Making New Music in Cold War Poland: The Warsaw Autumn Festival, 1956–1968 by Lisa Jakelski (review)

In recent years, scholars have devoted a great deal of attention to European festivals of contemporary music during the Cold War, including the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in Darmstadt (Martin Iddon, New Music at Darmstadt: Nono, Stockhausen, Cage, and Boulez [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013]), the Music Now concert series in London (Benjamin Piekut, "Indeterminacy, Free Improvisation, and the Mixed Avant-Garde: Experimental Music in London, 1965–1975," Journal of the American Musicological Society 67, no. 3 [2014]: 769–823), and the Biennale di Venezia (Harriet Boyd-Bennett, Opera in Postwar Venice: Cultural Politics and the Avant-Garde [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018]). Lisa Jakelski's book Making New Music in Cold War Poland effectively complements this growing scholarship by considering another, lesser-examined festival operating in the Eastern Bloc: the Warsaw Autumn Festival. While this festival still occurs today—it recently celebrated its sixtieth anniversary—Jakelski considers only the years between the festival's foundation in 1956 through 1968. During this period, the Warsaw Autumn worked not only as a site for the exercise of cultural diplomacy but also as a hub of a larger "network of people, involved with the composition, performance, dissemination, and reception of contemporary art music" (p. 5). As part of such network, Jakelski argues, an international group of composers and audiences contributed to a shared definition of musical modernism, well beyond the dichotomous division be tween Western modernism and socialist realism inspired by contemporary Cold War political discourse. The invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, however, dissolved the impression of the Warsaw Autumn as a politically neutral space, ultimately transforming the festival's original cultural purpose, as Jakelski briefly discusses in the epilogue to the volume.

The book is articulated in two sections. In the first, Jakelski examines the negotiations that led to the creation of the Warsaw Autumn and defined its institutional agenda during its first decade. In the second, she considers the festival in the international context and discusses the processes of cultural exchange performed in Warsaw by audiences, composers, and performers.

Chapter 1 examines the elements of continuity and change between the Warsaw Autumn Festival and previous festivals organized in the country. At the end of the war, state cultural investments led to the construction of new performing venues and to the formation or reestablishment of orchestras, opera companies, and other music ensembles. The Festival of Polish Music (held in 1951 and 1955)—a massive event involving numerous cities over eight months—was intended by the Polish United Workers' Party (Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza) to be a tool for social control and for the development and promotion of a socialist-realist aesthetic. But the death of Joseph Stalin and the ensuing Thaw created the need for a cultural institution that could increase Poland's visibility on an international level. Leaders of both the Workers' Party and the Polish Composers' Union (Zwia˛zek Kompozytorów Polskich, or ZKP), were pushing in this direction, but for very different reasons. While the party was interested in the creation of a "site for cultural diplomacy" (p. 19), younger ZKP members, such as composers Tadeusz Baird and Kazimierz Serocki, were eager to overcome years of isolation and reconnect with international musical trends (and with the Western avant-garde in particular). Inaugurated in 1956 in lieu of the old Festival of Polish Music, the Warsaw Autumn Festival was planned to respond to these different—and often discordant—goals.

As Jakelski explains in chapter 2, the Warsaw Autumn was conceived as an international festival of contemporary music presenting works and performers from both socialist and capitalist countries. Such a pluralistic approach to music programming entailed a vision of the festival as an "empty frame" (p. 36)— that is, as a politically neutral space in which different declinations...