From 1956 to 1962, he studied composition at the Higher State School of Music in Warsaw under his father, Kazimierz Sikorski (gaining a diploma with honours) and piano under Zbigniew Drzewiecki. From 1961 to 1963, he worked at Polish Radio’s Experimental Studio, then between 1963 and 1968 he worked as a teacher: he led classes in instrumentation and score-reading at the Department of Composition, Conducting and Music Theory at his alma mater. In 1962, he received the Special Mention at the Young Composers Competition organised by the Polish Composers' Union and a year later, he debuted at the Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music with his composition Antyfony (Antiphones) for soprano, piano, horn, bells, 2 gongs, 2 tam-tams and tape (1963). From this moment on, his compositions were invited to festival concerts every year.
Sikorski lived in Paris for a year in 1965 thanks to a scholarship from the French government, and in 1975 he lived in New York under the auspices of a Senior-Fulbright Scholarship. During his year in NYC, he worked at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center and wrote his Solitude of Sounds for tape. In 1964, he became a member of the Polish Composers' Union, and was a member of the board from 1973 to 1975. From 1966 to 1974, he worked for the Repertoire Commission of the Warsaw Autumn festival and was even the chairman during his last year there. He was also an active pianist. From 1963 to 1967, he worked with a band called Warsztat Muzyczny (with Zygmunt Krauze), and from 1967 until the mid-1970s with the group Ad Novum (with Zbigniew Rudziński). He also performed his own music at concerts in Stockholm, Athens, Brussels, the USA and Japan.
Tomasz Sikorski was the first Polish minimalist in music during the 1970s and 1980s. He was also someone who spread a kind of minimalism in Europe that was different from the earlier type based on American models. However, the extreme simplicity that Sikorski used was heavily criticised in those days. Critics said that: 'It is hard to determine what is more surprising in this music: lack of creativity or the author's naïvety'. In the 1972 composition Untitled for piano and three optional instruments, the composer exploited 'the audience's and performers' patience rather than the qualities of the intrusive and endlessly-repeated motif'. They concluded: 'Well, our times are full of single-use objects.'
However in 1989, a year after Sikorski’s premature death, texts were published evaluating his works in a completely different way. Critic and composer Rafał Augustyn wrote in the 1989 Warsaw Autumn programme booklet:
Repeated piano chords, rapid gestures, explosions of sounds and never-ending echoes. Ritual vibrations filled with gongs. Horn and trumpet signals lost in space. Sublime, bitter-sweet harmonies. Phrases returning precisely or modulated. Tomasz Sikorski's music is easy to recognise, hard to characterise and even harder to follow or develop, thus it avoids plagiarism. Besides material elements like technique, there are common natural traits that build its originality: relationships are created to time and space, to the ability to hear and the sense of time, to the “internal rhythm” of listeners, to literary texts and undertones. Sikorski's music is highly symbolic, together with its development, literary and philosophical allusions unveiled by the author aggravate the symbolism. The circle of quoted artists is exceptional: Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer, Kafka and Joyce, Beckett and, lastly, Borges – namely people interested in existence and the human condition, pessimists, moralists without delusions. Sometimes their texts are included raw in a piece, a flash in a title or a dedication. And especially this, not the music itself, shows the biggest difference between Sikorski and the other minimal or repetitious music composers that he was commonly connected with. They, mostly Americans, stand aloof from philosophy, immersed in urban commonality and the outcries of civilised people, or they strive to pantheistic nirvana. Tomasz Sikorski was a European, with his own existential fears, obsessions and madness. We should remember that Freud first uncovered the repetition compulsion in the “death-contaminated” victims of World War One...
The composer himself also commented on his works, however briefly. He wrote about his Homophony for 4 trumpets, 4 horns, 4 trombones, piano and 2 gongs from 1968: 'This is an example of static, one-dimensional music. The sound matter and its structure in this composition are reduced as much as possible.'
Without a Title (1972) was to represent, according to Sikorski, 'minimalistic tendencies'. What he wrote about his Solitude of Sounds for tape (1975) seems to be the most successful characteristic of his music and creative process:
Last October, as I was wondering about the shape of the tune I was supposed to make in the Columbia-Princeton studio, I spent a lot of time in my room listening to distant sounds coming through an open window. It was a seemingly chaotic mixture of street noise, signals sounded by river boats and the distant thunder of planes. After a while I had the impression that all these sounds were alive, perhaps even aware of their own existence, as if wanting to speak. Getting together and yet doomed to loneliness, they made up a lonely chorus. I wanted to express this feeling in my new work. The solitude of sounds has a storyline. In the initial section, uniform sound material appears only in the lowest register, as if unable to 'get out’ of this area of darkness and uncertainty. Then in the upper register, there appear sound complexes with a harmonic structure. They make up a kind of 'chorus' of harmonics, overlapping and 'oversinging' each other. However, the limitations of their nature prevent them from creating a new quality. They remain forever captured in their deficiency, circulating and existing.
I would like to note here that the above comments should be treated only as reflections on the origins of the piece and in no way can they be regarded as an attempt to reveal any literal links between the inspiration provided by a specific sonic situation and the work itself. The situation was for me only an impulse to create a certain imaginary space filled with autonomous sound material governed by its own rules. In any case, my comments may have been prompted by a desire to explain my aversion to the music that clearly organised space, introducing into it an element of 'order'; this aversion resulted in the form of my work, where sounds only undulate, circulate, hesitate and sink into space.
Sikorski’s most important compositions
- Two Preludes for piano (1955)
- Cantata of Wit Stwosz for soprano, choir of sopranos and chamber orchestra (1956)
- Echoes II for 1, 2, 3 or 4 pianos, bells, 2 gongs, 2 tam-tams, percussion and tape (1961-63)
- Antyphones for soprano, piano, hornet, bells, 2 gongs, 2 tam-tams and tape recorder (1963)
- Prologi for female choir, 2 grand pianos, 4 flutes, 4 horns and 3 percussionists (1964)
- Concerto Breve for piano, 24 brass instruments and 4 percussionists (1965)
- Monodia and Sequence for flute and piano (1966)
- Sequenza I for Symphony Orchestra (1966)
- Sonant for piano (1967)
- Diaphony for 2 pianos (1969)
- Homophony for 12 brass instruments, a piano and a gong (1970)
- For Strings for 3 violins and 3 violas (1970)
- Absent-Minded Window-Gazing for piano (1971)
- Vox humana for mixed choir, 2 solo pianos, 12 brass instruments, 4 gongs and 4 tam-tams (1971)
- The Adventure of Sinbad the Sailor, a radio opera for soprano, tenor, recital voices, female choir and orchestra (1971-72)
- Holzwege for symphony orchestra (1972)
- Without a Title for piano and 3 other instruments (1972)
- Listening Music for 2 pianos (1973)
- Music from Afar for mixed choir and instruments (1974)
- Other Voices for 24 wind instruments, 4 gongs and chimes (1975)
- Solitude of Sounds for tape (1975)
- Sickness unto Death for reciter, 2 pianos, 4 trumpets and 4 horns (1976)
- Music in Twilight for piano and orchestra (1977-78)
- Hymnos for piano (1979)
- String in the Earth for 15 string instruments (1979-80)
- Monophony for orchestra (1979-80)
- Autograph for piano (1980)
- Modus [version No.1] for trombone (1980)
- Afar a Bird for clavichord, tape and reciter (1981)
- Paesaggio d'Inverno for strings (1982)
- Modus [version No.2] for cello (1982)
- Euphony for piano (1982)
- Autoritratto for 2 pianos and orchestra (1983)
- Recitativo ed aria for String Orchestra (1984)
- Rondo for harpsichord (1984)
- La notte - Omaggio a Friedrich Nietzsche for String Orchestra (1984)
- Das Schweigen der Sirenen (nach Kafka) for cello (1986-87)
- Diario 87 for tape and reciter (1987)
- Omaggio per Quattro Pianoforti ed Orchestra in Memoriam Jorge Luis Borges (1987)
Sources: official Sikorski website, Polish Centre for Music Information, Polish Composers' Union, April 2002; translated by ND, Sept 2015.