Pneuma—expanded reality: contemporary music versus transcendence and the experience of mystery and the extraordinary. The notion of “pneuma” has several meanings depending on the period of reference. It is also related to air and its movements, leading to further symbols and metaphors such as breathing, motion, the wind of history.

Air as the centre of sound, where sound is born and through which it moves. Air exists in song, speech, organs, portatives, accordions, other wind instruments and objectophones. This year’s Warsaw Autumn will feature a lot of music “from the air.” Both because of aerophone sound sources and aerial, spatial, and naturalistic connotations. From the opening concerts, which will feature Thurídur Jónsdóttir’s air-drenched Flutter, to the final concert with the windy final of Jonathan Harvey’s …towards a pure land.

But air is also the “centre of spirit”—the sphere of life that aims at grasping the world as a coherent, sensible whole, fed by a nostalgia for a harmonious fullness, which is experienced as “numinosum”: the extraordinary, touching the transcendence.

This touch comes in the endless space (see Iannis Xenakis’s Jonchaies at this year’s final concert), time with its processuality (in the works of Richard Barrett, Niels Rønsholdt, Cathy van Eck, Sofia Gubaidulina, Cassandra Miller, and Tadeusz Wielecki), the shape of matter and shapes of nature (listen to the music of Thurídur Jónsdóttir, Alvin Lucier, Tristan Murail, and Jonathan Harvey), vitality (as heard in Bruno Mantovani, Raphaël Cendo, and again Iannis Xenakis), the mystique of the body and the animated world (Rebecca Saunders and Agnieszka Stulgińska), or paradox and strangeness (Cathy van Eck, Simon Løffler). The issue of man taking up the competence of the creator, as in the biblical legend of the Golem, is another stage of transcending reality into the “work of creation” of artificial life—a topic that has long intrigued Georges Aperghis. We shall hear his Thinking Things, a work of “robotic theatre,” the last part of his triptych focusing on artificial intelligence.

This and other aspects of the “incredible” can be found in other compositions to be heard at this year’s Festival. Some will also be polemic towards the issue of spirituality. Nothing reinforces the sacrum more than being tested by the profanum. Negation, paradox, and irony feed it. They can give life to some sort of “modern sacrum,” live and unregulated: see Trond Reinholdtsen’s 13 Music Theatre Pieces, Jacek Sotomski’s Credopol, Niels Rønsholdt’s Gaze for Gaze.

At this year’s Warsaw Autumn, music theatre will often enter into relationships with performative art and concert situations. Apart from the above-mentioned three large musical shows: Aperghis’s Thinking Things presented by IRCAM; and Rønsholdt’s Gaze for Gaze celebrated by the Danish ensemble SCENATET and the VRC choir, we shall also feature works by Jacek Sotomski—a sharp linguistic rebuke to “high speech”—and Agnieszka Stulgińska, who authors an understated, private music theatre focusing on life’s subtleties.

One of the Festival’s threads will be the music of Swiss female composers: Cécile Marti and Katharina Rosenberger, featured in a spectacular concert of the Basel Sinfonietta, as well as Icelandic female composers: Thurídur Jónsdóttir and Bára Gísladóttir, whose works are included in the opening and final concert.

Lots will be going on at the Theatre Institute, which we hope will become a daily hub for our audience through the Festival’s duration. With our Warsaw Autumn Contexts series, organised in cooperation with PWM Edition and TVP Kultura, we shall premiere films about Zygmunt Krauze and footage of works by Agata Zubel and Andrej Krzanowski, performed at last year’s Warsaw Autumn. We will also revive concerts and musical shows from past editions of Warsaw Autumn from the archives of Polish TV, as well as some recently premiered theatre plays where contemporary music plays an important role.

Also at the Theatre Institute, there will be daily meetings with the public at Warsaw Autumn Hits the Club. Little Warsaw Autumn shall feature a performance, installation in the Królikarnia Sculpture Park, a concert at the Fryderyk Chopin University of Music, and a musical walk through the Museum of Warsaw. The Austrian Cultural Forum will feature meetings with artists, protagonists of Warsaw Autumn events, as well as workshops for your composers, in cooperation with the Youth Circle of the Polish Composers’ Union. Each day of the Festival, our internet Festival Radio will be edited by Monika Pasiecznik and Tomasz Biernacki. As usual, there will be a rich programme of fringe events.

The main thread of the Festival will feature eleven first performances of works by Monika Dalach, Magdalena Długosz, Paweł Hendrich, Zygmunt Krauze, Cécile Marti, Adrián Mocanu, Piotr Roemer, Agnieszka Stulgińska, Piotr Tabakiernik, Tadeusz Wielecki, and Sławomir Wojciechowski. Further premieres will be featured at Warsaw Autumn Hits the Club and Little Warsaw Autumn.

There will also be first Warsaw Autumn appearances by Paul Craenen, Monika Dalach, Cathy van Eck, Bára Gísladóttir, Thurídur Jónsdóttir, Steffen Krebber, Thomas Lehn, Simon Løffler, Cécile Marti, Cassandra Miller, Adrián Mocanu, Dariusz Przybylski, Jerzy Rogiewicz, Katharina Rosenberger, Tomasz Skweres, Agnieszka Stulgińska, and Zach Thomas.

Soloists will notably include flutist Mario Caroli; pianist Zygmunt Krauze with percussionists playing on veme, huge metallophones; flutists Łukasz Długosz; cellist Arne Deforce; trumpeter Marco Blaauw; cellist Marcin Zdunik; at Warsaw Autumn Hits the Club: percussionist Jerzy Rogiewicz; Thomas Lehn on the synthesizer; and flutist Dominik Strycharski; while Little Warsaw Autumn will feature vocalist Joanna Freszel; cellist Tomasz Skweres; flutist Katarzyna Gacek-Duda; and Dariusz Przybylski on the organ and portative organ.

Other featured artists include conductors Wilson Hermanto, Ryan Bancroft, Jerzy Wołosiuk, Baldur Brönnimann, Szymon Bywalec, Anna Szostak, Rüdiger Bohn, and Maciej Koczur; ensembles including IRCAM, Plus-Minus Ensemble, SCENATET, and Kompopolex; orchestras such as the Warsaw Philharmonic, Basel Sinfonietta, Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra of Katowice, Teatr Wielki – Polish National Opera, and European Workshop for Contemporary Music, as well as the Camerata Silesia and VRC choirs.

The 62nd Warsaw Autumn includes over 50 events, including 29 in the main thread, two within Warsaw Autumn Hits the Club, seven at Little Warsaw Autumn, and a dozen fringe events.

Our events will take place in ten venues: the Warsaw Philharmonic, Witold Lutosławski Polish Radio Concert Studio, Fryderyk Chopin University of Music, ATM Studio, IMKA Theatre, Nowy Teatr, Theatre Institute, Austrian Cultural Forum, Sculpture Park in Królikarnia, and the Museum of Warsaw.

This year’s Warsaw Autumn concludes a specific triptych of ideas that inspired our programmes between 2017 and 2019. 2017’s “Trans/avant-garde” addressed musical radicalism and various avant-garde movements with their social agendas. 208’s “Res Publica” tackled different aspects of identity, shaping our consciousness, including national and social. 2019’s “Pneuma” nurtures the nature of the undefined. Bear in mind that regardless of its themes, Warsaw Autumn is primarily an overview of new music from recent years, with references to twentieth-century music. And it will continue as such—if the spirit of times allows.

Jerzy Kornowicz
Director of the Festival

Warsaw Autumn was created in 1956, during the thaw that followed years of Stalinist dictatorship. Even though the government quickly abandoned the democratisation course, the Festival continued without interruption (with two exceptions) during the entire Communist era: its finances were secured by the state (up to this day, it is primarily finances from public funds). In the 1990s, Poland’s new economic and social situation threatened the financial stability of Warsaw Autumn. With a new model and procedures of culture financing developed since, the subsequent editions of the Festival may now be planned in a much more predictable way.

Paradoxically, the communist era was a golden age for Warsaw Autumn. The Festival was an obvious crack on the Iron Curtain, an island of creative freedom in a sea of compulsory Socialist realism. Here, the most varied forms of artistic invention were possible. That created a sense of general freedom of expression, and the Fesrtival was seen as a form of political protest. Audience attendance reached 120 per cent; Warsaw Autumn made the headlines, and there were several hundred international guests, both from the East (for Soviet citizens, it was the only opportunity to experience new currents in music) and the West. The government tolerated this situation, presenting itself as a liberal patron of the arts. Another important goal for the authorities when allowing the Festival was to demonstrate the superiority of socialist music over the bourgeois art of capitalist countries. Of course, there was censorship, and a permanent threat of the authorisation being annulled, especially under pressure from the Soviet government, who considered avant-garde music and the entire atmosphere of Warsaw Autumn as ideological diversion. In order to pursue our artistic endeavours, it was often necessary to use a ruse.

“This edition of the Festival,” Krzysztof Baculewski wrote about the 16th Warsaw Autumn in 1972 in a timeline published for the Festival’s 50th edition, “again verges on the political. The Ministry of Culture and the Arts orders for the work of Edison Denisov to be deleted from the programme, as the composer is not well seen in the Soviet Union. As we know, such orders could not be discussed, so ‘in exchange,’ we got the Piano Concerto of the Soviet Composers’ Union secretary general for life and member of the Supreme Soviet, Tikhon Khrennikov, with the composer as soloist. This concert is partly boycotted by the Warsaw public; the younger audience, especially youngsters and students, do attend to have a laugh. As a sign of protest, the Warsaw Autumn Repertoire Committee withdraws its members’ names from the programme book. And Denisov’s work would be played soon anyway—but this time, he appears under the maiden name of his wife, Gala Varvarin…”

Regardless of the independent image that continued to attract audiences, music in the 1960s and 1970s abounded in new and exciting events, rousing the interest of the general public. After years of isolation from the new musical currents and phenomena in Western Europe following World War II and Stalinist isolationist politics, Poles were now decided to make up for lost time, learning the works of Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Varèse, and even Bartók or Stravinsky through the festival. Warsaw Autumn was also an opportunity to follow the latest avant-garde experiments of those years: Boulez, Nono, Dallapiccola, Maderna, and Cage. Composers, performers, critics, and musicologists from the West were eager to come to Warsaw, too: out of curiosity about the countries on the other side of the curtain and simply because Warsaw Autumn gained worldwide recognition as one of the most important places for new music.

Warsaw Autumn’s modernist image was established almost from the very beginning: conservative music remained marginal in the programmes. The Festival retains an open formula, and aims at presenting a variety of phenomena and tendencies typical for the latest music: from Webern-inspired radicalism derived (Lachenmann, Ferneyhough, Hollinger), through currents that refer to the music of historical or traditional cultures, up to audio-art and sound installations. Warsaw Autumn is often termed—appropriately—as pluralistic and positively eclectic. This is necessary in order to familiarise Polish audiences with the latest developments in the world of music. For Polish musicologists and journalists, Warsaw Autumn’s programme books are the primary source about modern music. The Sound Chronicle, a full set of recordings that is published after each festival, performs a similar function (until 1999, these chronicles included Polish music only; since the Aimard plays Ligeti record in 2000, the series was extended to international music).

Today, one of the main goal of Warsaw Autumn’s creators—to familiarise the Polish audience with the classic works of the twentieth century (i that were seen as such already at the dawn of the Festival)—has of course been fulfilled. Yet there remain gaps regarding the classics of the second half of the twentieth century. For example, Stockhausen’s Gruppen was performed for the first time in Poland only at the 2000 Warsaw Autumn festival, and Boulez’s Répons as late as 2005. The festival’s two other objectives, however, are timeless: to present new music from Poland and abroad.

From all the above, an important aspect of Warsaw Autumn emerges: the new and newest trends are presented in the context of modern classics. The Festival’s identity is that of an event that shows modernity in its relation to tradition. Moreover, the Festival is a debate, a forum for different tendencies and opinions. Finally, the phenomenon of Warsaw Autumn is that it performs its mission continuously, year after year. It is not a one-off event, a news campaign, or a themed concert. The essence of Warsaw Autumn is that it has stayed—for nearly sixty years—the same. And yet it is continuously renewed, following the evolution of art, cultural situation, and overall reality.

Contemporary music in Poland has long functioned on somewhat odd terms; it has been considered hermetic, abstract, and specialist. Hence the challenge undertaken by the organisers, in the new socioeconomic reality of Poland, to overcome that stereotype. Indeed, Warsaw Autumn’s audience continues to grow, sometimes overflowing the concert venues. Importantly, the average age is low. The public is increasingly interested in more refined, complex music. In the last decade or so, a young musical elite has emerged that is not afraid of “difficult” music, and wants to stand out from the mass consumers of pop culture. These people are looking for something new and different; for the exotic in the broad sense of the word. But they also look for music that enriches the listener. In today’s world, dominated by the internet, contemporary music has moved away from the ridiculous or the indifferent of yesterday. A large number of new festivals, initiatives, and projects are created around new music. The question today is no more whether contemporary music makes sense but what it really is—whether modern music can only make sense in the historical context of the Western tradition of serious art music.

All obstacles and difficulties notwithstanding, Warsaw Autumn remains a creative event with first-class achievements and an international reputation. It is Warsaw’s cultural flagship. Warsaw Autumn has cooperated with leading Polish cultural institutions including the National Philharmonic, Grand Theatre–Polish National Opera, Polish Radio, Polish Television, Adam Mickiewicz Institute, National Audiovisual Institute, and National Institute of Music and Dance, as well as, significantly, the embassies, cultural institutes and foundations of the many countries whose music is represented at the festival. When Warsaw Autumn has a national or regional theme, the cooperation is very close, such as in 1998 with a Scandinavian programme supported by the Nordic Council of Ministers, Pierre Boulez’s 80th anniversary with French cultural institutions on the 80th anniversary of the composer’s birth, the Polish–German Year in 2005, and the North Rhine–Westphalia Cultural Season in Poland in 2011.

The atmosphere of the Festival has certainly changed in recent years, compared to the early 1990s and earlier. Our concerts have expanded to different venues across Warsaw in search of new audiences: apart from traditional venues such as the Warsaw Philharmonic, Music Academy, theatres, and churches, Warsaw Autumn now also take place in less “classic” places: sports halls, old factories, modern buildings, and clubs. New colour is being added to the Festival by young people, who prevail in the audience. They are not professional musicians or artists: they just participate in culture. As to the music itself, it increasingly often features an electroacoustic layer. Concerts require complex systems of sound distribution. Composers treat space as an important factor of form. They introduce video projections and new technologies. A good example is the audiovisual orchestra concert presented during the 48th Warsaw Autumn Festival. The incredible scenery of the Highest Voltage Hall’s “futuristic” facilities, wonderfully illuminated by Polish Television, became an additional element of the show.

But don’t be misled by the spectacular character of these big projects. This is the way contemporary composers think and write. This is a feature of the present. Keeping up with this trend, Warsaw Autumn consistently maintains its credibility as a place where independent and disinterested art, free from commercial aspects, is cultivated. Every guest at Warsaw Autumn concerts can be confident to be hearing the best and latest from the world of new music.

Tadeusz Wielecki
Festival Director from 1999 until 2016