The Adam Mickiewicz Institute’s Map of Polish Composers, the first comprehensive, interactive online resource dedicated to Polish classical music in the 20th and 21st centuries, goes live on 27th November 2018.
The launch of the Map of Polish Composers will be celebrated with an event at the Polish Embassy, including a panel discussion dedicated to contemporary Polish music: it will be chaired by James Jolly, Gramophone magazine's editor-in-chief, with contributors John Allison, editor of Opera magazine’s editor, and radio host and well-known Polish musicologist, Aleksander Laskowski.
The panel discussion will be followed by a recital by pianist Aleksandra Świgut, who will perform works by Ignacy Jan Paderewski, Karol Szymanowski, Roman Maciejewski and Paweł Szymański. Świgut was awarded the Second Prize at the first International Chopin Competition on Period Instruments. She also won one of the special prizes of the competition, the Prize of the Orchestra of the 18th Century.
The map is the fullest resource ever dedicated to Polish music, giving users instant access to full biographies, extracts from recordings, facts and trivia about each composers and their mutual artistic and biographical connections and influences. It also provides analyses of their composing techniques and styles, as well as a carefully charted map providing a rich global cultural context for every artist. The Map of Polish Composers also facilitates access to other existing resources that will further enrich the user’s understanding of 20th century Polish musical landscape.
An intuitive, bilingual tool (Polish and English), it includes over 200 Polish composers from the last 120 years, and aims to become an indispensable resource for performers, promoters and programmers of Polish music.
The project was supervised by Dr Iwona Lindstedt, a lecturer at the Warsaw Institute of Musicology who specialised in serialism in the output of 20th-century Polish composers. She chose pieces of music that would best characterise each composer, analysed thousands of hours of music to compare and contrast the works of each composer featured on the resource. Her research interests include the history of 20th-century music (with particular emphasis on Polish music), musical aesthetics, and music theory. She has published books and papers on the works of Józef Koffler, Bogusław Schaeffer, Krzysztof Penderecki, Witold Lutosławski, Kazimierz Serocki, as well as articles on analytical methods for music.
Find out more: http://mapofcomposers.pl/en/
The Map of Polish Composers is produced by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute as part of the Polska Music programme and POLSKA 100, the international cultural programme celebrating the centenary of Poland regaining independence.
POLSKA 100 is financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland as part of the multi-annual programme NIEPODLEGŁA 2017–2021.
Source: press materials, compiled by NR, Oct 2018