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EN
No one doubts the importance of Stravinsky's work for development of musical theatre. Some prominent scholars, however, still see his works for theatre as 'chiefly musical compositions'. In reality, it is the theatre component that constitutes Stravinsky's works for stage. Not only he knew the Avant-garde theatre well, but already in the Act One of Le Rossignol, he reinvents himself as a creator of musical theatre with specific aesthetic views, admirable taste and originality. In Stravinsky's works, music and theatre share common rules of the game. The principle of 'Trennung der Elemente' (Brecht) and Stravinsky's 'paradoxical' handling of historical and folklore models is applied throughout the work. In addition, the Renard and Mavra sketches prove that Stravinsky applied his tectonical structuring paralelly in music and the text. His abrupt alternation of blocks dissolves the traditional logical structure of an art piece in both music and theatre.
Muzyka
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2008
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vol. 53
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issue 1(208)
65-79
EN
The development of sound-recording technology, as well as various avant-garde artistic manifestos promoting timbral experiments, led to increased interest in the problem of sound quality by twentieth-century composers and music theorists. Sound quality was regarded as being concerned with the experience of performed music (characterised through the metaphor of power or colour) and, in the second half of the twentieth century, also as being concerned with the electronic recording of sound (objets musicaux, sound object) and the visual result of its analysis (sonogram), described using the terminology of acoustics. In the modern theory and aesthetics of music, the problem of timbre has been discussed from the point of view of positivist or idealistic philosophy, and the end of the twentieth century saw the arrival of the cognitive approach, developed within cognitive psychology (Sloboda, Serafine, Bregman). The French language developed the concept of 'corp sonore' (J.-Ph. Rameau), English employs the term 'the power of sound' (E. Gurney), while German has the term 'Klangfarbe' (H.von Helmholtz). The term 'Klangfarbe', widely used by composers and music theorists, has been variously understood as the auditive experience of 'Tonsatz' associated with the means of performance and the metaphor of colour (Riemann, Erpf, Kurth, Schönberg), as a particular type of experimental sound (Lachenmann) and, in the theory of music developed by F. Blum, as the abstract aspect of the 'sound materia' (Tonstoff). Józef Michal Chominski's sonology theory has, on the one hand, a positivist character (it concerns a new technology for generating and transforming sound) but, on the other hand, it stresses the psychological-cognitive aspect of experiencing sound (differentiations: homogenous-polygenous, monochronic - polychronic sound). The term 'sonorism' refers generally to the auditive experience of avant-garde compositions and the new signs of music notation associated with them, but it also includes the 'colouring' effect of the traditional 'Tonsatz' mentioned above. The theory of music inspired by cognitive psychology proposes the term 'parton', which takes into account the concepts of 'gestalt' and of the 'invariant' (Jarzebska). In the article, the concept of 'sonoristic parton' is illustrated using the example of compositions by Lutoslawski (Venetian Games) and Stravinsky (The Flood).
Muzyka
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2008
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vol. 53
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issue 1(208)
7-15
EN
The article focuses on the concept of sonorism and related terms as musicological and critical tools used in in the description of Polish music after 1956. The author demonstrates that this termonology has constituted a valuable component in musicological thinking in Poland, and he considers various advantages as well as stylistic and chronological limitations of sonoristic concepts for music composed beyond the 1960s
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SONORISTIC SPACE IN MAHLER'S FIRST SYMPHONY

80%
Muzyka
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2008
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vol. 53
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issue 1(208)
119-130
EN
Reception of Mahler's First Symphony has often concluded that it undermines the teleological premise of its symphonic principles. The aurhoress proposes that Mahler's 'failure' to achieve a clear syntactic process shows instead a proactive engagement with the potential of sonorities to create a meaningful, multi-dimensional space. This quality in his music can be framed as a type of early sonoristic project. The work shows a characteristic sensitivity to register, dynamics, and tone color. Mahler's spatial music facilitates a phenomenological pivot from a 'lateral' orientation toward one of 'depth'. This pivot magnifies the passage's experiential weight and, by extension, its capacity to symbolize the beginning of the hero's path.
5
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THE CONCEPT OF TRANSFORMATION AS A SONORISTIC PARADIGM

80%
Muzyka
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2008
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vol. 53
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issue 1(208)
31-45
EN
Jozef Chominski's writings from the 1950s and 1960s reveal that sonoristics was conceived as a theory that attempted to rationalize the musical language of the mid-century avant-garde and focused on the issues of timbre and texture. One of the most innovative aspects of this theory was the ability to explain the novel sound qualities of twentieth-century music as transformations of traditional musical elements, such as melody or harmony, into 'sonoristic values' - self-sufficient qualities of the musical work of a purely sonic character. This approach allowed for a positive evaluation of many non-traditional compositional means frequently found in twentieth-century music, such as clusters, sound effects generated by conventional instruments (e.g., violin as percussive instrument), or noise acquiring the status of musical material. This article examines a variety of transformational processes, both evolutionary and 'metabolic', that constituted the main objects of sonoristic analyses, and scrutinizes how the concept of transformation informs the analytical language itself. The article further demonstrates how the idea of transformation instigates a methodological shift from 'ideal' structures of tonal music (themes, harmonic progressions, or contrapuntal relationships) to 'real' sound objects given in aural perception. In effect, sonoritics is defined as an analytical theory that replaces the interest in structure deducible from the score with an emphasis on texture as an experiential phenomenon; and transformation is shown to represent the chief methodological paradigm of this theory grounded in the sounding manifestation of a composition.
6
80%
Muzyka
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2008
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vol. 53
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issue 1(208)
131-139
EN
Penderecki's 'St Luke Passion' is not usually considered a sonoristic work. In the United Kingdom, however, firsthand experience of truly sonoristic pieces was limited and St Luke was the first notable experience of the style for many British audiences. After two performances in 1967 London's critical community divided, a pattern that would mirror international opinion in the following decades. The work's detractors labelled it an unthinking collection of sound effects. Its defenders attempted to negate these accusations by distancing the work from the Polish school and stressing its conventional methods of construction, passing over its extravagant soundworld to focus on recognisable models such as serialism, strict counterpoint, organic development and underlying tonalities. Negatively or positively, sonorism was regarded in the work as a colouristic device, a means by which modernistic means were domesticated to word-painting or dramatic embellishment. Both instances, this paper will argue, did a disservice to the work as an example of Polish political defiance, which was suppressed by either the criticism of its sonoristic technique as mere sound effects or its reduction to familiar Western European designs. Through a combination of reception history and score analysis, this article examines the impact of St Luke in the formation of a British interpretation of sonorism, and compares this to a new reading of the work that draws attention to its use of sonoristic means in support of a political-theological programme, restoring its forgotten political power and arriving at a richer understanding of Penderecki's sonoristic method.
7
80%
Muzyka
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2008
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vol. 53
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issue 1(208)
107-118
EN
The article sets out to prove the hypothesis that the sonoristic aspect of Serocki's music is one of the main indicators of his mature and late style. The tendency to compose polychromatic sound structures is already marked in the works dating from the 1950s, and continues until the final years of his creative development. The composer combines sonoristic and dodecaphonic techniques with aleatoric methods of shaping the work, as well as - in a few compositions - with elements of traditional techniques.
Muzyka
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2008
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vol. 53
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issue 1(208)
17-29
EN
In the 1960s, an interest in Jo zef Chominski's sonology theory was a lonely experience within European musicology. Its significance has been growing over the course of time, as has been the case with other investigative or artistic enterprises in the history of culture which were too radically avant-garde for their time. Today, it is the 'flagship' theory of Polish musicology, having caused a significant degree of resonance not only within the 'Chominski school', but also beyond it. An important premise within this tendency is the adoption of sonoristics as the so-called 'structural dominant' of a musical composition, in view of the loss of this function by the older, purely sound-based systems (major-minor, modal, 12-note etc.). Among the main operational categories (norms) of Chominski's sonological theory, the author regards as crucial the concept of the functional transformation of musical elements. Broadly understood, functional transformation refers to reshaping one musical element into another or, more precisely - changing the expressive values of a particular, relatively autonomous, musical element, into, in Chominski's words, complex expressive values. Writing about the new harmonics, Chominski said: 'the character of consonances, their interal dynamics, are a relative phenomenon, dependent on a number of co-factors, among them the manner of rationalising time, the treatment of the dynamic and articulatory techniques. There are no longer any chords, but 'vertical structures', in which the 'colouristic factor' plays a part. There are no melodics, but 'horizontal structures', co-created by sounds and agogic and purely motive moments. A sonological analysis thus offers individual investigation of the structure of compositions, where each of them separately is the result of its own norm-setting'. The article focuses on the systematisation of subjects for investigation by musical sonology (elements of musical sonoristics) from the point of view of the criteria of psychophysiological cognitive theory. In the final part the author discusses various works which have made a significant contribution to the development of Chominski's research, pointing to their open character which stimulates further research.
Muzyka
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2008
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vol. 53
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issue 1(208)
47-63
EN
Józef Michal Chominski's postulate of investigating the 'real sound' of a composition is the most essential aspect of the theory of musical sonology; yet the existing analytical literature regards it primarily as a metaphor. In Chominski's approach, the 'auditive shape of sound' provides the true basis for investigation, whilst its music notation records the projection of the composer's creative intention. However, the sonoristic re-definition of the functions of particular elements of music is carried out exclusively on the basis of the score. Its results are thus not fully satisfactory, because of the gap which exists between the etymology of the concept of 'real sound' (a physical-acoustic fact) and the nature of the source - the written text of a work which is being analysed (a symbolic-sign code). If the theory of sonology is to develop, it seems necessary to relocate the point of gravity, from an interpretation of the sound phenomena encoded graphically in the score to the issues of their acoustic shape and their psychologically conditioned perception. As a condition of adopting such an approach, one has to enter the area of empirical musicology and to identify the 'real sound' using the methods and tools appropriate to it. The model of a sonoristic analysis of a musical composition presented in the first part of the article is based on three kinds of sources: the score (the music notation of a composition), a recording (the acoustic text of a music composition) and a sonogram (a mathematical-information text), which is a form of making the real sound of a composition, taken from its phonographic recording, 'permanent' by means of a visual time-frequency representation. In the later part of the article the authoress presents an analytical study of 'Threnody to the victims of Hiroshima' by Krzysztof Penderecki. This work is one of the most representative examples of the avant-garde style of the 1960s 'Polish school of composition', which the composer himself strongly associated with the idea of music sonoristics/sonology. An analysis of those aspects of sonoristic regulation of 'Threnody' which are given above allows one to observe that the score notation and the spectral image of the work - what might be regarded as a visualisation of auditive perception - provide a very convergent picture, confirming the composer's belief that the 'graphic logic' is reflected in the 'sound logic'. Moreover, the construction of 'Threnody' has certain features of symmetry already apparent on the diagram of the shape and amplitude of the sound wave, which are confirmed on the basis of theoretical-musical criteria associated with the distribution of states of density and dilution of sound and the movement of sound events.
Muzyka
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2008
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vol. 53
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issue 1(208)
93-105
EN
Polish sonorism in general, and its specific form as developed by Szalonek, pose some unusual challenges for musical analysis and interpretative musicology, owing to the fact that they give prominence to aspects of music such as timbre and texture whose sensuously immediate character is sufficiently complex to mean that they are, or at least would seem to be, highly resistant to straightforward functional categorisation. Yet both musical analysis and the interpretation of music as a cultural sign-system presuppose a grasp of the internal functional organisation of the music they are concerned with. One possible solution to this problem is proposed by those who adopt a structuralist approach to timbre and texture as compositional variables. This article considers whether such an approach - as exemplified by Danuta Mirka's analysis of Penderecki's sonoristic works - can also be applied to sonoristic music in general, and to Szalonek's music in particular. It argues that such an approach possesses serious limitations, even though these do not show up in an analysis of the kind of sonoristic music that focuses largely on sound-mass effects, as Penderecki's compositions do. A consideration of Szalonek's more soloistic exploitation of sonoristic compositional techniques highlights both phenomenological deficiencies within the structuralist model and the extent to which it retains a formalistic conception of the ingredients of music - one that seems to run counter to the anti-formalist aesthetic that is a feature of sonorism. The author then considers what might be involved in seeking to develop an alternative strategy for analysing such works.
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Content available remote

SONORISM: FOOTPRINTS AND FINGERPRINTS

70%
Muzyka
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2008
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vol. 53
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issue 1(208)
81-92
EN
Polish avant-garde music after 1956 has often been described by the term 'sonoristic', introduced into Polish musicology by the musicologist Józef Chominski. This trend, characterized by an emphasis on texture and timbre and often coupled with non-traditional instrumental and vocal techniques, became known as 'sonorism' [sonorystyka] and associated with the term 'Polish School'. While this paper touches on problematic issues such as the time-frame, definition and periodisation of the movement, its main focus is on the sonoristic repertoire and two complementary aspects which the authoress refers to, metaphorically, as footprints and fingerprints. The footprints are shared sonoristic features and characteristics such as texture and timbre used as primary structural elements, sharp textural contrasts, fast rate of change, and particular aspects of articulation and notation, all of which join to constitute criteria that enable one to distinguish virtually all sonoristic works from contemporary 'textural' pieces by composers such as Xenakis and Ligeti. The present discussion of fingerprints, which highlights highly diverse personalities within the general sonoristic trend, concentrates on three works: Schaeffer's 'Scultura' (1960), Serocki's 'Symphonic frescos' (1963-1964), Szalonek's 'Les sons' (1965). These works provide a useful supplement to more familiar instances of sonoristic fingerprints in the early works of, for instance, Penderecki and Górecki. Both aspects of such works are equally important for the understanding of the nature of sonorism. The paper concludes that, despite its problematic aspects, the notion of sonorism is not only justly imprinted as a term and concept in Polish musicology but is finally crossing the language barrier. The term 'sonorism' has come to usefully represent both the footprints and the fingerprints of the movement.
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