Music and Change in the Eastern Baltics Before and After 1989

356 Pages·2022·22.064 MB·English

by  Rūta Stanevičiūtė, Małgorzata Janicka-Słysz (eds.)

MUSIC
AND CHANGE
IN THE EASTERN
BALTICS
BEFORE
AND AFTER
1989
Studies in the History and Sociology of Music
Series Editor: Olga Manulkina (Saint Petersburg University)
Editorial Board:
Carolyn Abbate (Harvard University)
Lucinde Braun (University of Regensburg)
Emily Frey (Swarthmore College)
Marina Frolova Walker (University of Cambridge)
Boris Gasparov (Columbia University)
Christopher Gibbs (Bard College)
Ludmila Kovnatskaya (Saint Peresburg Conservatory)
Tatjana Marković (University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna)
Klara Moricz (Amherst College)
Roger Parker (King’s College London)
William Quillen (Oberlin College and Conservatory)
Dorothea Redepenning (Heidelberg University)
Tim Scholl (Oberlin College and Conservatory)
Rūta Stanevičiūtė (Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre)
Richard Taruskin (University of California, Berkeley)
Stephen Walsh (Cardiff University)
Patrick Zuk (Durham University)
MUSIC
AND CHANGE
IN THE EASTERN
BALTICS
BEFORE
AND AFTER
1989
Edited by Ruˉta Staneviciuˉte
and Małgorzata Janicka-Słysz
B O S TO N
2022
Supported by the Research Council of Lithuania (LMTLT), the National
Science Centre (NCN) in Poland, and the Lithuanian Council for Culture.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022936808
ISBN 9781644698945 (hardback)
ISBN 9781644698952 (adobe pdf)
ISBN 9781644698969 (epub)
Copyright © 2022 Academic Studies Press
All rights reserved
Book design by PHi Business Solutions
Cover design by Ivan Grave
Contents
Introduction 1
Rūta Stanevičiūtė and Małgorzata Janicka-Słysz
Part One: Cultural Encounters and Musicians’ Networking 11
1. F rom Ignorance to Familiarity: Lithuanian and Polish
Musical Networking During the Cold War 13
Rūta Stanevičiūtė
2. O n Forms of Memory and Freedom in Polish and
Lithuanian Music before and after 1989 45
Małgorzata Janicka-Słysz
3. Th e Musical Meetings in Baranów and Sandomierz as
Oases of Freedom 64
Dominika Micał
4. R ebellion and Identity: A Generational Breakthrough in
Polish Music in the 1970s 85
Kinga Kiwała
Part Two: The Musical Expression of Cultural and
Political Liberation 109
5. Th e Idea of Freedom in Krzysztof Penderecki’s Works:
From Experience to Expression 111
Iwona Sowińska-Fruhtrunk
6. N odes and Turning Points in the Life and Art of
Henryk Mikołaj Górecki as a Resonance of
Polish Politics and History in the Second Half of
the Twentieth Century 128
Teresa Malecka
7. Th e Dimensions of Freedom in Wojciech Marczewski’s
Movie Escape from the “Liberty” Cinema and
Witold Leszczyński’s Siekierezada (Axiliad):
Music Functions in Films 144
Ewa Czachorowska-Zygor
vi Contents
8. L ithuanian Music in Transition:
Independent Festivals of the 1980s and 1990s 165
Vita Gruodytė
Part Three: Music and Politics before and after the Fall 219
9. Disco Culture and the Ritual Journey in the Soviet 1980s 221
Kevin C. Karnes
10. Th e Ganelin Trio, Rova Saxophone Quartet, and
US-Soviet Cultural Exchanges in the 1980s 255
Peter J. Schmelz
11. O n the Other Side of Freedom: The Band Miłość and
the Polish Yass Scene 296
Andrzej Mądro
12. C ritics’ Choice: New Russian Music Criticism and
Leonid Desyatnikov 308
Olga Manulkina
Editors and Contributors 335
Index of Names 341
Introduction
The employment of music as a form of cultural opposition and transformative
power is a multifunctional process that represents an extension to the thematic
and disciplinary borders of the complex relationship between music’s cultural,
socio-economic, and political contexts. Yet there is a danger that thinking about
music in this way will reduce it to a mere image of said contexts. As Jacques
Attali writes, music “makes audible the new world that will gradually become
visible, that will impose itself and regulate the order of things; it is not only the
image of things, but the transcending of the everyday, the herald of the future.”1
The Baltic Singing Revolution—a “revolution by singing and smiling”2—is
a widely known example of an expressive cultural practice that stimulated the
cultural imagination and kindled political transformation. Resulting from the
Baltic Musicological Conference “Music and Change before and after 1990”
that took place in Vilnius in 2020, the present collection of articles is also a part
of the joint Lithuanian-Polish scholarly project Music of Change: The Cultural
Expression of Liberation in Polish and Lithuanian Music before and after 1989.
The collection aims to develop new knowledge and a deeper understanding of
the ways in which the musical expression of liberation and musicians’ networks
contributed to political and cultural change before and after the end of the Cold
War. What has been the relationship between the processes of political and cul-
tural change before and after 1989? In what ways have musical practices con-
tributed to the creation, negotiation, and refashioning of sociocultural identities
and fluctuating collectives? What prominent ideas, landmark cultural texts, and
influential individuals have left a formative and transformative mark on these
processes? To address these issues, this volume provides a transnational study of
the impact of musical cultures in the Eastern Baltics—Lithuania, Latvia, Poland,
and Russia—during the period between the independence movement and the
transition of the Baltic states into the European political space.
The variety of words employed to describe the process of liberation attests
to the dramatic expansion of the idea of dissent after the fall of the Berlin Wall:
1 Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1985), 11.
2 Heinz Valk, “Laulev revolutsioon” [Singing revolution], Sirp ja Vasar, June 17, 1988, 3.
2 Introduction
from “resistance,” “rebellion,” and “protest” (as a means of combating totalitar-
ian and authoritarian regimes), to “oppositional,” “nonconformist,” “alternative,”
“autonomous,” “underground,” to others that cover even more cultural phenom-
ena. When such a multiplicity of concepts is used to discuss the same phenom-
ena, discussion may become confusing, especially when transcultural analysis is
involved. While the contributors to this volume share the view that the expres-
sion and interpretation of cultural dissent in the countries of the Eastern Baltics
was specific to each nation, that is, conditioned by their individual histories,
they also agree that there were moments of rhythmic synchronization between
the liberation processes of the region’s musical cultures as a whole. Indeed,
the contributors to 2018’s monumental The Handbook of COURAGE: Cultural
Opposition and Its Heritage in Eastern Europe make a similar assessment of such
processes in Communist bloc countries generally and how to approach them.3
They call for the abandonment of a “prescriptive definition of cultural opposi-
tion” and argue for “a more dynamic concept which takes into account both the
diversity of its meanings in various nation states and periods and the fact that the
concept of cultural opposition (and its definitions) is a historical product itself.”4
Drawing on numerous methodologies, Music and Change in the Eastern Baltics
before and after 1989 explores the wide range of musical dissent during these
years—in terms of ideas and practices. The revised and extended keynote lec-
tures and commissioned papers included here are divided into three parts. The
first part, “Cultural Encounters and Musicians’ Networking,” contains articles
concerned with a topic thoroughly analyzed during the conference. Thus, in
“From Ignorance to Familiarity: Lithuanian and Polish Musical Networking
During the Cold War,” Rūta Stanevičiūtė submits that these countries serve as
case studies for theorizing musical networking at that moment in history. The
two little-studied neighboring countries’ cultures demonstrate how from the
late 1970s oppositional musical networking resulted in politically and socially
engaged cross-border collaborations between musicians. Building her argu-
ment on the concept of transformative contact, Stanevičiūtė reflects on the
factors that enabled communication between informal communities in these
countries’ during this time of ideological and political constraint; and she fur-
ther considers how such relationships contributed to the cultural and political
3 Balázs Apor, Péter Apor, and Sándor Horváth, eds., The Handbook of COURAGE: Cultural
Opposition and Its Heritage in Eastern Europe (Budapest: Institute of History, Research Centre
for the Humanities, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 2018).
4 Balázs Apor, Péter Apor, Sándor Horváth, and Tamás Scheibner, “Cultural Opposition:
Concepts and Approaches,” in Apor, Apor, and Horváth, COURAGE, 11.
Introduction 3
transformation of societies. Rūta Stanevičiūtė argues that exchanges between
Polish and Lithuanian musicians revealed to them the norms of each other’s
musical cultures. She shows that in the wake of the tensions between the Polish
People’s Republic and the USSR—due to the deepening of Polish resistance
to its Moscow-controlled Communist government—there were constraints
on relationships between Lithuanian and Polish musicians. Yet, paradoxically,
these constraints resulted in Polish music critics reviewing and then reject-
ing their ideologically ingrained stereotypes of Lithuanian culture and, in fact,
helping Lithuania renew its own discussion of musically modernity. Through
the interactions of the milieus of Polish and Lithuanian contemporary music,
the presence of the norms and representations of one culture in the field of
the other culture is discussed. Stanevičiūtė shows that the constraints on the
informal relationships between Lithuanian and Polish musicians were strongly
affected by the political relations between the USSR and the Polish People’s
Republic, especially in the wake of an intensification of political resistance to
the imposed Communist regime in Poland. In that particular environment, a
new view on Lithuanian culture was being shaped in Poland, which allowed
Polish critics through music to define a new Lithuanian cultural identity, dif-
ferent from the previous politicized stereotypes, while Polish music and
musicology contributed to the renewal of music modernization discourse in
Lithuania.
Małgorzata Janicka-Słysz’s “On Forms of Memory and Freedom Strategies
in Polish and Lithuanian Music before and after 1989” proposes that mem-
ory—including emotional memory—consists of an individual’s acts of creative
interpretation and resembles a textually layered palimpsest. She argues that the
inclination and ability to create memories, whether historical, social, or emo-
tional in nature, is one of the liberation strategies present in Polish and Lithuanian
music before and after 1989. Janicka-Słysz attempts to identify acts of memory
in the works of Polish (from Krzysztof Penderecki to Anna Zawadzka-Gołosz)
and Lithuanian (from Bronius Kutavičius to Onutė Narbutaitė) composers.
Utilizing Derrida’s idea of hauntology, she shows that these musicians combine
to political ends the old and new values in their compositions. They reinterpret
tradition (often in the form of a return to/repetition of past styles). Janicka-Słysz
gives special attention to the notion of “reinventing oneself” through a poetics
of lofty nostalgia—a hallmark of postmodern sensitivity.
In “Musical Meetings in Baranów and Sandomierz as Oases of Freedom,”
Dominika Micał examines the activities of the so-called Krakow School of
Music Theory, a group of researchers surrounding Mieczysław Tomaszewski,
which played a leading role in Polish musicological life during the last decades
4 Introduction
of the twentieth century. Its achievements include, among others, introducing
the research of relationships between music and other arts, promoting interdis-
ciplinarity, and studying matters outside the purely technical side of music, such
as meaning or cultural context. Micał argues that the most important part of
its ethos was freedom, understood primarily as freedom from the political con-
text in which they were living and writing, and freedom to decide on what and
how to work. They connected the idea of freedom with that of responsibility.
Members of the Krakow School of Music Theory accompanied the emergence
of new trends in composition not only as researchers, but also as critics, journal-
ists, and teachers. They felt a duty towards the present and future of music and
their discipline, feeling that music and musicology can play an important role in
social life. Micał centers her article on three cycles of international and national
meetings: “Spotkania Muzyczne w Baranowie” (Musical Meetings in Baranów,
1976–1981), “Wrzesień Muzyczny na Zamku” (Musical September at the
Castle, 1984–1986) in Baranów Sandomierski, and “Collectanea. Sandomierz
Music Festival and Seminars” (Collectanea: Sandomierz’s Musical Festival and
Seminars, 1988–1989).
In “Rebellion and Identity: A Generational Breakthrough in Polish Music of
the 1970s,” Kinga Kiwała investigates a significant change in the aesthetic para-
digm which appeared in Polish music in the mid-1970s. After years of domi-
nating the avant-garde, especially in its Polish manifestation, sonorism, Polish
composers started looking to the Romantic tradition. This turn can be seen in
the work of middle generation composers, the so-called Generation 33, and
appeared in the music of debuting Silesian composers, the so-called Generation
51. However, despite certain common traits typical of the music of the older and
younger composers (neotonality, a return to melody and euphonic harmony, a
lead part for either lyrical or dramatic expression), significant differences became
visible between them, the most important being their approach to national and
universal values. In Penderecki’s and Górecki’s work, national qualities seem to
dominate (in the form of quotations or musical allusions to a national, religious,
or folk ethos), whereas the work of the younger musicians is completely devoid
of these. Kiwała asks: Is the “cosmopolitanism” (or universalism) of Generation
51’s music an attempt distinguish themselves from the older artists or is it con-
nected with the place the former derive from (Silesia—a region where many
cultures meet)? Is the Romantic tension between the national and universal one
of the preeminent culture-forming values of late twentieth-century Polish music
(which is, after all, typical for Slavic countries in particular)?
Part two, “The Musical Expression of Cultural and Political Liberation,”
begins with Iwona Sowińska-Fruhtrunk’s article “The Idea of Freedom in