The Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Transformations of Programming Music Policies Małgorzata gąsiorowska Email:
[email protected]???? Email: The Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music Transformations of Programming Policies Musicology today • Vol. 14 • 2017 DOI: 10.1515/muso-2017-0001 ABSTRACT situation that people have turned away from contemporary art because it is disturbing, perhaps necessarily so. Rather than The present paper surveys the history of the Warsaw Autumn festival confrontation, we sought only beauty, to help us to overcome the 1 focusing on changes in the Festival programming. I discuss the banality of everyday life. circumstances of organising a cyclic contemporary music festival of international status in Poland. I point out the relations between The situation of growing conflict between the bourgeois programming policies and the current political situation, which in the establishment (as the main addressee of broadly conceived early years of the Festival forced organisers to maintain balance between th Western and Soviet music as well as the music from the so-called art in the early 20 century) and the artists (whose “people’s democracies” (i.e. the Soviet bloc). Initial strong emphasis on uncompromising attitudes led them to question and the presentation of 20th-century classics was gradually replaced by an disrupt the canonical rules accepted by the audience and attempt to reflect different tendencies and new phenomena, also those by most critics) – led to certain critical situations which combining music with other arts. Despite changes and adjustments in marked the beginning of a new era in European culture. the programming policy, the central aim of the Festival’s founders – that of presenting contemporary music in all its diversity, without overdue In the history of music, one such symbolic date is 1913, emphasis on any particular trend – has consistently been pursued.