Pushing Boundaries

Building Musical Bridges

Mobility at the Warsaw Autumn was related to the cultural dimensions of the Cold War. As the work of numerous scholars has shown, the era’s geopolitical boundaries coincided with aesthetic ones—socialist realism in the East, modernism in the West—and musical practices therefore became politically loaded. ⁵ Speaking very broadly, Soviet-sponsored socialist realism demanded music that was optimistic and accessible. In practice, this meant composing works with memorable tunes, a clear rhythmic pulse, consonant harmony, and defined points of arrival. Texts and programmatic narratives sent messages that audiences could readily grasp; drawing on folk song enabled composers to imprint their socialist realist works with national features. ⁶ The characteristics of Western-backed modernism were viewed as diametrically opposed to socialist realism in nearly every way. Rather than easy comprehension, modernist aesthetics championed complexity, typically manifested in jagged melodic lines and a dissonant harmonic language. Many composers in the postwar West were invested in serialism—that is, exploring nontraditional, rigidly algorithmic approaches to ordering musical material (such as pitch, volume, and duration). Each side had its symbol: Dmitri Shostakovich, the Soviet Union’s leading composer, and Anton Webern, an Austrian composer who died in the immediate aftermath of World War II, and whose hermetic, intricately structured music was an inspiration to Western Europe’s postwar avant-garde. Each side had its prestige machine, the apparatus that dispensed commissions for new works, awarded prizes, assigned posts in universities and other institutions, and controlled opportunities for publication, public performance, and media distribution. ⁷ And neither side could be fully understood except in relation to the other. In the West, socialist realism was viewed as the product of coercion; Soviet cultural officials saw modernist music as empty formalism. Within their own domains, socialist realism was a key component in building a new and better society, and modernism was a preserver and defender of creative autonomy. ⁸

If the dichotomy between modernism and socialist realism seems simplistic, that’s because it is: applied to musical aesthetics, Cold War rhetoric lent itself far more readily to reductive binary sloganeering than to sophisticated analysis. ⁹ Yet the binary had real effects. Cultural life throughout postwar Eastern Europe was recalibrated to align with Soviet models. ¹⁰ Poland’s postwar Stalinization had palpable musical consequences in addition to the political and economic ones. The most overt of these took place in 1949, when the Polish Ministry of Culture and Art (Ministerstwo Kultury i Sztuki, hereafter MKiS) staged a conference of composers and musicologists that cemented socialist realism as official aesthetic policy. ¹¹

Polish musicians responded to socialist realism in complex ways, and we should be wary of viewing the Stalinist period exclusively in terms of totalitarian state repression. ¹² At the same time, it is important to remember that early 1950s Poland was, to use Dariusz Stola’s words, “a country with no exit,” ringed with barbed wire and governed by tight controls on the movement of its citizens. ¹³ Polish musicians were among those whose mobility was restricted. Only the most institutionally powerful composers could travel abroad, and then only rarely. Typically, their journeys were part of cultural exchange missions with other socialist nations: Andrzej Panufnik, Poland’s leading composer before his defection in 1954, was sent to Hungary and the Soviet Union in 1950 and to China in 1953. ¹⁴ Scores and recordings likewise had little opportunity to traverse the Polish border. At the 1954 General Assembly of the Polish Composers’ Union (Związek Kompozytorów Polskich, hereafter ZKP), Tadeusz Baird related a disheartening incident from a recent trip to Romania. In Bucharest, the composer visited a music shop that was overflowing with publications from the Soviet Union, the German Democratic Republic (GDR), and Czechoslovakia. But when Baird inquired about Polish music, the shopkeeper responded with a shrug: he had no Polish scores to offer. Baird interpreted this encounter as symptomatic of larger problems in Poland’s musical life. ¹⁵

Just as Polish composers—and their works—had difficulty getting out of Poland, information from elsewhere had difficulty getting in, especially if this information was about the modernist musical trends that were ascendant in powerful new music institutions throughout postwar Western Europe. Composer and critic Zygmunt Mycielski addressed this issue forthrightly when he spoke at the ZKP General Assembly in 1955. A former ZKP president, Mycielski continued to occupy a position of authority in Polish musical circles. ¹⁶ Reflecting on the years of socialist realist policy, he cautioned against the dangers of isolation: “we are becoming a backwater, in which we can neither imagine how music is being played and produced elsewhere, nor can we envision what music is being performed and composed in other places.” ¹⁷

The Warsaw Autumn’s fundamental purpose was to bridge these gaps, which had opened during Poland’s wartime occupation and subsequent Stalinization. In early 1954, during the very first trickles of the Thaw, ZKP’s leadership approached Polish cultural officials with a proposal to organize an ongoing festival that would feature an international array of performers playing recently composed repertoire from all over the world. ¹⁸ Their aims were to educate Polish musicians and general audiences, objectives that aligned ZKP’s festival initiative with similar institutions that were launched in postwar Western Europe—most notably the Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music, established in West Germany in 1946 to introduce young composers and performers to the repertoire, styles, and techniques that had been banned under National Socialism. ¹⁹

Though ZKP’s acknowledged model, the Prague Spring Festival in Czechoslovakia, came from closer to home, their proposal initially failed to generate much enthusiasm in the Polish Ministry of Culture. ²⁰ The project only gained momentum after an encounter that allegedly took place in autumn 1954, when Kazimierz Sikorski, newly elected ZKP president, happened to speak with PZPR First Secretary Bolesław Bierut during a state function in Warsaw’s Belvedere Palace. ²¹ Reminiscing in 1986, Sikorski recalled the conversation as decisive, not just in obtaining Party-state approval to launch the event, but also in determining what the festival’s character would be:

I didn’t know him [Bierut], and I didn’t know how he would respond. I thought that he might say, “listen, you know, wait a couple of years, we still have time.” But he said, “that’s interesting,” and, as he put it, “make it a confrontation between East and West. Let them show what they have, and we’ll show them what we have.” Then he says: “Call me in two or three days and I’ll give you an answer.” But not even two days passed before I received a phone call from the Ministry of Culture and Art, saying that the Ministry approved the project and that it was going to be the “Warsaw Autumn.” ²²

Sikorski’s account is revealing because it intimates that, from the PZPR’s perspective, the Warsaw Autumn’s primary value was to function as a site for cultural diplomacy—an arena in which international relations could be played out through musical performance. ²³ Some of these encounters indeed took place across East–West geopolitical boundaries. When it began in 1956, the Warsaw Autumn was one of the few places in Eastern Europe where the Cold War’s opposing cultural spheres could regularly come into contact. The festival also played an important role in facilitating the exercise of soft power across state borders within the socialist bloc. And cultural diplomacy at the Warsaw Autumn served yet another function: it was one factor that enabled the institution to continue to disseminate musical modernism long after Poland’s Thaw had come to a close.

It is well documented that Władysław Gomułka’s consolidation of power as PZPR First Secretary led to a period of cultural retrenchment in the late 1950s that impacted artists and intellectuals in many fields. Art historian Piotr Piotrowski has demonstrated that the PZPR sought to curtail modernism in the visual arts by liquidating journals that promoted modernist aesthetics, shuttering exhibitions and galleries that championed abstract art, and specifying that abstract works could comprise no more than 15 percent of any public exhibition. ²⁴ Writers and journalists likewise experienced renewed restrictions, including reinvigorated censorship and a precipitous decline in the number of periodicals and books that were published each year. ²⁵

But these changes largely bypassed musical life. Polish composition entered its most radical phase precisely when official policies towards the other arts had started to refreeze; music continued to enjoy relatively uncontested official patronage during the late 1950s and beyond. One sign of this support was the MKiS administrative order that, in December 1959, established the Warsaw Autumn as an ongoing annual event. ²⁶ The festival’s newly secure institutional status reflected the particular position of art music in late 1950s Poland. Influenced by Romantic notions of music’s autonomy, ZKP members generally were among the least politically engaged of all Polish artists. While they did not necessarily support party directives, composers and musicologists rarely engaged in forthright critiques of official cultural policy; as a result, the PZPR tended to view ZKP as benign. Composers, critics, and musicologists also successfully positioned Poland’s emerging compositional avant-garde as both a uniquely national phenomenon and one that had its finger on the pulse of Polish contemporary life. ²⁷ At the same time, the MKiS administrative order of December 1959 reflected the priorities that had led Polish officials to approve the festival in the first place, for it enshrined international exchange as one of the festival’s primary aims. ²⁸ Throughout the Cold War, the Warsaw Autumn indeed served Polish cultural diplomatic interests, demonstrating that a socialist state could promote musical modernity and thereby projecting an image of liberality to the outside world. Representatives from other countries, including the Soviet Union and the states of Eastern Europe, also sought to use the annual festival concerts as a way to further their own agendas. In the section that follows, I will discuss cultural diplomacy at the Warsaw Autumn in more detail, focusing specifically on interactions that took place within the socialist bloc, and considering how these interactions affected the cross-border circulation of modernist music.

Diplomatic Maneuvers

A key component of cultural diplomacy at the Warsaw Autumn involved demonstrations of East–West parity. During the 1960s, the Festival Committee sponsored delegations of official observers from throughout the world. Like many of the festival’s logistical elements, the guest-lists were shaped by concerns for geopolitical balance: in 1962, for example, there were resources to sponsor sixty guests total—half of them from the East, and the other from the West. ²⁹ The stakes of repertoire selection were especially high at the Warsaw Autumn, where compositions functioned not just as representatives of various musical styles but also as stand-ins for particular countries and political-economic systems. The flags that were hung each year at the National Philharmonic Hall publicly broadcast the state affiliations of the composers whose music was featured on the festival program. Behind the scenes, Festival Committee members categorized pieces as “socialist” or “capitalist” when they submitted each year’s repertoire to MKiS for its approval. To demonstrate the levelness of the playing field, the total running time of music from each camp was tallied to the minute. ³⁰ Performers were also tracked according to their points of geopolitical origin. ³¹ Needless to say, differences of musical style and technique were blurred to create these images of regional cohesion: by and large, the Polish compositions that were being featured at the Warsaw Autumn were just as radical as anything that was being produced in Western Europe. One question, then, was what “socialist” music might be in the 1960s, and who had the power to define it.

Looking more closely at the official Soviet and East European delegations to the Warsaw Autumn complicates the picture still further. To manage international relations within Eastern Europe, the Festival Committee, MKiS Music Division, and MKiS Bureau of International Cultural Relations (Biuro Współpracy Kulturalnej z Zagranicą, hereafter BWKZ) precisely delineated how the invitations were to be distributed to potential official observers from the socialist bloc. Twelve invitations were destined for the Soviet Union in 1962. The GDR and Czechoslovakia each received six, while other socialist countries were granted between one and three of the remaining spots. ³² As for the festival program, it was a given that Soviet performers and compositions would be included each year. Yet there was not enough time to present music from every East European country while still providing an overview of new compositions from Poland and the West. To avoid giving an impression of favoritism, Warsaw Autumn planners proposed a rotation system in which the same East European country could not appear on the festival program in successive years. ³³

Aside from deciding which East European countries to include, there was also the question of what the musicians would play. From the outset, Warsaw Autumn organizers were aware that “new music” had divergent meanings in the East and the West, and that there were also gradations of difference within the socialist bloc. ³⁴ Yet initially they opted to give East European musicians free rein to choose their concert programs, as part of their project to present a complete, multifaceted view of postwar composition. ³⁵ Festival organizers and Polish cultural officials soon began to question this strategy. By 1961, the BWKZ was advising Warsaw Autumn planners to help the East European ensembles select suitable repertoire. ³⁶ This was because, despite the Warsaw Autumn’s overt self-positioning as a site for objective comparison, covertly the festival was a means of asserting cultural parity with the West, and so its tacit rules privileged Western definitions of modernist aesthetics. Socialist realist compositions were thus virtually guaranteed a poor reception at festival concerts. The Bulgarians chose the Sofia Philharmonic’s repertoire on their own in 1961, which resulted in a string of works whose folksy lyricism and clear indebtedness to nineteenth-century Russian classics hewed closely to an official ideological line. ³⁷ The Festival Committee described this concert as an “unfortunate” event, one that had probably “done more harm than good” in advertising contemporary Bulgarian music. “We should no longer allow such bad experiences to happen,” they concluded. ³⁸ Far from demonstrating geopolitical unity, presentations of unabashedly socialist realist music at the Warsaw Autumn could contribute to tensions between Poland and its socialist neighbors if these performances resulted in an impression of backwardness in the eyes of festival observers.

Yet Warsaw Autumn planners were inconsistently successful at nudging East European performers outside a socialist realist aesthetic zone. This spottiness resulted in part from how the festival was planned. Organizing each year’s concerts involved multiple institutions and layers of bureaucracy. ZKP members formed the core of the Warsaw Autumn Festival Committee and its Repertoire Commission, which masterminded the concert programs each year. The MKiS Music Division represented state interests at festival planning meetings. It also served as a liaison between composers and higher-ups in the Ministry, who dispensed the Warsaw Autumn’s annual budget and evaluated each year’s proposed repertoire and performers. Other MKiS agencies coordinated the festival appearances of non-Polish musicians: these included PAGART, the state-run concert agency, and BWKZ. Both PAGART and BWKZ were linked to sister institutions in the socialist bloc, such as Goskoncert, the state-run Soviet concert agency. Poland’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Ministerstwo Spraw Zagranicznych) also participated in festival planning by clearing performers’ and observers’ travel to Warsaw. ³⁹

Interactions among institutions within the socialist bloc ostensibly eased cross-border flows of people and information in the service of increased regional cohesion. When it came to the Warsaw Autumn, however, such contacts were just as likely to put roadblocks in festival planners’ way. Organizers had little direct control over which East European performers might appear at the festival. Instead, these arrangements were dictated by the cultural exchange agreements that were negotiated over their heads, between government ministries. ⁴⁰ Contact with East European musicians also typically took place through intermediaries. These circuitous channels of cross-border communication could bring Warsaw Autumn planning to a halt. In March 1961, for example, desperate Festival Committee members begged MKiS to speed up its negotiations with Bulgaria and the GDR, because “the lack of information from both countries has completely paralyzed our work on the festival program.” ⁴¹ Lack of direct contact meant that there were few opportunities for Warsaw Autumn committee members to influence the festival concert programs of their East European neighbors.

Even more importantly, because Warsaw Autumn concerts gave Westerners a glimpse into the socialist bloc, cultural officials had an interest in controlling what these observers might see within the festival showcase. This was especially true of the Soviet Union: strategic selections of performers and repertoire illuminated some facets of Soviet musical life while veiling others. One problem was the group of unofficial composers who had started experimenting with abstract, modernist compositional techniques from the West. Another was pianist Maria Yudina, who became notorious in the early 1960s for her allegiance to modernism both old and new. Musicologist Peter Schmelz describes her performances of Andrey Volkonsky’s Musica Stricta (1956–1957) for solo piano as electrifying audiences in Moscow and Leningrad in 1961. This was not just because Volkonsky’s idiosyncratic serial techniques challenged prevailing Soviet compositional orthodoxy, though the work did play a seminal role in the development of unofficial Soviet music. ⁴² Yudina’s flinty playing also highlighted all that was hard-edged, uncompromising, and therefore potentially oppositional about the piece. A repeat Leningrad performance in November 1961 cemented Musica Stricta’s connection with anti-authoritarian sentiment. Yudina began her recital by playing Webern’s Variations, op. 27 (1935–1936); she ended with the Volkonsky. In between, she read poetry by Boris Pasternak and Nikolai Zabolotsky. From this point on, Soviet officials took measures to reduce Yudina’s domestic visibility and freedom of movement. She was first barred from performing in Leningrad; by March 1963, she was unable to concertize or teach anywhere in the Soviet Union, a ban that lasted until the autumn of 1966. ⁴³

News of Yudina’s scandalous November 1961 recital quickly traveled to Poland. Just one month after the performance occurred, Warsaw Autumn planners approached the pianist to see if she might be interested in a 1962 festival appearance. The repertoire they requested was precisely the pieces Yudina had recently played in Leningrad, Volkonsky’s Musica Stricta and the Webern Variations, along with two additions: Polish composer Karol Szymanowski’s Masques (1915–1916) and a piano sonata by fledgling modernist Aurel Stroe, a significant choice since Romanian music had not been performed at the Warsaw Autumn since 1956. ⁴⁴ By late January 1962, the Festival Committee was corresponding with Yudina to hammer out the details of her program. ⁴⁵ They were confident enough to list Musica Stricta as a coming attraction in the festival’s 1962 promotional brochure. ⁴⁶

But there was a catch—Yudina’s participation in the Warsaw Autumn had to be confirmed via official channels, and she was having trouble getting permission to go to Poland. After weighing their options in early March 1962, ZKP’s Executive Board decided to attempt to influence the situation through diplomatic channels: they sent a plea for help to Poland’s ambassador to the Soviet Union. ⁴⁷ This effort came to naught. In early April, Goskoncert sent a telegram to the Festival Committee with its final decision: Yudina would not be allowed to perform in Warsaw. ⁴⁸ In this instance, the inability of the performer to travel also prevented the planned performance of Volkonsky’s piece at the 1962 festival.

In the meantime, the Soviet concert agency had already begun to make alternative arrangements. They proposed violinist Mikhail Vayman, accompanied by pianist Maria Karandashova; Warsaw Autumn planners approved the choice in late March 1962, when negotiations with Yudina were still ongoing. ⁴⁹ The works Vayman and Karandashova performed were not exactly ingratiating. There was little consistent uplift in Prokofiev’s Violin Sonata no. 1, op. 80 (1938–1946). Gritty sonatas by Galina Ustvolskaya and Boris Klyuzner impressed one American observer as “surprisingly dissonant.” ⁵⁰ The pair also performed Stravinsky’s Duo concertant (1931–1932). But unlike the juxtaposition of Webern and Volkonsky that would have occurred in Yudina’s performance, Vayman and Karandashova’s program did not make uncomfortable suggestions about the dependence of new Soviet music on formalist trends from Western Europe. Their self-contained repertoire was limited to composers who were part of the Soviet fold—including the newly rehabilitated Stravinsky, whose triumphal homecoming occurred nearly simultaneously with the 1962 Warsaw Autumn. This concert was thus a carefully calibrated exposition of Soviet modernity, one that had been generated from within before its export to Poland.

The repertoire Soviet performers brought to the 1962 Warsaw Autumn presumably represented their home country’s official point of view. In Poland, however, these pieces were understood as misrepresenting the more complex realities of Soviet musical life. Before the 1962 festival, Wiktor Weinbaum, director of the MKiS Music Division, asked composer-critic Stefan Kisielewski and musicologist Zofia Lissa to review a draft of the program. Kisielewski and Lissa had opposing musical tastes and divergent political views. Yet neither could understand why festival organizers had been so unadventurous when it came to the Soviet music scheduled for that year. Kisielewski complained that focusing on composers like Prokofiev was taking the path of least resistance. ⁵¹ Lissa advocated performing pieces by the fledgling group of Moscow-based radicals (including Volkonsky), because, as she put it, “this would counteract the prevailing view of the ‘backwardness’ of Soviet music.” ⁵² As we have seen, adding such works to the Warsaw Autumn program was easier said than done. Weinbaum admitted in a letter to Minister of Culture Tadeusz Galiński that powerful figures in the socialist bloc’s other composers’ unions “do not always agree with the creative explorations of young composers.” ⁵³ Outside Poland, that is, modernist experimentation was not always viewed as an appropriate official representation of “socialist” music.

Informal Imports

But official exchanges were not the only option. So far, the cross-border relationships I have been describing might usefully be understood as international, in the sense that Steven Vertovec defines the term in his work on migrant communities in Europe. Internationalism in this case entails sustained, top–down contact across borders. Governments forge international ties that typically work to perpetuate contemporary notions of the nation-state. In contrast, Vertovec describes transnationalism as bottom–up. He views transnational relationships as the work of non-state actors—businesses, non-government organizations, and individuals—whose interactions have the potential to question existing national borders and to challenge state monopolies on determining meaning. ⁵⁴

The boundaries between these terms are fuzzy, especially when they are applied to a state-sponsored institution like the Warsaw Autumn. The terms are useful in that they can allow us to conceptualize the different kinds of cross-border relationships the Warsaw Autumn facilitated. Some encounters were clearly official, and at the risk of oversimplifying, we might think of them as international—because the assumption was that musicians (or musical works) who traveled to Poland officially were functioning as stand-ins for a particular state. Other encounters depended on sustained informal, non-state interactions that might better be described as transnational.

Many of these informal connections were forged through tourism. Warsaw Autumn planners had initially been reluctant to cast the festival as a tourist destination, because they associated music tourism with European spa towns, the peregrinations of bourgeois dilettantes, and flashy performances of easily digested standard musical fare. None of these seemed compatible with their aim to edify Polish audiences through exposure to difficult contemporary composition. ⁵⁵ By the early 1960s, however, organizers’ attitudes were starting to change: they began to interpret increasing numbers of paying guests as a sign of prestige, confirmation that their institution was becoming a truly worldwide forum for aesthetic debate. ⁵⁶

The Festival Committee’s annual reports recorded the growing number of tourists and their points of origin. Although Warsaw Autumn audiences did not consist solely of musicians, most of the East European tourists who attended the festival in the early 1960s were connected to music in some way. In 1961, for example, a busload of forty-six musicians came from Prague. ⁵⁷ There were entourages of seventy-two people from the Soviet Union, three from France, and twenty-five from Czechoslovakia in 1962. ⁵⁸ Music institutions in the Lithuanian and Latvian Soviet republics sent groups of students and faculty to the 1964 Warsaw Autumn. ⁵⁹ In 1965, two groups of composers, musicologists, and performers—one from Talinn (thirty people), the other from Novosibirsk (fifteen people)—journeyed to Warsaw, where they joined seventy-three tourists from elsewhere in Eastern Europe and thirty-one visitors from the West. ⁶⁰

What quickly becomes apparent from these tallies is that the overwhelming majority of the Warsaw Autumn’s tourists came from various locations in the Soviet Union. These travelers were part of a much larger trend: in 1963 alone, Anne Gorsuch notes, more than sixty thousand Soviet citizens vacationed in Eastern Europe. ⁶¹ Their journeys were facilitated by an expanding culture of tourism during the post-Stalin Thaw, in which the ability to travel became essential to evolving notions of Soviet identity. What did Soviet travelers find in Eastern Europe? Most fundamentally, Gorsuch argues, they encountered difference. A journey to Czechoslovakia, East Germany, or Poland also gave Soviet tourists an opportunity to consume—both material goods and the products of Western culture. ⁶²

The Warsaw Autumn offered its participants the chance to indulge in a very specialized form of cultural consumption. At festival performances, Soviet tourists had direct encounters with music by Poland’s compositional avant-garde, as well as music from the West that was difficult to hear back at home. Visitors could also acquire more durable tokens of their Warsaw Autumn experiences: scores, recordings, and the hefty program book, which included detailed information about composers and their works.

Yet the festival not only provided opportunities for Soviet tourists to absorb modernist music from Poland and the West. As a zone of cross-border contact that brought together people, compositions, and ideas that were unlikely to meet in any other way, the Warsaw Autumn was an excellent place for Soviet musicians to network—to contribute, in other words, to the exchanges of information that were taking place during and between festival performances. In what follows, I will trace the journey of one such traveler—Edison Denisov—to demonstrate how tourism and informal networking created transnational ties that enabled unofficial Soviet music to begin traveling westward across the Polish border.

Like Volkonsky, the composer of Musica Stricta, Denisov wrote music using the abstract, serial methods that were officially suspect in the Soviet Union during the 1960s. He attended the Warsaw Autumn for the first time in 1962. Denisov’s aesthetic predilections disqualified him from the official Soviet delegation, which typically comprised musicologists and composers who were among the most inured to the ideological dangers of exposure to modernist music. Instead, he paid his own way to Warsaw, traveling as a tourist with a group from the Soviet Union of Composers. ⁶³ That he was able to go to Poland at all suggests that Denisov’s status was still ambiguous in 1962: too questionable to represent the Soviet Union officially, but not so problematic that he was barred from traveling altogether, as he frequently would be in subsequent years.

Denisov took full advantage of the opportunities to network at his first Warsaw Autumn. He met Elliott Carter, an influential American modernist, who was so impressed by the Soviet composer that, in a private letter to an influential patron, he hyperbolically described Denisov as a “23-toner from Moscow” and gushed that he was planning to acquire the score of Denisov’s Piano Variations (1961). ⁶⁴ Denisov also connected with his Polish colleagues, including Kazimierz Serocki—a composer who was an active member of the Warsaw Autumn Festival Committee and its Repertoire Commission. After the 1962 Warsaw Autumn, Denisov wrote a private letter to Serocki; he proposed his new work, the Concerto for Flute, Oboe, Piano, and Percussion (1963) as a potential addition to one of the upcoming festival programs. Serocki relayed the idea to the Repertoire Commission, which responded favorably. ⁶⁵ The world premiere of Denisov’s Concerto took place at the festival in 1964, during a cosmopolitan concert that also featured works by Bulgarian, Polish, British, and Italian composers. ⁶⁶ This was the first time unofficial Soviet music had been heard at the Warsaw Autumn.

In some respects, this performance occurred because Denisov had been in the right place at the right time. Through traveling to Poland and communicating directly with Warsaw Autumn planners, Denisov circumvented the official channels that had, to that point, blocked performances of unofficial Soviet music. It also helped that the festival’s Polish organizers were keen to promote the modernist musical trends that were emerging throughout Eastern Europe. Although a performance of Volkonsky’s Musica Stricta never came to pass, the Repertoire Commission continued to hunt for music by the Soviet Union’s “young composers.” ⁶⁷ Meanwhile, the Festival Committee pledged in 1963 that it would “establish contacts with the People’s Democracies and present their compositions, especially works by young, avant-garde composers.” ⁶⁸ Committee members were perhaps responding to the criticism their programming received in 1962, when peer reviewers in Poland had objected that the Soviet offerings were too staid. Their interest also had a more pragmatic motivation: finding adventurous new music from the socialist bloc was part of a broader strategy to ensure that Warsaw Autumn concert programs would remain varied, up-to-date, and provocative, and therefore continue to attract the large audiences that were crucial to ensuring the institution’s legitimacy in socialist Poland. ⁶⁹ But there was a streak of idealism as well. A member of the Repertoire Commission throughout the 1960s, composer Włodzimierz Kotoński has recalled that programming unofficial Soviet music furthered festival organizers’ goal to present as in-depth a picture as possible of contemporary musical life in various countries. ⁷⁰ At the time, Kotoński traveled frequently on cultural exchanges throughout Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. In addition to conducting official business while he was abroad, he also used these trips to find new works that might fit the Warsaw Autumn’s predominantly modernist profile. ⁷¹

Locating the socialist bloc’s avant-gardes was one thing. As we have seen, information might come from the composers themselves; members of the Warsaw Autumn organizing committees also turned official cultural exchanges to their advantage. Performing this music was another matter entirely: it was often easier to transport music scores across borders than it was for musicians to travel. Polish performers gave Warsaw Autumn planners a way to circumvent potential Soviet resistance to presentations of unofficial music. In 1959, ZKP higher-ups discussed using local players as a way to present a wider variety of music from Eastern Europe. ⁷² The Warsaw Autumn Festival Committee returned to this idea in 1963, when it proposed that Polish orchestras might perform works from other socialist countries. ⁷³ Two unofficial Soviet composers—Alfred Schnittke and Arvo Pärt—had their festival debuts in just this way. On 28 September 1965, Witold Krzemieński led the Poznań State Symphony Orchestra in the world premiere of Schnittke’s forbiddingly abstract Music for Piano and Chamber Orchestra (1964). One night later, Andrzej Markowski conducted the same ensemble in the Polish premiere of Pärt’s Perpetuum Mobile (1963), an audience favorite whose immediately apprehensible build-up of musical tension (and its release) is structured according to a serially ordered formal plan. ⁷⁴ Aside from presenting unofficial Soviet music to an international audience, these performances were noteworthy for two additional reasons. Neither took place during the opening gala or closing concert, the festival’s two most prestigious time-slots and the events that were most likely to have a substantial government presence. Instead of Poland’s premiere symphonic ensemble, the Warsaw-based National Philharmonic, a regional orchestra performed Schnittke’s and Pärt’s compositions. These decisions suggest that festival organizers were concerned to minimize the antagonisms that could result from their promotion of unofficial Soviet composers.

In addition to using Polish personnel, Warsaw Autumn planners assigned unofficial Soviet compositions to performers from other countries in the socialist bloc. Even during the Stalinist years, musical life in Eastern Europe had not been entirely uniform; the cultural changes of the Thaw further increased the limited possibilities for diversity. Thus, Czechoslovak new music gained its first institutional foothold in 1961, when the ensemble Musica Viva Pragensis was established at the Prague Conservatory. One of its founding members, flautist and composer Petr Kotík, was initially exposed to Western European trends through his father, the painter Jan Kotík. ⁷⁵ By the time he launched Musica Viva Pragensis, Kotík had already met Luigi Nono, an Italian composer whose communist political convictions were acceptable throughout Eastern Europe, even if his modernist compositional techniques were less universally acclaimed. Kotík was also well on his way to becoming a devotee of John Cage’s experimental approaches to generating musical experience. ⁷⁶ Warsaw Autumn organizers heard about Musica Viva Pragensis when the ensemble had been active for about one year; a Repertoire Commission member learned about the group when he was traveling in Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. ⁷⁷ Warsaw Autumn planners brought Musica Viva Pragensis to the 1964 festival, where the group played the latest avant-garde offerings from Prague, collaborated with John Cage and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, presented music from Western Europe, and performed Denisov’s Concerto for Flute, Oboe, Piano, and Percussion. ⁷⁸

Like the tactic of assigning Pärt and Schnittke to the Poznań State Symphony Orchestra in 1965, having members of the Czechoslovak ensemble play the Denisov appears to have been a calculated move. Warsaw Autumn planners originally thought that they would give Denisov’s piece to a group of Western soloists who were scheduled to appear at the festival in 1963. ⁷⁹ It is unclear why this performance did not take place. But the shift is suggestive, for it speaks to some of the complexities of border crossing at the Warsaw Autumn during the 1960s. In many respects, the festival facilitated movement across boundaries. Denisov and the players of Musica Viva Pragensis traversed two national borders when they converged on Warsaw; acting through informal communication channels, Denisov exported the score of his Concerto for Flute, Oboe, Piano and Percussion to Poland. Yet delegating Denisov’s Concerto to Musica Viva Pragensis preserved Cold War geopolitical divisions in ways that a presentation by Western musicians would have not. For years to come, ensembles from the West would be unable to perform works by unofficial Soviet composers at the Warsaw Autumn. In 1964, the assumed political solidarity among the socialist bloc’s musicians was another factor that facilitated the festival’s first glimpse of unofficial Soviet composition.

Musical Mobility at the Warsaw Autumn: Effects

What were some of the consequences of musical mobility at the Warsaw Autumn? Paradoxically, one of these effects was to underscore national difference within the socialist bloc. In the late 1950s, demonstrations of musical modernism at the Warsaw Autumn were one of the tactics Polish musicians had used to broadcast their cultural distance from the Soviet Union. As political and cultural changes took place elsewhere in Eastern Europe, local new music scenes responded by taking what had become, by then, an obvious course: a belated, prestige-enhancing turn to Western modernism and the embrace of the Warsaw Autumn in official publications. ⁸⁰ Musica Viva Pragensis was one manifestation of these broader trends, for the group specialized in music that was self-consciously new. And regardless of whether these works had been composed in the East or the West, the pieces tended to embody “newness” in similar ways—by eschewing defined national markers, pushing the boundaries of traditional performance situations, and challenging conventional ways of working with harmony and form. Yet precisely because Musica Viva Pragensis took a transnational approach to its programming, the group signaled that even though de-Stalinizing political reforms were slow to come to Czechoslovakia, the country’s musical life nevertheless was diverging during the early 1960s from official practices in the Soviet Union, where the injunction to produce new music that was “national in form, socialist in content,” was not wholly abandoned during the Thaw.

At the same time, musical practices that demonstrated national differences within the socialist bloc could also be understood as manifestations of increasingly close transnational ties across the Cold War’s East–West divides. As the Warsaw Autumn demonstrated—first through performances of works by avant-garde Polish composers, and then by programming an array of new music from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union—composers on both sides of the Cold War’s geopolitical boundaries were exploring similar aesthetic territory. Western observers at the Warsaw Autumn were especially prone to interpret the festival’s concert programs as evidence that the “Iron Curtain” was perhaps not so impenetrable after all. After the 1958 festival, one dazzled American commentator gushed that “abstract painting and ‘radical’ music” were being produced in Poland “almost as if Warsaw were a suburb of Paris.” ⁸¹ In 1965, a West German critic proclaimed that the “Warsaw Autumn effect” was rippling through Poland’s neighbors, rejuvenating musical life in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, the Soviet Union, and beyond. ⁸² In each account, the mobility of modernist musical practices is cast in terms of an eastward expansion of Western cultural influence. Neither commentator questions the right of the West to set the terms of musical progress; each assumes that an alignment with modernism was, aesthetically at least, to be free.

It is important to recognize that the apparent victory of modernism among East European musicians was hardly the outcome of a fair fight, for like many of their counterparts in the West, these composers were also conceptualizing musical progress in terms of technical advancement. In other words, musicians on both sides of the Cold War honored the same criteria of prestige. This seeming paradox was a common phenomenon throughout the socialist bloc. It was present in other fields of cultural production: David Crowley has remarked that, when it came to design, “socialist modernity looked just like that found on the other side of the East–West divide.” ⁸³ György Péteri argues that this paradox was, in fact, at the core of the entire socialist modernization project, which “followed deliberately and programmatically the universal standards of technological and economic success” (i.e., the standards of Western modernity) while also attempting to maintain a fundamental distinction between the socialist and capitalist systems. ⁸⁴ We might understand the de facto adherence of both sides to Western criteria as a product of skewed power dynamics, in which those on the periphery seek legitimation by adopting the standards of the center. ⁸⁵ The swerve towards modernism in music, however, was not just a matter of importing standards of aesthetic judgment that had been articulated elsewhere, because composers in both the East and the West were heirs to the same Romantic heritage from which modernist definitions of musical value ultimately derived. Thus we might also understand East European and Soviet composers’ advocacy of modernism in the 1950s and 1960s as stemming from their perception of a shared cultural history.

Cold War dynamics nevertheless ensured that the aftereffects of mobilizing modernist music were often more ambiguous for the Warsaw Autumn’s Polish organizers and supporters than they were for likeminded musicians and critics in the West. One instance of this took place in 1962, when, in a glowing review of that year’s concerts, the New York Times quoted Warsaw Autumn organizer Kazimierz Serocki as saying that, “the Warsaw shock treatment may well start a chain reaction in the Soviet way of composing music.” ⁸⁶ Serocki quickly denied ever saying any such thing: less than three weeks after the review appeared, the composer wrote a letter to the director of the International Cultural and Academic Exchanges Department at the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He claimed that the journalist had utterly misconstrued “his sincere joy at the large number of Russian colleagues who participated in our festival this year.” ⁸⁷ While Serocki was not willing to go on record by sending a letter of complaint to the New York Times, he urged the director to convey his position “to those people and institutions who—in your opinion—should be made aware of it.” ⁸⁸ Serocki’s swift disavowal suggests that this assessment—attributed to him, printed in an American newspaper, implicitly criticizing Soviet musical policy, and imagining an inversion of the socialist bloc’s presumed cultural hierarchies—could turn out to be a significant problem.

Such comments were also poorly received if they appeared in Poland’s domestic musical press. Zygmunt Mycielski’s 1965 review of the Warsaw Autumn made the indecorous suggestion that it was clear that Polish composers “no longer have a monopoly on these things” when modernist music was being written and performed even in scattered locations in the Soviet Union. ⁸⁹ He interpreted the appearance of young Soviet composers—such as Schnittke and Pärt—as final proof that modernist imperatives of compositional progress had triumphed over socialist realism’s preservation of musical traditionalism. Pointing this out in print overstepped the bounds of decorum that governed Polish–Soviet international relations, even when these relations were musical: Mycielski’s review provoked a truculent response in Soviet Music (Sovetskaya muzïka), the official organ of Soviet musicology, which was subsequently republished in Musical Movement (Ruch Muzyczny), Poland’s primary music magazine. ⁹⁰

The consequences were similarly complex for the East European avant-gardists the Warsaw Autumn promoted, especially if these exposés were interpreted as saying something more general about cultural relations within the socialist sphere. The case of Musica Viva Pragensis in 1964 illustrates how festival exposure could have multiple outcomes. The group’s performances received a sympathetic response in the Polish musical press, where critic Bohdan Pociej hailed the new Czechoslovak works as signaling a breakthrough in that country’s musical thought. ⁹¹ Travel to Warsaw also enabled ensemble member Petr Kotík to forge personal ties with musicians from the West. ⁹² One of the composers Kotík met in Poland was the American Lejaren Hiller; this connection eventually enabled Kotík to leave post-1968 Czechoslovakia when Hiller invited him to participate in SUNY Buffalo’s Creative Associates Program. ⁹³

Yet although Warsaw Autumn participation ultimately increased Kotík’s mobility, the most immediate effect was to restrict his range of motion. A Polish reviewer described Music for Three (1964), Kotík’s contribution to the 1964 festival, as an experiment in “sonic extremity,” in which the composer “instructs his string players to coax maximally ‘ugly’ and harsh sounds from their instruments”; the critic went on to note that the work had been “one of the few to provoke a scandal at this year’s Autumn.” ⁹⁴ This was not necessarily a bad thing: the abrasive composition and its turbulent reception had the potential to increase Kotík’s standing among the avant-garde musicians for whom envelope-pushing was a fundamental virtue. Czechoslovak cultural authorities were less convinced, however, that such deliberate provocations were an appropriate way to promote national culture in a closely scrutinized international forum. They barred Musica Viva Pragensis from traveling to Yugoslavia in 1965 to perform at Zagreb’s biennial new music festival; Kotík left the group to keep it from being dissolved altogether. ⁹⁵

Warsaw Autumn exposure likewise had mixed outcomes for unofficial Soviet composers. Through performances of his music, Edison Denisov became increasingly visible outside the Soviet Union during the 1960s. His works continued to sound at the Warsaw Autumn: in 1966 a Slovak ensemble performed Sun of the Incas (1964) with French soprano Berthe Kal. ⁹⁶ This work—for soprano, three speakers, and eleven instruments, to texts by the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral—was composed using serial methods, and it circulated widely throughout transnational new music networks, receiving performances in West Germany, France, the United States, and the United Kingdom. As Denisov’s scores were becoming increasingly mobile, however, the composer’s position in the Soviet Union was becoming ever more fixed. Schmelz notes that, by the mid-1960s, Soviet cultural officials had ceased to view the composer as capable of reform. In other words, Denisov was incontrovertibly unofficial, a designation that affected his chances for promotion at home as well as his ability to travel abroad. ⁹⁷

At the most abstract level, presentations of Soviet and East European modernism at the Warsaw Autumn could enable composers to make metaphorical, symbolic journeys even if they were prevented from crossing borders physically. My thinking on this point is indebted to musicologist Joy Calico, who has adopted the concept of “remigrating ideas” to argue that performances of Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw (1947) allowed the aged and infirm composer to remigrate symbolically to postwar Europe, even though he remained physically confined to the United States, the country he adopted in 1933. One reason for this, she argues, is that, during a performance, composers are “most significantly present in the aural materiality of their music,” rather than their persons. ⁹⁸ Whereas Calico is concerned primarily with the particular issue of émigré artists in postwar Europe, her concept of symbolic musical remigration is also useful for thinking about the implications of new music performance at the Warsaw Autumn. For East European and Soviet composers who experienced travel restrictions, festival performances could constitute a kind of symbolic migration in which, through the medium of their works, these musicians could be understood as participating in the definition and dissemination of modernist aesthetic ideas, and therefore as present in a transnational new music community whose boundaries were determined by the presence of shared values and knowledge, rather than the presence of national, state, or geopolitical divisions. As a point of contact between East and West, the Warsaw Autumn was one of the most important sites where these symbolic migrations could take place.

Conclusion

This article has explored the many ways that new music performance at the Warsaw Autumn contributed to mobility across socialist borders. Mobility via the festival involved the physical movement of people: performers, composers, official observers, tourists, and many others. It entailed the transport of objects: music scores, recordings, and the festival program books. It also involved the circulation of ideas about new music. As we have seen, some forms of cross-border interaction took place at the level of cultural diplomacy, in which musical actors were presumed to be acting as nation-state representatives; other contacts were more informal. The multiplicity of cross-border relationships the Warsaw Autumn facilitated suggests that the same institution might simultaneously be involved in forging both international connections, which reinforce the identities of discrete nation-states, and transnational connections, which blur the boundaries between them.

The Warsaw Autumn’s success in disseminating ideas about musical modernism underscores Poland’s importance in cementing cultural ties between Eastern and Western Europe. Through mitigating Cold War divisions via exchanges of music, people, and ideas, the festival can be understood as participating in processes of globalization that Akira Iriye describes as ongoing throughout the twentieth century. While music festivals do not figure overtly in Iriye’s analysis of non-state international organizations, the history of cultural exchange at the Warsaw Autumn suggests that these institutions have contributed to the formation of an increasingly dense global network of cross-border ties. ⁹⁹

At the same time, the festival was also a catalyst for change within the socialist bloc. The Warsaw Autumn provided access to information, a function that was vitally important not just in Poland, but throughout Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Festival performances also enabled East European and Soviet musicians to increase their audience. And the Warsaw Autumn’s prestige—both in Poland and the West—offered legitimation, which could in turn encourage composers and performers to explore (or continue to work) in some musical styles, as opposed to others. Polish music thus had an impact that was similar to the Polish visual arts: Susan Reid, for example, has argued that exposure to modernist paintings from Poland contributed to Soviet processes of de-Stalinization. ¹⁰⁰ The meaning of these changes depended on the Cold War’s cultural politics, in which aesthetic strategies resonated in ways that went beyond their significance in specific artworks.

But even as the festival enabled people and artworks to travel from one place to another, its organizational procedures rooted them in specific locations—within state borders, the East or West, and, more metaphorically, defined aesthetic regions. The perceived strength of these divisions was, in fact, what made the festival relevant during the Cold War. Mobility at the Warsaw Autumn was significant insofar as other avenues remained blocked, and once the old boundaries fell away in the early 1990s, the festival floundered for several years before redefining itself to be meaningful in twenty-first century networks of new music performance. Thus, borders not only constrain; they can also be enabling. And throughout its history, the Warsaw Autumn has not only facilitated cross-border mobility: the festival has also defined boundaries and contributed to maintaining them.