Making New Music in Cold War Poland The Warsaw Autumn Festival, 1956-1968 [Hardcover]

Making New Music in Cold War Polandpresents 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.
 

Lisa Jakelskiis Associate Professor of Musicology at the Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester.

“Lisa Jakelski’sMaking New Music in Cold War Polandoffers a vibrant account of the postwar negotiations on what new music could and should mean, positioned on what Jakelski terms ‘the Cold War's cultural fault line,’ at a site of concrete, critical engagement between modernism and socialist realism. Jakelski’s narrative, though, does away with simplistic binaries, revealing the ways in which the everyday lives and interactions between composers, performers, administrators, and critics negotiated the space between the competing poles. In equal measure political and personal, this account expands both the geographical and the methodological territory of histories of new music in important, vital directions.”—Martin Iddon, author ofNew Music at Darmstadt: Nono, Stockhausen, Cage, and Boulez
 
“No mere institutional history here! Jakelski’s book crackles with insights into Cold War cultural politics, festival culture, anlÓ3