was absolutely normal. I think most of my male colleagues felt the same way. We had already studied composition together, we were there together, men and women, so it was something you just had to acknowledge and deal with.
You left Poland for France in 1981, shortly before the martial law started in Poland. Were there any political reasons involved in your decision?
No, not at all. I left because I received a scholarship from the French government and the Ministry of Culture. So I took my child, because he was still too little to be left alone for 9 months, and I went to France. And it was in Paris where the information about the martial law in Poland found me. This was of course something that influenced my plans and I started prolonging my stay in France, until at some point it became permanent.
I can only imagine how hard it must have been to watch it all from abroad.
Yes, it was very difficult, it was a big shock for all of us. I remember that day very well, because at 5:00 in the morning I was awakened by a phone call from a family member who was also in Paris at the time, saying "Welcome, emigrant". This was the first moment when I realised it was going to be difficult. Then came a long hesitation: to return or not to return, and what to do with the whole situation. The 9- month perspective of course allowed me to take my time and think it over, it happened naturally. After having spent 9 months in Paris I felt like I had just started doing something there, so the decision to stay just made sense, I went with the flow. But for the first seven years I suffered a lot that I couldn’t visit
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Poland at all (I mean I could but it would be a particularly problematic return as I didn’t have a valid passport). Those seven years of separation were a really difficult period for me. Of course, since I started coming to Poland again, it’s been quite different. In the end. I am still a Pole and I don’t forget about it.
Since we’re already talking about these days, could you say anything more about the circumstances of creating "Janek Wiśniewski - December- Poland" (1982)?
Yes, of course. It was right after the martial law was proclaimed in Poland when I received an order from the Groupe de Recherche Musical to compose an electronic piece and started working in the studio. And initially I had a completely different plan, for a completely different piece. But under the influence of this particular event, of what had happened to us (the whole Paris was taking part in demonstrations, it was very important for all of us), I decided to compose one of the few of my pieces that you could name "political". I based it on 4 chords that originally accompany the song "Janek Wisniewski fell” composed spontaneously after the events of December 1970. The music is quite violent sometimes.
I didn’t want to refer to the situation of that particular moment, to the martial law, because it was too recent, too fresh. And I remembered very well the 1970s and the story of Janek Wiśniewski as I had lived for many years in Gdansk. I had it all lied down in my memory and it almost asked to be included in this piece.
(...)
Let’s come back to the subject of female composers. Most of them are usually reluctant to make any references to their gender. This is primarily because they are afraid to turn the attention away from their artistic output, right?
This is one of the reasons for sure. Besides, I’m not sure how to put it in order not to blunt, but if a woman, or anyone in general, decides to choose a profession such as composer, painter, sculptor, writer, it is obvious they will have to dedicate virtually their whole lives to it. And not everyone wants to sacrifice this much, and I’m not talking only about women. (...) There are so many pleasant things to do, like swimming in a river, going on holidays, so why would we compose, right? Something pushes us towards it and when it does, you just have to commit yourself. And I think this is the most important thing, regardless of gender. If this is the most important thing you want to do in your life, then the problem whether you're a man or a woman just no longer exists, because you’ll do it one way or another. Even if there are difficulties, whatever their size, even if your works end up in a sock drawer.
Do you think the situation in the composition world is getting better for female composers nowadays?
I think it is definitely much better now. The world has moved forward, women are emancipated (in some situations even too much and it can work against them at times) and the access to professions such as a
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composer or a plane pilot is open for them. It is perhaps not as widely open as for men, but it’s open. There are many brilliant and very interesting female individuals in the composition world: in France we have Kaija Saariaho, who has a great international career, in Poland we have Agata Zubel with her beautiful professional success. There are many names that I could list here.
I think it would be interesting to run some statistics about female composers in order to see how many among them are really successful and mean something. I have a feeling this would be a high percentage. Because once a woman actually decides to be a composer, then she really, consistently goes for it. Even when you look at my case: I was studying with four other girls and I don’t really know what happened to them afterwards (except Dorota Szwarcman, who made a brilliant use of her education and became a fabulous publicist and critic). I don’t really know anything about their lives, so I can’t be sure what they do, but I assume that if they were very active as composers, we would have probably heard about them at some point.
Thank you for the conversation.
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Lidia Zielińska, interviewed by Marta Beszterda. The interview took place in Utrecht on September 15th 2016.
MB: Was it a completely normal thing in the 1970s for women to study composition next to men?
LZ: Yes, absolutely. There had already been other female students in Poznań before me, for example, Małgorzata Nowak, Barbara Zakrzewska-Nikiporczyk... These were only single cases. But to me it wasn’t really relevant – I wanted to study composition and that’s it. And I wanted to be in Andrzej Koszewski’s class and that’s it. He accepted me in his class and it wasn’t until years later when I found out that he didn’t believe in the idea of a woman studying composition. He was convinced that once a female student got married and has a child, it would all go to hell. Because this was obviously the case with my predecessors, they stopped composing quite soon, except for Basia Zakrzewska. I also remember how later on, not only in Poznań but in the whole country (and it is so up until now), composition professors had a minimum number of students they needed to fill the class with (because otherwise they would have to teach other courses, like counterpoint, due to the obligatory teaching load), so what they did was when a pretty female student of music theory caught their eye, they would persuade her she had a big talent for composition and will certainly be a good composer, and this way they just kept their jobs safe. And this was unfortunately quite common, especially in the 1980s. However, there were also many great, determined girls who really wanted to study composition and who are right now functioning very well [as composers], both in Poland and – for the most part – abroad, because now that the world is open, it’s much easier. I think female conductors were in a much worse situation, for them it was really a drudgery. There was Ewa Michnik, and there was Agnieszka Duczmal in Poznań, well, really few people, and it was really hard for them.
Hard, because it wasn’t accepted in the academic and music community? They weren’t respected?
Exactly. In fact, even now many men still believe that music – art in general - can only be created by men. That it is only them who understand metaphysics, whatever it would mean, that it is them who are capable of deeper feelings and that they are better in all strategy games, and composition is a game. But we already know that in fact it is women who are better managers, better strategists.
You mentioned that many of the female composers who studied together with you later on started families and abandoned their careers. Were there many such cases?
Yes, many of them abandoned their careers, but it’s worth not only taking a look at women but also at men, who in the 1990s would also give up composing and, for example, open beauty salons or go to Hungary or Turkey to trade. So they were also abandoning their careers. Having said that, in general if you count those who graduated in composing and those who graduated in conducting, among the latter only every few years there was one who worked in his or her profession afterwards. And among the
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former, more people managed to work in their field; for example from time to time they write something for the theatre or for a commercial. And I feel like it has nothing to do with gender whatsoever.
Do you think the communist system made the situation of women composers in Poland easier?
Easier. Definitely easier. Before I became wise in that aspect, before I saw the light (which unfortunately happened very late), I had had the impression that women were really treated equally to men, also outside of the musical context. Moreover, in composition there was a great person: Grażyna Bacewicz. She must have been an amazing woman, well liked, well respected, and she had simply paved the way for us. So I would say it all depends on a single case. If a woman composer can make an impression, also on her male colleagues, from that moment they will perceive all of the other women differently. They will think “oh, what if there is actually a potential there” (of course followed by “it would be best not to let it come to the fore” but that’s another story) (laughs). All in all, it’s not that bad.
And when you first started travelling abroad for courses and meeting foreign composers, did you feel like the attitude towards female composers was different than in Poland?
Oh yes, oh yes. (...) The funny thing is that actually my first time abroad as a composer was here in Utrecht. It was just a few months after my graduation (…). I guess I was the only woman in this international company at the courses. And I do not recall any women there for several years in a row (...). Then in the 1990s, after 1989, when I already had a passport in my hand, I was travelling a lot to concerts and festivals, but I was aware that I was perceived as a kind of an oddity: "Oh, a woman, a woman from the East, let’s invite her, it’ll be fun and exotic". This "exoticism" of mine was based equally on both of these reasons – that I was a woman composer, and on top of that, I was from the former socialist bloc. I imagine I must have been a veritable oddity for them indeed, because back in 1989 (and even still 10 years later) people from the East were easily recognizable in the street, let alone on composition courses. But the moment it turned out that this woman composer from the East was also sensible and smart, the situation of course improved.
Nevertheless, I do still feel it, especially in Germany: “Oh, a woman, and she’s in electronics. At that age?!” (because now also my age plays a role, obviously). But I remember Scandinavia, particularly Sweden, where in turn there was a striking partnership. Something that is hard to find here, in continental Europe. Since 1985 I have not experienced anything that I could call a male chauvinism in Sweden. That’s of course my personal experience, but I’ve known a lot of people there and talked a lot with many of them throughout the years, so I believe it is a telling one.
It is interesting that you mentioned Sweden, because it is a very socialist state, where differentiating people based on gender became politically incorrect very early on, and after all it looked very similar in communist Poland, right?
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Well, the difference was that in Poland it was just a faux-pas to differentiate while in Sweden it was a matter of an authentic partnership, a full balance. In the beginning, it would surprise me in the West that no man would hold the door open for me or help me with my coat. But while I was missing these nice gestures, it is a really minute price to pay for the fact that one is finally treated seriously. And in contrast, when I was in Ukraine, Belarus or Moldova, I could see that "gentlemanly" behaviour is still very common there. I remember one time I had a colleague from that region visiting me and when he saw I was driving a car, he said with a fright in his eyes: “A woman behind the wheel? I’m scared".
Well, how would you then describe the Polish composers’ community in the 1970s and 1980s? Because, on the one hand, there was gender equality, at least officially, but on the other hand, I’m sure this "gentlemanly" behaviour was also there... So how did you feel as a woman composer?
Yes, this "gentlemanly" behaviour was there as well. The equality was external, imposed from above, while men in Poland had completely different ideas in their minds. It was not a partnership, it was only an external, formal equality. But at the same time, I don’t know, the composers’ community is a group of individuals, and individuality counts, sense of humour also counts, things like that. So we liked and respected each other because of the other person’s personality, and it was not important whether someone was a man or a woman. I think this is how I would describe it. But it’s a tiny community (…). I also think about the fact that what a composer wants more than anything is to be performed, regardless of their gender. And that in those socialist times, it was particularly expedient for the authorities to care about music and to look after composers, because well, it wasn’t as dangerous as for instance literature. So there were quite a lot of opportunities to perform, many concerts and festivals. Now, if I compare it to the German market, of course the German market is much more developed. But at the time, we were satisfied that there was a lot going on, that we got to meet several times a year. As a consequence, there was also nothing to compete for. Nowadays, in turn, with all the (more and less prestigious) festivals, with all the market for compositional orders, you can feel competition (…).
And also Polish artists, musicians and visual artists, turned out to be a gold mine for the communist system, because suddenly it turned out that they were doing something very original, very modern, they were sought after. After all, look how many artistic careers were launched at the time [meaning the Polish compositional school of the 1960s]. Penderecki, Górecki, Kilar, Lutosławski and so on, but there were many such names in fine arts too. So for the government it absolutely wouldn’t pay off to keep putting the screws on at the time, as it would cause too much noise internationally. By the way, this is how our gentlemen messed up Polish music for a few decades – because there is a theory that in art every second generation creates masterpieces. So me, I’m still falling under the lost generation (laughs).
Have you ever had an impression that men were more influential than women in the Polish Composers’ Union?
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No. Well, I’m probably the best proof of this since I’ve been a member of the Board for 20 years now, and on top of that I was even a vice president for 6 or 8 years. So they wouldn’t let a woman in if they didn’t want to. It was the same with the Warsaw Autumn program committee. In the beginning, I was probably the only woman there, but then it changed and now it is probably even 50-50, or almost 50-50. And I think I was perhaps the only woman there mostly because I was just the only one who happened to do anything effective at the time while other women did not (in that actual moment). It’s the same with politics, I am against all sorts of parities. We should let it happen on its own. (...). Politicians are actually also a small community.
Now I am also thinking about all those ghettos that women composers create for themselves. It’s very American of course. I remember that after one of my successes in an international competition, it was in the late 1970s, some American ladies signed me up to the International League of Women Composers and they even sponsored my membership for several years (as the membership was about $25, the amount unreachable for us at the time). And thus, I used to receive their monthly newsletter. Thanks to them I figured how it worked, how it flourished, what these American women of my profession were actually doing and after a few years I was sure that this method would never be for me, certainly not. Nowadays there is also a European organization of this sort, in Italy – “Donne in Musica". I observe how they are fighting for performances, fighting for performances. While all you have to do is to turn on the Internet, there are plenty of offers: some need a piece for this festival, some for that conference. So I just simply send my scores and see if I succeed or not. And this is in my opinion the only reasonable way not to dishonour yourself, not to get humiliated. Well, because women having to gang together and claiming the right to performances only because they are women, well, this seems like too much.
Do you prefer to be called a female composer [PL “kompozytorka”] or just a composer [PL “kompozytor”]?
I don’t care. It says more about the person naming than it does about the named one.
You know, there is a bit of a controversy in this aspect.
Yes, I know. Because while "ministra" [female form for “minister”] sounds good, “kompozytorka” [female form for “composer”] sounds slightly dismissive in my opinion. There was a time when in Polish aesthetics and musicology there was a discussion about women’s art, its special features. And while I have never observed those features in my female colleagues’ pieces, I could give some names of the male ones who perfectly met the requirements of women’s art (laughs). (…) So at the time I found the female form of “composer” a little disrespectful, derogatory, well, because this is how it sounds in Polish, with the suffix (…). But now it just makes me laugh. It’s the same as when we say "a man". Guys will think that it means only guys, but well, I’m also a "man", a human being, and so on, so well, it just makes me laugh.
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Talking about myself like: "I, the composer [“kompozytor”, male form], I composed something" sounds funny, it doesn’t sound good. So let it be the “composer” [“kompozytorka”, female form].
And how do you perceive gender when observing your students at the conservatory? (...) Are there any differences between them?
I’ll tell you about something else. As I was doing all this electronic and electroacoustic music, I ran a lot of courses, both in Poland and elsewhere. And I observed a cool thing: that when [the participants] found out that it was a woman who taught electronics, all the stereotypes about electronics being difficult, all the biases towards computers simply vanished (today obviously people are born with computers, but a little older generation was unable to use computers so efficiently during their studies, they were scared as hell, and as it turned out that a woman taught electronic music, men were like "what, me, a man, I won’t do it? I must do it". But above all, it emboldened the girls. So unwittingly I sort of fulfilled a nice mission, I guess primarily during summer courses in Poland. All the prejudices about computers just shattered. (…)
Does solidarity or something like that exist between women composers in Poland?
I think that composers in general do not really have anything to show solidarity over, because in composing everyone is on their own (…). There is the Polish Composers’ Union, but in fact there are only six – seven people who protect the rights of the whole community. Besides, everyone is busy with themselves, everyone “would like – wouldn’t like” to be the free artist, freelancer. Personally I like my job at the Academy of Music, so I wouldn’t want to be a freelancer. But in many case, it’s just a constant, daily attempt to make ends meet. It’s better if a woman composer has a wealthy husband. But I also know a lot of male composers who have rich wives. So a lot has changed also in that aspect.
What does it look like to be a composer and start a family?
Well, it’s a problem. The score must first emerge in your head. And only when it is ready, you should sit and write it down. But how does it happen that it becomes ready in your head, I still don’t know, even after having composed one hundred or so pieces. I only know that for me it is best to work when I travel (...). Then the piece arranges itself in my head. But in a travelling context there is no everyday life, you also usually turn off your phone abroad, or at least you don’t use it. So there is such a nice isolation. Then I come home, because I cannot really write the score away from home, and that poor family of mine is made to simply tiptoe and stay away from me, not to speak to me, and if the piece is long, it can even take months. And you cannot expect something like that from a small child, so it is me who needs to make compromises. And even with an ideal situation, an ideal partner, such as mine, it was still difficult, let alone the cases when the husband is equally busy or not willing to make such compromises. (…) So it is very difficult even in favourable circumstances, let alone unfavourable ones.
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Especially with the strong social conviction, or at least held some years ago, that it is a woman who should take more care of children,
Well, it’s never been like that in my house, thanks to my parents-in-law: people from the older generation. My father-in-law was born in the nineteenth century, but he chose a concert pianist for his wife, so he had already known what he was signing up for (...). So my husband took over the partnership-oriented attitude towards division of household chores from his father. I’ve never heard from my mother-in-law that I don’t look after my child well enough, none of these things. But there were, of course, technical problems. My parents passed away early, when I was 30-31 years old, and my husband’s parents lived outside the city, so we didn’t have this typical constantly available grandmother around. A lonely composer’s life is very comfortable, especially if someone is egocentric, but personally I would never give up my family life for freedom, chill, lack of responsibilities, no. In addition, the social aspect of music is very important nowadays, so a composer from the ivory tower or an egocentric composer do not have a chance in this society. And so it should be. In the end, music is for people and not for me. I am of course my first listener, the first judge, but I can’t be a parasite. Either you get along with the society, including your loved ones, or...
Fine, let me ask you a bit provocative question now: if the conditions to run a compositional career were favourable in communist Poland both for women and for men, and if it is possible, apparently, to combine compositional career with family life, what happens then that there are always more male than female names in the discourse about composers, even in Poland?
I don’t think there are. I really know the community, and I think that all the women who deserve it, or even more, are functioning properly as composers. It’s just that plenty of them might simply have chosen family life. We [me and my husband], for example, have only one child but Grażyna Pstrokońska- Nawratil [another Polish composer] raised three while actively composing, and there are women who have given up their careers, but dream about coming back to composing once their children grow up (…). In a society where everyone makes their dough, people perceive us, composers, as losers. For this reason, I’m in a way very happy that I’m over 60 and, therefore, no longer have to worry about it. Well, here the pressure on the male part of the population is greater, "don’t be a loser, make money"... it’s harder for them. This stereotype that a woman may be dependent on a man – but never the other way around – is very strong. And yet how beautifully the world has changed since women decided not to be dependent on anyone (…).
Have you ever experienced censorship?
Generally, no, at least not that I’m aware of. However, in my student days I was very fascinated by Messiaen and I used to write some articles about him. There was a situation when someone told me that the censors had cut my article, took out this, took out that (of course it were mostly the fragments about
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God, so it made the whole article lose its point). (…) But with reference to my music, I don’t think so. But I didn’t write any engaged music, and almost no pieces with lyrics. By the way, there was a fairly strong trend involving socially and politically critical art at the beginning of this century, but it had a very weak resonance in Polish music. I even remember that they tried to dedicate one edition of the Warsaw Autumn Festival to this topic...but I don’t know, these Western shouts of composers in the scores, I don’t know, they think they’ve changed the world while nothing’s really moved. Andriessen is of course a good example here. For me, this isn’t what art is made for. In general, I don’t understand it, neither utilitarianism nor the attempt to promote oneself this way.
But how about the situation of political oppression? Given that an artist has such a tool, unavailable to an average person, given that he or she can get through to many more people, isn’t it even their responsibility to actually use it?
I can’t relate answer this question. Personally, I’m not able to make music which would convincingly address this aspect of reality. Maybe someone else can, although I haven’t encountered any masterpieces in my life. There was a time of course, when the pieces dedicated to the Pope were mushrooming in Poland. Or the composers who had been the heads of the communist party cells in their academies started to write plenty of Ave Maria’s. But well, this is the other side of a story.
In 1956, there was Polish October and the Warsaw Autumn Festival was founded. Composers finally regained their freedom.
During the first Warsaw Autumn, they still even played Rachmaninov, but later on they played very different things indeed. Strange things. Yes, repertoire interventions [of the USRR authorities] were rare when it came to Polish composers (…), but they happened every year with regard to the repertoire performed by the orchestras from USSR. And until the last moment, even still in the 1990s, they were trying to exert pressure, to say that this and this composer would or would not be played by the orchestra. Literally on the day of the concert, we still wouldn’t know if the orchestra would play all the program.
I also remember specifically one of the first Warsaw Autumns after the 1989’s breakthrough. There is a piece called "Iron Foundry" by Alexander Mosolov, a full-fledged social realism from 1921. The title says it all. Musically, the piece is just great. Today we would probably recognise him as a precursor of noise in music, heavy metal and so on. The first thing always played at the opening concert of Warsaw Autumn is the national anthem. And that specific year the Mosolov’s piece came right after the anthem. The Festival started on September 17th, which is the anniversary of the Russian invasion of Poland in 1939. So that was also a way, a means, to express something, to send a politically engaged message. Planning a concert, or an entire festival, is for me also a political art which implies, argues, interrogates etc. But at the level of a single piece – I cannot imagine it.
Thank you for the conversation.
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