The changing seasons of the Warsaw autumn: Contemporary music in Poland, 1960-1990

Cold War cultural contests relied on binary divisions that pitted Soviet-backed socialist realism against works by the Western avant-garde. The clear-cut nature of these categories makes it tempting to view all musical styles from this period from either a Soviet or an American perspective. Socialist-era Poland, however, offers an alternative point of view. Rather than simply invert the traditional Cold War dichotomies, Polish musical life unsettled the opposition by asking how avant-garde music might be championed within a socialist framework. The Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music provided one response to this question: inaugurated in 1956, it was the most visible manifestation of Polish state support for musical avant-gardism. Through detailing the administrative workings of the festival's organization and analyzing its public outcomes, this study documents the acts of negotiation that made the Warsaw Autumn possible. The first chapter chronicles disputes about compositional freedom and socialist cultural policy that erupted among Polish critics and composers after the 1960 festival premiere of Henryk Gorecki's Scontri (Collisions) for Orchestra, op. 17. The second examines the Warsaw Autumn as a site for cultural exchange during the early 1960s, a time when access to information was entangled with the exercise of political power. Chapter Three follows Polish composition from the festival out into the world, where works by Polish composers became exportable goods that could travel between the socialist and capitalist camps of a divided Europe. The last chapter views festival repertoire in the 1970s as a form of historiography that challenged binary terms of engagement by providing a means to imagine Poland as part of an integrated international community. The study ends by considering what meanings the Warsaw Autumn could continue to generate after the Cold War and its politics had been consigned to history.