Composer of musical rituals
However, Ziółkowski does not allow himself to be pigeonholed as a creator of intriguingly ‘beautiful’, contemplative vocal music. As a composer and arranger, he also collaborates with the Con Brio Children’s Choir directed by Małgorzata Podzielny, the Rondo ensemble made up of his pupils, and the ensembles of the National Forum of Music in Wrocław. Commissioned by Andrzej Kosendiak, he composed the children’s opera The Ugly Duckling to a libretto by Justyna Skoczek based on Andersen’s fairy tale, presented at the National Forum of Music in May 2016, directed by Hanna Marasz and conducted by Ernst Kovacic. He has written music for theatre and film, including for Marta Guśniowska’s The Cowardly Ferret, based on her own book O Fretce, Który Dała Się Porwać Wiatrowi (premiered in November 2019 at the Opole Puppet and Actor Theatre), for the chamber play Wyniosła [Haughty], directed and choreographed by Bożena Klimczak, with the participation of two actresses and two dancers of the Wrocław Dance Theatre (premiere 22 December 2017 at the Świebodzki Stage of the Polish Theatre), and for Tomasz Musiał’s short music and dance film Fala ‘97, inspired by the dramatic events of the millennium flood in Wrocław. He collaborates with Agnieszka Gorajska, a flutist specialising in playing historical instruments and a yogi, founder of the Wrocław-based studio Joga Dobra, with whom he co-creates meditation and electronic tracks that accompany the sessions. He teaches theatre and film music performance at the Faculty of Composition, Conducting, Music Theory and Music Therapy at the Academy of Music in Wrocław.
In the commentaries on his works, Ziółkowski often mentions a longing for an irretrievable past. Indeed, musical time in his compositions often gives the impression of ‘timelessness’, of a non-linear time, considered to be merely an illusion in Buddhist terms. Ziółkowski’s music, which also applies to his compositions to Latin sacred texts, is sometimes not so much religious as spiritual. It can be a meditation, a ritual, sometimes even a magical rite, serving to ‘reflect on the impermanence of the world, its transience and the constant transformation taking place in the cosmos’, as the composer put it in his doctoral dissertation, the basis of which is Taking the Essence for mixed choir, children’s choir, children’s soloists and chamber orchestra (2021), his ‘musical mandala’, an attempt to transfer the symbolism of a tantric motif into the language of sound. Paweł Łukaszewski, one of the reviewers of the work, noted that ‘The mandala retains its shape for only a few days. Michał Ziółkowski’s work has a chance to last.’ Or, at the very least, there is chance for a long and satisfying process of building a mandala from the sand of beautiful sounds.
Originally written in Polish by Dorota Kozińska, October 2022