The Warsaw Autumn Festival: Musical Encounters in Poland from the Cold War to the Twenty-First Century

FAIN: FT-61083-13

Lisa Jakelski
Eastman School of Music (Rochester, NY 14604)

This book project investigates one of the Cold War's most important venues for cross-border connections: the Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music. Launched in 1956, the festival featured music and musicians from both the Soviet and American zones of influence. Now one of the longest-running institutions of its kind, the Warsaw Autumn continues to enable modernist ideas to circulate transnationally. Situating the festival in socialist and post-socialist Poland, I analyze the maneuvers that have made it possible. I consider how the Warsaw Autumn has promoted cultural integration and facilitated a definition of modernism in Poland that is simultaneously local and cosmopolitan. As a result, I shed new light on the cultural politics of East-Central Europe and the exercise of soft power during the Cold War. By focusing on institutional practices in what is perhaps an unexpected center for new music, I also provide fresh insights into the history of modernism after 1945.

Associated Products

Making New Music in Cold War Poland: The Warsaw Autumn Festival, 1956-1968 (Book)
Title: Making New Music in Cold War Poland: The Warsaw Autumn Festival, 1956-1968
Author: Lisa Jakelski
Abstract: Making New Music in Cold War Poland presents a social analysis of new music dissemination at the Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music, one of the most important venues for East-West cultural contact during the Cold War. In this incisive study, Lisa Jakelski examines the festival’s institutional organization, negotiation, and reception in Poland, while also considering the festival’s worldwide ramifications, particularly the ways that it contributed to the cross-border movement of ideas, objects, and people (including composers, performers, official festival guests, and tourists). This book explores the performance of social interactions within institutional frameworks and how these interactions have shaped the practices, values, and concepts associated with new music.
Year: 2016
Primary URL: http://http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520292543
Publisher: University of California Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780520292543
Copy sent to NEH?: No

Making New Music in Cold War Poland (The Warsaw Autumn Festival, 1956-1968 (Book)
Title: Making New Music in Cold War Poland (The Warsaw Autumn Festival, 1956-1968
Author: Lisa Jakelski
Abstract: Making New Music in Cold War Poland presents a social analysis of new music dissemination at the Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music, one of the most important venues for East-West cultural contact during the Cold War. In this incisive study, Lisa Jakelski examines the festival’s institutional organization, negotiations among its various actors, and its reception in Poland, while also considering the festival’s worldwide ramifications, particularly the ways that it contributed to the cross-border movement of ideas, objects, and people (including composers, performers, official festival guests, and tourists). This book explores social interactions within institutional frameworks and how these interactions shaped the practices, values, and concepts associated with new music.
Year: 2017
Publisher: University of California Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978052029253
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

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