Making New Music in Cold War Poland: The Warsaw Autumn Festival, 1956-1968

Making New Music in Cold War Poland

Michael P. Roth and Sukey Garcetti have endowed this imprint to honor the memory of their parents, Julia and Harry Roth, whose deep love of music they wish to share with others.

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Music in America Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation, which was established by a major gift from Sukey and Gil Garcetti, Michael P. Roth, and the Roth Family Foundation.

The author and publisher would like to thank the Dragan Plamenac Endowment of the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

CALIFORNIA STUDIES IN 20TH-CENTURY MUSIC

Richard Taruskin, General Editor

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  2. Russian Opera and the Symbolist Movement, by Simon Morrison

  3. German Modernism: Music and the Arts, by Walter Frisch

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  5. Bartók, Hungary, and the Renewal of Tradition: Case Studies in the Intersection of Modernity and Nationality, by David E. Schneider

  6. Classic Chic: Music, Fashion, and Modernism, by Mary E. Davis

  7. Music Divided: Bartók’s Legacy in Cold War Culture, by Danielle Fosler-Lussier

  8. Jewish Identities: Nationalism, Racism, and Utopianism in Twentieth-Century Music, by Klára Móricz

  9. Brecht at the Opera, by Joy H. Calico

10. Beautiful Monsters: Imagining the Classic in Musical Media, by Michael Long

11. Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits, by Benjamin Piekut

12. Music and the Elusive Revolution: Cultural Politics and Political Culture in France, 1968–1981 , by Eric Drott

13. Music and Politics in San Francisco: From the 1906 Quake to the Second World War, by Leta E. Miller

14. Frontier Figures: American Music and the Mythology of the American West, by Beth E. Levy

15. In Search of a Concrete Music, by Pierre Schaeffer, translated by Christine North and John Dack

16. The Musical Legacy of Wartime France, by Leslie A. Sprout

17. Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw in Postwar Europe, by Joy H. Calico

18. Music in America’s Cold War Diplomacy, by Danielle Fosler-Lussier

19. Making New Music in Cold War Poland: The Warsaw Autumn Festival, 1956–1968 , by Lisa Jakelski

Making New Music in Cold War Poland

The Warsaw Autumn Festival, 1956–1968

Lisa Jakelski

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2017 by Lisa Jakelski

Parts of chapters 4 and 5 appeared previously as Pushing Boundaries: Mobility at the Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music, East European Politics and Societies 29/1 (2015): 189–211; copyright © 2014 SAGE Publications, DOI 10.1177/0888325414540935.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Jakelski, Lisa, author.

Title: Making new music in Cold War Poland : the Warsaw Autumn Festival, 1956–1968 / Lisa Jakelski.

Other titles: California studies in 20th-century music.

Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2017] | Series: California studies in 20th-century music | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016020665 (print) | LCCN 2016024282 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520292543 (book/cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780520966031 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: International Festival of Contemporary Music. | Music festivals—Poland—Warsaw. | Music—Poland—20th century—History and criticism.

Classification: LCC ML36 .W374 2017 (print) | LCC ML36 (ebook) | DDC 780.78/43841—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016020665

Manufactured in the United States of America

26  25  24  23  22  21  20  19  18  17

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

To Steven

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations and Tables

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction

1. The Sounds of Revolution?

2. Building an Empty Frame

3. A Raucous Education

4. From Warsaw to the World

5. Mobilizing Performers, Scores, and Avant-Gardes

6. The Limits of Exchange

Epilogue

Appendix 1: Concert Program of the Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music, 10–21 October 1956

Appendix 2: Biographical Notes

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS AND TABLES

FIGURES

1. Jerzy Jasieński, Grażyna Bacewicz, Kazimierz Serocki, and Zygmunt Mycielski greeting Nadia Boulanger in Warsaw, 1956

2. Festival audience at the National Philharmonic Chamber Hall, 1961

3. Penderecki, Canon, mm. 13–15

4. Włodzimierz Kotoński and Stanisław Wisłocki after the Warsaw Autumn performance of Kotoński’s Musique en relief, 25 September 1960

5. A group of the Warsaw Autumn’s international visitors en route to Żelazowa Wola, 1968

6. John Cage, Stefan Śledziński, and Bolesław Szabelski at a festival banquet, 1964

7. Members of the selection jury for the 1964 ISCM festival in Copenhagen

8. Josephine Nendick performing Milton Babbitt’s Philomel at the 1968 Warsaw Autumn

9. John Tilbury performing John Cage’s Water Music in Warsaw, 1964

TABLES

1. Compositions and Composers Selected by the Temporary Repertoire Commission (23 November 1959)

2. Proposed Repertoire for the 1962 Warsaw Autumn

3. Audience Turnout at the Warsaw Autumn, 1956–69

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book could not have been written without the generous assistance of several individuals and institutions. I am grateful to director Mieczysław Kominek, Izabela Zymer, Beata Dźwigaj, and the librarians of the Polish Music Information Centre in Warsaw for their unfailing support and for granting me access to the files of the Polish Composers’ Union. At the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, Jolanta Szopa found documents that I didn’t know to ask for but that were exactly the ones I needed. Director Piotr Maculewicz and archivist-librarians Magdalena Borowiec, Elżbieta Jasińska-Jędrosz, and Barbara Kalinowska facilitated my work at the University of Warsaw Library’s Archive of Twentieth-Century Polish Composers. I benefited from the assistance of the archivists at Warsaw’s Central Archives of Modern Records and the expertise of the librarians at the National Library of Poland. Zbigniew Skowron was unfailingly patient during our meetings and always willing to share his encyclopedic knowledge of Polish music with me. I owe a special debt of gratitude to interviewees Krzysztof Knittel, Włodzimierz Kotoński, Zygmunt Krauze, and Tadeusz Wielecki. Their firsthand knowledge of the Warsaw Autumn greatly enriched my understanding of the festival and the times in which it has taken place.

I am fortunate to have a strong support network of friends and colleagues who offered insights, advice, and practical assistance as this project developed. I could not ask for better colleagues than the ones I have in the musicology department at the Eastman School of Music. My thoughts on postwar Polish music have been honed in conversations with Andrea Bohlman, Cindy Bylander, David Tompkins, and Lisa Cooper Vest. Danielle Fosler-Lussier shared State Department materials as well as her deep knowledge of the Cold War’s cultural dynamics. Rachel Vandagriff generously gave me access to some of Elliott Carter’s correspondence with Paul Fromm. Seth Monahan expertly—and cheerfully—prepared my music examples. Krysta Close gave me access to materials housed at the University of Southern California’s Polish Music Center. Joy Calico enabled me to conduct additional research in Warsaw in 2008 and at Harvard University’s Widener Library in 2010. She has offered sage guidance at every stage of this project, and I treasure her friendship.

The opportunity to share my work publicly was invaluable as I conceptualized the book and brought it to completion, and I thank Michael Markham of SUNY Fredonia, the Musicology/Ethnomusicology Student Association of the University of Georgia, and Ewelina Boczkowska of Youngstown State University for inviting me to present portions of this project at their institutions. For their feedback I am also grateful to the participants of the interdisciplinary Crossing the Borders of Friendship panels at the 2012 convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.

This book has been shaped by the comments of several readers. Gregory Bloch, David Frick, Andy Fry, and Mary Ann Smart offered insightful criticism when the material was at the dissertation stage. Andrea Bohlman, Melina Esse, Emily Richmond Pollock, Martha Sprigge, and William Quillen read portions of the book manuscript as it developed, and the questions they asked encouraged me to sharpen both my thinking and my prose. My conversations with Melina Esse helped me focus my ideas at a critical stage, and I thank her for encouraging me to let this book develop in some unexpected directions. Martin Iddon and Peter Schmelz deserve special thanks for reading the manuscript in full. Their generous and incisive comments have substantially improved the book’s clarity and nuance.

I am indebted to Mary Francis for her advocacy of this project when it was at the proposal and manuscript submission stages, and to Raina Polivka, and Zuha Khan at the University of California Press for enthusiastically shepherding the book through publication. Richard Taruskin has supported this project for many years—from its beginnings as my doctoral dissertation to the form it has taken now. This project has benefited tremendously from his ear for prose and keen critical eye, and I owe him more than I can adequately express here for encouraging me to trust my own voice. For financial support I thank the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities and the Department of Music at the University of California, Berkeley. I also thank the Schott Music Corporation for granting permission to reprint the excerpt from Krzysztof Penderecki’s Canon that appears in Chapter 3. A significant portion of the manuscript was written at Maynooth University, where Antonio Cascelli, Alison Hood, John Keating, Margaret Kelleher, Jennifer Kelly, and Victor Lazzarini extended a warm welcome when I was a Visiting Fellow in the Humanities during the 2012–13 academic year.

The love and encouragement of friends and family have been crucial to the completion of this project. Joshua Johnson, Steve Masover, Jennifer Sheppard, and Jeffrey Tucker were steadfast sources of inspiration, support, and perspective. I am grateful to my parents, Richard and Mary, and to my siblings, Sarah and Richard, for encouraging me to follow my interests wherever they might lead. I am especially indebted to my husband, Steven, who cheered my successes and patiently weathered this project’s more intense phases, all while making great strides in work of his own. I dedicate this book to him.

ABBREVIATIONS

Introduction

The Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music was one of the most significant zones of cross-border cultural contact during the Cold War. Launched in Poland in 1956, the state-sponsored Warsaw Autumn staged symbolic encounters between the era’s opposing aesthetic viewpoints. Just as importantly, it brought together people—performers, composers, critics, arts administrators, government functionaries, and general audiences—from both sides of the Cold War. This book tells the festival’s story.

More broadly, this book is about the performance of social interactions in particular institutional frameworks, and how these interactions have shaped the practices, values, and concepts associated with new (or contemporary) music. My account of cultural production adopts sociologist Howard Becker’s model of the art world, which he defines as the network of people whose cooperative activity, organized via their joint knowledge of conventional means of doing things, produces the kind of art works that [the] art world is noted for.¹ Festivals have been among the most powerful instruments through which new-music practitioners have organized their activities. As planned and purposively coordinated series of events, festivals are invested with symbolic meaning. They are dense sites of relationships among people, objects, and ideas. Through festivals, musicians mobilize resources and distribute their works. Festivals have, moreover, played a vital role in defining new music and enabling ideas about it to circulate from place to place. One reason for their efficacy is that festivals entail practical decisions—what music to program, which performers to invite—that result in acts of grouping and exclusion that imply judgments of relative value. Such acts, Eric Drott emphasizes, give rise to what is called a musical genre, which, as he puts it, "is not so much a group as a grouping, the gerund ending calling attention to the fact that it is something that must be continually produced and reproduced."² One of my primary objectives in this study is to chart and to understand these groupings as they were made at the Warsaw Autumn.

Specific occasions dedicated to composing, performing, and listening have long been part of the making of new music. Modernism developed in tandem with a host of organizations and performance venues designed to promote it. Among the earliest of these was the Society for Private Musical Performances, which Arnold Schoenberg launched in 1918. The Donaueschingen Festival, the first of its kind to be dedicated exclusively to contemporary music, began operations three years later. The International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) inaugurated its peripatetic festival in 1923. Originally a forum for the visual arts, the Venice Biennale added a contemporary music festival in 1930. An array of professional organizations, advocacy groups, and specialized performance venues boosted modernist composers in New York City throughout the 1920s.³ In most cases, these institutional arrangements were predicated on the belief that contemporary music—especially in its spikier, modernist guises—required special advocacy as well as safe havens to insulate it from the hostilities of standard concert culture.

New-music institutions resumed their proliferation after 1945. Music making at educational centers, festivals, radio stations, and competitions involved inclusion as well as exclusion; it was mediated by political, social, economic, technological, and other factors that simultaneously enabled and constrained.⁴ Through the practices, discourses, and aesthetic outlooks they supported, postwar institutions continued to define and redefine notions of contemporary music. At the music research institute IRCAM in 1980s Paris, the practice of new music entailed taking a position vis-à-vis modernism or postmodernism; while these stances may have carved divisions within the larger category of contemporary art music, they shared common ground in that each affirmed a basic separation between art and popular genres.⁵ The London-based Music Now concert series, which ran from 1967 to 1976, blurred generic divisions between contemporary art music and jazz by showcasing practices that evinced a common preoccupation with improvisation and indeterminacy.⁶ In the 1950s, new music at the Darmstadt International Summer Courses became synonymous with the critical discourse and compositional practices of serialism.⁷ In 1960s Buenos Aires, the composers affiliated with the CLAEM (Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales) did not adhere to any one style or technique; here, the practice of contemporary music was mediated by the centrifugal pull of transnational connections and the centripetal tug of Latin American identity.⁸

I mention these examples to demonstrate that the Warsaw Autumn was not the only site where groups of people have actively negotiated what contemporary music ought to be. Indeed, there were significant points of contact and overlap between the Warsaw Autumn and other postwar new-music institutions. Since 1957, musicians from Poland have consistently participated in the Darmstadt Summer Courses. During the years when he was involved with Music Now, British experimental pianist John Tilbury was also a Warsaw Autumn regular.

But the Warsaw Autumn was unique in that its negotiations were taking place on the Cold War’s cultural fault line. The festival was born into an environment in which cultural display was a means of asserting sociocultural superiority. These contests were meaningful not because East and West were incomprehensible to one another but, on the contrary, because stylistic progress and the proper role of artists in society were live issues on both sides. The difference lay in how these issues were resolved. Aesthetically, the terms of engagement pitted Soviet-sponsored socialist realism, which privileged traditional forms and audience accessibility, against Western modernism, an orientation based on continual, self-conscious technical advance.⁹ Each side had its symbol: Dmitry Shostakovich, the Soviet Union’s leading composer; and Anton Webern, 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 and critical approbation, assigned posts in universities and other institutions, and controlled opportunities for publication, public performance, and media distribution.¹⁰ 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.¹¹

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. It remains all too easy to conceptualize each side as a monolith that expressed its position in hackneyed ways. And, as a result, it remains all too easy to write Cold War Eastern Europe out of the history of twentieth-century modernism.¹² In his reflections on modernism and Cold War cultural politics, Alistair Williams presents the East solely as the West’s enabling other, an undifferentiated socialist-realist sideshow that he acknowledges in passing before proceeding to the main event: music, politics, and meaning in modernist compositions from (Western) Europe.¹³ While Martin Iddon does not deny Eastern Europeans’ presence in the institutional configurations that played vital roles in articulating and promulgating modernist aesthetics during the mid-twentieth century, he does view their contributions as peripheral and hence excisable—he admits that his investigation of serialism at Darmstadt excludes the composers from Eastern Europe, South America, and Asia who participated in the summer courses.¹⁴

Yet musicians in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were engaging with modernist compositional strategies, such as serialism—albeit at a temporal and geographical remove that put them at a disadvantage, both at the time and in subsequent historiography. Modernism took a variety of forms and accrued various connotations throughout the Eastern Bloc. The Cold War’s binary divisions could be useful as resistance: Peter Schmelz demonstrates that the apparent reluctance of serialism to disclose its meanings was a source of its appeal to the Soviet Union’s unofficial group of young composers.¹⁵ In showing how dedicated socialists and party members advocated serialism in East Germany during the mid-1960s, Laura Silverberg counters Cold War stylistic stereotypes that would view these compositional preoccupations and political commitments as incompatible.¹⁶ These stories are no less significant for taking place outside Western Europe and North America. They remind us that individuals and groups have conceived and practiced modernism in diverse ways at various places and times, and thereby encourage us to resist the tendency to view Darmstadt as a metonym for the whole of new-music making after 1945.

Even though it represented a similar mobilization of resources in support of music that was often abstract, esoteric, and complex, the Warsaw Autumn has received far less scholarly attention than the iconic Summer Courses. In Poland, the festival has typically been subject to brief, essayistic overviews or recalled episodically in memoirs.¹⁷ Significant anniversaries have prompted more sustained chronicles of festival history that are indispensable sources of information, but these are more limited when it comes to understanding the actions, negotiations, and motivations behind the events they document.¹⁸ Cynthia Bylander’s painstaking study was the first scholarly work in English to examine the Warsaw Autumn’s early history in depth.¹⁹ In this book, I will revisit the documents Bylander consulted in the 1980s, putting them in conversation with a wider array of archival and published materials, investigating the Warsaw Autumn over a longer span of time, and viewing the festival as part of a larger world of new-music performance. The Cold War’s end means that it is now possible to offer a more distanced perspective on the festival and its significance, and to think more critically about the ways it was affected by—and the ways it influenced—the era’s aesthetic and geopolitical categories.

While the Warsaw Autumn was implicated in the international dynamics of Cold War musical politics, it was also part of a socialist ecosystem that was specific to Poland. This ecosystem reflected the dynamics of a decades-long reconstruction: Poland suffered devastating losses in World War II, especially in its capital city, which occupying German forces systematically destroyed in response to the 1944 Warsaw Uprising. It additionally reflected the dynamics of Poland’s postwar transition to state socialism, in which the government, economy, society, and culture were recalibrated along Stalinist lines. The dominance of the Polish United Workers’ Party (Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza, or PZPR) was secure by the end of 1948. When the two camps of the Cold War began to crystallize, Poland oriented its trade flows toward the Soviet Union and the member nations of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, established in 1949. Poland withdrew from the International Monetary Fund and refused Marshall Plan aid in response to Soviet pressure.²⁰ It was one of the signatories to the Warsaw Pact of 14 May 1955. Poland’s postwar Stalinization had palpable musical consequences in addition to the political, military, and economic ones. The most overt of these took place in 1949, when the Polish Ministry of Culture and Art (Ministerstwo Kultury i Sztuki, or MKiS) staged a conference of composers and musicologists that cemented socialist realism as official aesthetic policy.²¹ As numerous scholars have pointed out, Stalinism in the emerging Eastern Bloc did not simply mimic Soviet models; rather, it morphed in response to national and local conditions, and this was true of musical life as well.²² After Stalin’s death in 1953, the Thaw further amplified divergences within Eastern Europe by opening up new possibilities for political, social, economic, and cultural change.

In postwar Poland, in other words, politics, economics, and society were not fixed contexts. Rather, these realms were fluid, changeable, and capable of interacting with the musical realm in ways both direct and indirect, planned and unpredictable.²³ And, just as politics was in flux, the boundaries between politics and culture were permeable. We are still learning the details of how culture worked in the socialist societies of the Eastern Bloc.²⁴ Through its emphasis on collective activity, the concept of the art world provides an alternative to totalitarian models that insist on unidirectional, top-down influence while also assuming a split between state and society. In totalitarian models of cultural production, the political center appears as a stable locus of control, either to be colluded with or resisted. The Warsaw Autumn suggests something else: a history of mutual entanglement among political and cultural agents. No less than the musical domain, the party and the state were composed of people who operated as individuals as well as in groups. They were among the components of the art world that created and sustained contemporary music in socialist Poland. Coordination and interaction, it should be stressed, do not necessarily imply agreement. Composers, musicologists, party members, and state bureaucrats could have differing goals for the Warsaw Autumn, and their views on contemporary music did not always align. But the party-state offered incentives in addition to imposing restraints. Composers and musicologists had room to maneuver, acting in response to—but also shaping—a shifting terrain of possibilities and limits.

The Warsaw Autumn provides a lens through which we can see how a network of people, involved with the composition, performance, dissemination, and reception of contemporary art music, mobilized resources and achieved organizational victories during a period of cultural, social, institutional, and political transformation. In the first half of the book, I focus on the festival’s negotiations in Poland, and the ways in which these negotiations contributed to defining new music at this particular institution.

Chapter 1 makes a case study of the Warsaw Autumn’s founding and first season. The 1956 concerts took place in counterpoint with political upheaval and change at the top of the Polish communist party. They offered a first answer to the question of what it would mean for a music festival in socialist Poland to be contemporary as well as international during the post-Stalin Thaw. As they crafted the 1956 Warsaw Autumn, festival participants were constructing an institutional paradigm that still depended on interwar patterns of cultural contact and Stalinist-era practices of state investment in the arts, but also transformed the art world in which elite Polish composers worked.

Warsaw Autumn participants refined this paradigm in subsequent years. Chapter 2 examines how a self-consciously pluralistic view of contemporary music enabled festival advocates to negotiate a secure institutional position during a period of cultural retrenchment that began in Poland in the late 1950s. These moves took place behind the scenes, during planning meetings in which Warsaw Autumn organizers selected repertoire, grouped works and composers into stylistic and geopolitical categories, and generally determined what the festival would be. Equally important were the maneuvers that took place in printed discourse, wherein critics and other commentators positioned the Warsaw Autumn as an empty frame—that is, a neutral zone in an otherwise polarized world of new-music performance.

Chapter 3 turns to the concert hall to consider the effects that festival performances had on Warsaw Autumn audiences, as well as the work these audiences performed through their listening practices. Public response was what demonstrated the Warsaw Autumn’s legitimacy as a socialist education project: in their annual reports to MKiS, festival organizers interpreted large, reactive audiences as proof that elite art music was socially necessary. The public also contributed to the genre making that took place via festival events, for their concert-hall behavior suggested that, in addition to various compositional styles and techniques, contemporary music entailed certain modes of audience response.

Becker’s art worlds are not bounded—they overlap with and connect to other art worlds, bleed into other parts of society, and are capable of potentially infinite expansion.²⁵ The Warsaw Autumn sheds light on this expandability, for the collective activity that went into making it not only involved actors located in a specific local and national framework, but also encompassed agents who were moving and operating across the borders of nation-states. To put it another way, the festival was a site of cultural mobility, where meanings were actively created through the movement of people, artworks, and ideas. Stephen Greenblatt describes cultural mobility as the restless process through which texts, images, artifacts, and ideas are moved, disguised, translated, transformed, adapted, and reimagined in the ceaseless, resourceful work of culture.²⁶ He further contends that even in places that at first glance are characterized more by homogeneity and stasis than by pluralism and change, cultural circuits facilitating motion are at work.²⁷ And so they were at the Warsaw Autumn, where there was a constant interplay between the festival as located and the festival as networked—between the festival as a site for the development of a national new-music culture and as an institution that, true to its name, was avowedly international.

The performance of cross-border relations at the Warsaw Autumn therefore counters the conventional view of Cold War Eastern Europe as isolated, shrouded by an iron curtain that blocked any meaningful interaction with the outside world. György Péteri maintains that the iron curtain metaphor Churchill invoked in his famous speech has always obscured more than it has revealed, especially when it comes to the domain of culture. Instead, he claims, the curtain was made of Nylon, not Iron. It was not only transparent but it also yielded to strong osmotic tendencies that were globalizing knowledge across the systemic divide about culture, goods, and services.²⁸ This was especially true during the post-Stalin Thaw, a period marked by greater openness and expanding opportunities for international contact. Travel, while still laden with restrictions, was increasingly an option for the Eastern Bloc’s citizens, especially for elite composers and performers of art music. People could circulate objects that transported information, values, and ideas even when they could not circulate themselves. As Danielle Fosler-Lussier puts it, the division was real, but each side listened to what the other was saying.²⁹ As one of the first venues to bring music and ideas from East and West together on a regular basis, the Warsaw Autumn was one of the places where this exchange of messages could be heard most clearly.

In the book’s second half, I examine the Warsaw Autumn as a site for cultural mobility. At the festival, to be contemporary was to be international, and vice versa: cross-border movement was essential to the practice of new music at this particular institution. From the outset, one of the festival’s most vital functions was to serve as an arena for Cold War cultural diplomacy—for the exercise of soft power across East–West geopolitical boundaries, as well as across state borders within the Eastern Bloc.³⁰ The Warsaw Autumn also supported other kinds of mobility and encouraged the formation of other kinds of cross-border ties; my aim in these chapters is thus to present as complex a picture as possible of the various mobilizations and connections the festival engendered.

Chapter 4 details the structural arrangements that facilitated foreign travel to the Warsaw Autumn. I focus on the people who went to Poland to hear the festival concerts, either as invited special guests or as tourists. Their journeys contributed to the circulation of information, ideas, values, financial assets, and objects that took place via the Warsaw Autumn; consequently, their journeys enabled the festival’s effects to extend far beyond Poland. Moreover, the festival’s foreign travelers served an economic function, in that they allowed composers and other players to mobilize resources, accumulate prestige, gain access to new distribution channels, and expand their personal and professional networks.

Chapter 5 takes a closer look at the types of cross-border relationships that were forged via the Warsaw Autumn by examining the mobility of performers and musical works. Drawing