Interdisciplinary Studies in Musicology
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“Od Chopina do ... Noskowskiego”? Zygmunt Noskowskis langer Weg zu Chopin
Get PDFThe aim of this text is to present the process whereby Zygmunt Noskowski grew closer to the music of Chopin, which he initially treated with considerable distance. In the first part of the article, the author analyses verbal testimony of Noskowski’s Chopin reception on the basis of extant columns written by him. Noskowski’s attention first focused on Chopin towards the end of the 1880s, the catalyst being the Chopin anniversaries celebrated in 1894 and 1899, for the purposes of which Noskowski arranged piano compositions by Chopin for orchestra and voice. The picture of Chopin sketched by Noskowski in his press writings contained Classicist components in which his sense of form and his affinities with the work of Bach were underlined; on the other hand, Noskowski stressed in Chopin’s music - as a specifically Polish characteristic - its links with nature. Both these factors influenced the shape of Noskowski’s own music. In the second part of the article, the author shows Chopin’s influence on Noskowski’s compositions, which initially found expression through the intermediary of the dramatic aspects of the Second Symphony of Ignacy Feliks Dobrzyński, and then in episodic links between Noskowski’s symphonic poem Step [The steppe] and Chopin’s Rondo ä la krakowiak, Op. 14. The climactic point of Noskowski’s dialogue with Chopin is defined by his programmatic-patriotic orchestral work Z życia... [narodu] [From the life... [of the nation]], in which Chopin’s Prelude in A major from opus 28 served as the basis for a set of variations; this work, despite a number of inconsistencies, is regarded by the author as an important work, both in its from and in its culturalhistorical significance
Sacred music by Amandus Ivanschiz: attributions and variants of extant compositions
Get PDFThe Pauline father Amandus Ivanschiz (1727-1758) was a composer whose music heralded the style of the early Classical period. He worked mainly in Austria (Wiener Neustadt and Mariatrost), as well as in Rome (it has recently been established that he spent three years there). His sacred music, especially masses, litanies and cantata-style pieces to non-liturgical texts, has been preserved in numerous manuscripts (over 260 items) held in eight countries of Central Europe (Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Switzerland and Hungary). Comparative analysis of all the manuscripts allows one to distinguish several problems commonly encountered in research into eighteenth-century musical sources, such as variants, multiple versions of works and contradictory attributions of authorship, further exacerbated by the lack of originals. This article focusses on the most recent findings relating to Ivanschiz’s life and religious music, as well as discussing and illustrating discrepancies between various copies of the same compositions by reference to selected works. We will also consider the differentiation of authorial variants from variant versions arising from custom
Adam Mickiewicz s My Little Fondling’ in the Songs of Polish Romanticists. Inspirations - Messages - References
Get PDFChopin on the cinema screen. Aesthetic and cultural determinants
Get PDFAs with most film subjects, the way Chopin has been presented in the cinema has been the result of a particular poetic (depending on the genre) and cultural context. The author classifies cinematographic Chopinalia on the basis of the former determinant, although without neglecting entirely, in some sections of the text, to treat film as a text of culture. The clear majority of documentary and educational films about Chopin have been made in Poland (as a form of promotion for the country, which does not boast too many icons of world culture). For both aesthetic and cultural reasons, the boundary between documentary and educational film has become blurred. Historical documentaries have used the same iconographic material, film shots and utterances, and also - for the purposes of musical illustration - the same Chopinworks as educational films. Cultural considerations have affected the thematic restrictions in respect to silver screen discourse about Chopin: in both genres, it reflects a rather stereotypical approach to the composer’s life story, with no room for the “Chopin mysteries” (e.g. his fascination with Tytus Woyciechowski) that have long been addressed in the literature. In experimental and animated film, the accent has been shifted - in keeping with the essence of those genres - from Chopin’s biography to his music. Nevertheless, here too the pressure of cultural (national) context has determined the choice of film material accompanying particular works. At the same time, experimental films have become anti-war or political films (as in the case of Eugeniusz C^kalski’s Utwory Chopina w kolorze [Chopin’s works in colour], from 1944 or Andrzej Panufnik’s Bailada f moll [Ballade in F minor], from 1945), whilst the presentation of Chopin’s music in animated films has been full of iconographic clichés and pleonasms (a Mazovian landscape with cleft willows, carriages speeding along in the background, dancing ballerinas, falling leaves and so on), creating a schematic visual code that is automatically associated with the compositions of the brilliant Pole. By way of contrast, it is worth emphasising that a few foreign experimental films (Max Ophiils’s La Valse Brillante de Chopin, Germaine Dulac’s Dysk 927) have illustrated Chopin’s music with images of “universal” objects (piano, gramophone, rain) associated more with music than with feelings, and not with Poland. The dozen or so feature films about Chopin have mainly belonged to popular cinema. For that reason, in the overwhelming majority of cases, the film-makers have turned to biographical facts which possess a suitable dramatic potential. Feature films about Chopin have treated history as a background - a costume in which to dress a tale about universal cultural myths: the myth of love (the relationship with George Sand, which has dominated Chopin films), the pseudo-Romantic myth of the great artist and the patriot myth (prime examples being Charles Vidor’s A Song to Remember and Jerzy Antczak’s Chopin. Pragnienie miłości [Chopin. Desire for love]). Some films - albeit few in number - have adopted a different strategy. One such picture attempted to exploit Chopin’s life story to exemplify Marxist historiosophy and a socialist- realist poetic (Aleksander Ford’s Młodość Chopina [Chopin’s youth]); another- Andrzej Żulawski’s Błękitna nuta [La note bleue] - is a truly original picture about the composer and, like almost every original film, tells us as much about the director as about Chopin himself
Cinema and popular music, a multifold relationship. The cases ofEnnio Morricone and David Lynch
Get PDFThe aim of this article is to discuss the complexity of the relationship between popular music and cinema. Since its very birth, cinema has established a solid collaboration with music. When films had no sound, music (back then played live) had the crucial role of creating moods, underlining specific sequences, and in general making speech not too missed. When sound appeared, musicals became immediately a dominant genre (and a rich source for business: cinema halls themselves, but also music-sheets and recordings). Shortly after, the subtle art of film music developed, granting — to film and music histories alike — some of the finest composers of the whole 20th century (Bernard Hermann, Nino Rota, John Williams, Ennio Morricone...), or allowing great composers and musicians in their own right, to deliver some of their best works in form of soundtrack (Miles Davis” Lift to the Scaffold or Duke Ellington’s Anatomy of a Murder, just to focus on jazz only). Whether film music must be considered a form of ’serious“ or ’popular\u27 music is still source of debate, and definitely not in the scopes of the present essay. Instead, the point I wish to make here is that, regardless of its nature, the interaction between cinema and popular music is made of literally dozens of possible combinations, making this relationship one of the most interesting among the many existing within an art, cinema, which makes of multimediality and multimodality its primary strength (let alone identity: up to the point that a good portion of the early years of film studies were spent in deciding whether, after all, cinema could be considered an art of its own, or simply a combination of pre-existing arts). The analysis will proceed in a rather linear manner, by simply taking two case-studies: Ennio Morricone, a most celebrated film composer, and David Lynch, a cult-director who has established a strong bond with popular music in his cinematography. Perhaps unexpectedly, the case of Morricone will be only in part employed to discuss his scores for the likes of Leone or Pasolini: more attention will bedevoted to his not-so-well known (at least outside Italy) activity as pop songwriter and arranger. When it comes to Lynch, instead, the analysis will try to cover more or less all his interests in popular music, including his long-lasting professional collaboration (and personal friendship) with composer Angelo Badalamenti
The commentary to some motifs of Peter Faltin\u27s semiotics of music
Get PDFThe article is focused on original musical semiotics of well known Slovak theoretician Peter Faltin (1939-1981), especially on his original semiotic theories in 1970s, including his last (unfinished) work Signification of Aesthetic Signs Music and Language based on L. Wittgenstein\u27s philosophy. The paper also delas with studies of contemporary representatives of Slovak and Czech semiotics, aesthetics and postmodern philosophy such as Eubomir Chalupka, Jarmila Doubravovâ, Klement Mitterpach and Jûlius Fujak, who commented, explained and developed Faltin\u27s thoughts in the frame of their research
Chopin and Polish FOLK
Get PDFAlthough Chopin’s music is continually analysed within the context of its affinities with traditional folk music, no one has any doubt that these are two separate musical worlds, functioning in different contexts and with different participants, although similarly alien to the aesthetic of mass culture. For a present-day listener, used to the global beat, music from beyond popular circulation must be “translated” into a language he/she can understand; this applies to both authentic folk music and the music of the great composer. In the early nineties, when folk music was flourishing in Poland (I extend the term “folk” to all contemporary phenomena of popular music that refer to traditional music), one could hardly have predicted that it would help to revive seemingly doomed authentic traditional music, and especially that it would also turn to Chopin. It is mainly the mazurkas that are arranged. Their performance in a manner stylised on traditional performance practice is intended to prove their essentially “folk” character. The primary factor facilitating their relatively unproblematic transformation is their descendental triple-time rhythms. The celebrations of the bicentenary of the birth of Fryderyk Chopin, with its scholarly and cultural events of various weight geared towards the whole of society, gave rise to further attempts at transferring the great composer’s music from the domain of elite culture to popular culture, which brings one to reflect on the role that folk music might play in the transmission and assimilation of artistic and traditional genres