Artigos de revistas sobre o tema "Penderecki"

Characterization in the four operas of Krzystof Penderecki is well developed. It includes specified melodic intervals for characters, distorted vocal lines, the use of coloratura singing and various forms of chanting and speaking.

O presente artigo trata da pesquisa do estilo de orquestração observável em composições musicais de Krzysztof Penderecki, que foram analisadas para que eu pudesse transcrever a música Agnus Dei do compositor polonês para banda sinfônica. Durante a pesquisa preliminar das obras orquestrais de Penderecki e a feitura da transcrição propriamente dita, escrevi um "diário de transcrição" (termo inspirado na prática de diversos tradutores que escrevem diários a respeito do ato de traduzir), que mapeou tanto os desafios enfrentados, quanto as soluções que foram encontradas durante meu processo criativo. Neste artigo essas informações estão presentes e justificam as decisões que foram tomadas ao escolher determinados recursos de orquestração.

Krzysztof Penderecki (born 1933) is considered to be one of the most outstanding contemporary composers. The religious theme is often taken to be an inspiration for his vocal-instrumental output. Penderecki presents in his compositions the religious and moral problems related to the human nature and existence. The principal issues in his activity are a trial to find a reason of evil and misfortune and also the vision of ordeal. The composer makes use of not only biblical and liturgical texts but also religious poetry mainly in latin language. His religious output has a concert character thanks to the musician language and composing techniques. His own commentaries concerning his compositions prove that his religious activity is an artistic confession of his faith.

By taking up Biblical themes in his oeuvre, Krzysztof Penderecki ef­fectuated the idea of returning art to its Christian roots. Analyses of selected fragments of his outstanding works (Seven Gates of Jerusalem and Passion According to St. Luke) show that the composer performed a peculiar, apt and suggestive “translation” of Biblical content into mu­sical language, using contemporary compositional techniques as well as alluding at times to the tradition of J.S. Bach.
 In the above compositions, Penderecki utilized the sound of the instruments, assigning them symbolic meaning and even experiment­ing with their construction (tubaphone). He also introduced a spatial­ly-distributed orchestra, assigning the human voice its original, pure­ly declamatory function, without limitations of rhythm or meter. The composer thus took steps to theatricalize the musical work, in order to enable a deeper reception of the Biblical content by the audience.

Résumé L’auteur trace ici un parcours chronologique de sa carrière de compositeur. Il en ressort que le hautbois est l’instrument privilégié pour ce créateur qui découvrit en Pologne, lors de stages d’études avec Penderecki, une autre façon d’être. De Québec à Winnipeg, en passant par la Pologne, pour enfin revenir à Québec — au fil d’oeuvres souvent symphoniques —, c’est un parcours original qui est présenté.

Há muitos escritos sobre a presença do compositor brasileiro, Claudio Santoro na Rússia, Alemanha e França. No entanto, pouco se pesquisou sobre sua passagem pela Polônia em 1955 e posteriormente sobre o uso de uma linguagem bem próxima a do sonorismo, característica do início da obra de Krzystof Penderecki, e a do aleatorismo controlado, presente na criação de Witold Lutosławski. Estes estilos oriundos da vanguarda polonesa estão presentes em muitas composições brasileiras dos anos 1960, incluindo obras de Santoro, como a peça Interações Assintóticas.

The stylistic changes in György Ligeti's music since 1960 have in some ways mirrored those in the wider contemporary music world. In his music of the 1960s he displays an experimental and systematic approach to the exploration of sound matter which can also be seen in the contemporaneous music of composers such as Xenakis, Penderecki and Stockhausen. In the 1970s his music shows a more eclectic approach, particularly the opera Le Grand Macabre (1974–7) in which there is much plundering of past styles – such as allusions to Monteverdi, Rossini, and Verdi. From this work onward there would appear to be a complete break from the approach in his works on the 1960s.

The object of research in article is Krzysztof Penderecki’s large-scale work Utrenya composed in 1970–1971 after the composer’s visit to The Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius. The author analyzes the textual basis of the composition, explaining the principles of selection of the verbal texts, and describes the relationships between individual techniques of the position of the words to the music with the tendencies in the development of choral music in the 1950s and 1960s. Analysis of textural and timbre features of the composition reveals three main sources of the technical compositional solutions: Krzysztof Penderecki’s own methods of choral writing, applied in Stabat Mater and in Passio Et Mors Domini Nostri Jesu Christi Secundum Lucam; the innovations of the post-war avant-garde, which became widespread in the works of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luigi Nono, Mauricio Kagel, György Ligeti; the intonational and textural elements of choral writing typical of Orthodox Christian worship. All these components of Penderecki’s choral style are organically combined with each other as part of the embodiment of a vivid sound picture of the climactic services of the church year, reflecting the extreme contrast between the mourning of Christ (Orthros of the Great Saturday) and the joy of His resurrection (Easter). A separate issue studied in the article is the position of sacred works in Penderecki’s legacy and the relationship between the composer’s choral oeuvres composed between 1962 and 1971.

La música no siempre se ha escrito. En la cultura occidental, la plasmación de las notas musicales en una partitura no llegó hasta la Edad Media, de la mano de Guido de Arezzo. ¿Por qué antes no se escribía? ¿Cuál fue la necesidad de propició ponerla por escrito? ¿Cómo se concretó un lenguaje tan abstracto como el musical en un sistema de signos, señales y símbolos? Además de responder a estas cuestiones, el artículo aborda la organización de la música modal clásica (de tradición oral), así como lenguajes modernos de difícil concreción escrita (como el swing del jazz o las propuestas estéticas de Bartók y Penderecki). Finalmente, el autor reflexiona sobre el autodidactismo y el analfabetismo musical como barreras al desarrollo de los músicos.

Уточняя критерии симфонического жанра, выдвинутые в трудах отечественных музыковедов, автор статьи рассматривает оркестровые сочинения известных польских композиторов второй половины XX века. Произведения Х. М. Гурецкого и К. Пендерецкого характеризуются как индивидуальные, в чем-то абсолютно противоположные проекты, открывающие новые возможности для дальнейшей эволюции жанра симфонии. Гурецкий сочетает монументальность в трактовке формы, в выборе исполнительских составов с крайне ограниченным кругом средств музыкального языка, работает на предельных контрастах динамики, темпа, метроритма, фактуры. В получившей всемирное признание Третьей симфонии все части выдержаны в медленных темпах, отсутствует свойственная жанру бинарная оппозиция образов. После создания сонористической Первой симфонии (1973) Пендерецкий возрождает постромантическую модель жанра, соединяя постдодекафонный и отчасти алеаторический методы композиции с характерной для позднеромантического симфонизма процессуальностью. Сочетание абсолютно чуждых друг другу музыкальных образов и стилистических парадигм придает драматургической фабуле парадоксальность. Основной вывод статьи состоит в возможности более широкого понимания жанра симфонии, чем это предлагается в классических для советского музыковедения работах М. Г. Арановского, считавшего, что в творчестве Шостаковича «история симфонии завершилась, если не фактически, то по крайней мере логически». С точки зрения автора статьи, симфониями в наше время можно считать - в отличие от оркестровых пьес, представляющих собой чистые звуковые эксперименты, - крупные концептуальные сочинения, утверждающие идеалы гуманизма. Clarifying the criteria of the symphonic genre, put forward in the works of Soviet musicologists, the author of the article examines the orchestral works of famous Polish composers of the second half of the 20 century. The works of H. M. Gorecki and K. Penderecki are characterized as individual, in some ways absolutely opposite, projects that open up new opportunities for the further evolution of the symphony genre. Gorecki combines monumentality in the interpretation of form, instrumentation with an extremely limited range of expressive means; he works on extreme contrasts in dynamics, tempo, metro-rhythm, and texture. His Third Symphony is world renowned. All its movements are sustained at a slow pace; there is no binary opposition of images typical of the genre. After creating the sonoristic First Symphony (1973), Penderecki revives the post-romantic model of the genre, combining the post-dodecaphonic and partly aleatoric methods of composition with the dynamicity characteristic of late romantic symphonies. The combination of musical images and stylistic paradigms that are absolutely alien to each other makes the dramatic plot paradoxical. The main conclusion of the article is the possibility of a broader understanding of the symphony genre than is offered in the classical for the Soviet musicology works by M. G. Aranovsky, who believed that in the work of Shostakovich “the history of the symphony ended, if not in fact, then at least logically.” In our opinion, to the symphony genre can be attributed-in contrast to orchestral pieces made for pure sound experiments- major conceptual works that affirm the ideals of humanism.

Penderecki's Arboretum in Lusławice is an example of the creative and unique work of an outstanding composer, visionary and lover of trees. Based on the historic park was created, a new, outstanding work, a collection combining a huge number of taxa into elements of garden composition, based on significant achievements of garden art of classical culture. The high natural and cultural values seamlessly blend with the historical park and the surroundings of the Lusławice Manor. The property is a rare example today of creative development of the historic layout with new elements, without simultaneous destruction of the existing values, but rather their protection and flourishing, creating new values on a regional, national and, because of the creator himself, global scale.

In this article, the author de-scribes Color Music, an alternative notation system for musical expres-sion. The system uses colors and shapes-powerful tools of expres-sion-in conjunction with sound to form a new language for musical no-tation. The author briefly describes the history of color/sound relation-ships since the time of Aristotle and discusses the use of color in scores by Alexander Scriabin, Arnold Schoenberg, John Cage, Krzysztof Penderecki, Gyorgy Ligeti, Olivier Messiaen and other contemporary composers who recognized color as a tool of expression for musical no-tation. He also discusses the psy-chology and musical meaning of col-ors, along with the role of performers as interpreters of Color Music, and the use of standard mu-sical forms as structural devices for applying color to scores. He de-scribes his Color Music: Toccata and Fugue (1995) in detail.

The article discusses the book Musical Solidarities by Andrea F. Bohlman. In her monograph she describes the history of Solidarity, placing sound at the centre of her analysis. The methods she uses allow her to examine historical facts holistically: she reaches for fieldwork as well as voice analysis, specific music motifs, and the influence of Polish musicians and composers on social attittudes in the 1980s. She offers an interesting analysis of the songs that acompanied the protests and the phenomenon of Stefan Bratkowski’s “Gazeta Dźwiękowa” [Sound Gazette] and its influence on the listeners. She draws attention to the icons of the Solidarity period such as Father Jerzy Popiełuszko, Lech Wałęsa, Krzysztof Penderecki and their voices, understood both literally and metaphorically. She also analyses contemporary reinterpretations of songs from that period, using Jacek Kaczmarski’s Mury [Walls] and Janek Wiśniewski padł [Janek Wiśniewski fell]. The author rejects the chronological approach to research, analysing the historical period through problematization of selected issues.

Twentieth-century art music composed by Bartók, Ligeti and Penderecki constitutes a large portion of the soundtrack for Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film adaptation of Stephen King’s novel, The Shining. This music was not written for the film, and the use of these pieces might leave listeners doubtful as to the legitimacy of a connection between them and the scenes in the movie they were used to enhance. However, in the case of the Bartók work excerpted in the film – Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta (1936) – an analysis of the subject-position of the music allows for another interpretation. Eric Clarke identifies subject-position in music as “the way in which characteristics of the musical material shape the general character of a listener’s response or engagement,” a definition based on earlier explorations of subject-position in film studies. My analysis of the subject-position of Bartók’s piece and the scenes in which excerpts of the work appear in The Shining reveals similarities in their potential effect on an audience member.

The article presents the figure of Jan Szyrocki, a conductor, pedagogue and music culture promoter, connected with Szczecin for most of his life. He was the founder of the “Słowiki” Boys’ Choir, the “Berżeretki” Girls’ Choir and, first and foremost, the Choir of the University of Technology in Szczecin, which he cooperated with continually for 50 years. The article also describes Jan Szyrocki’s contribution to the establishment of the International Choral Festival in Międzyzdroje and “In terra pax” Choral Academy, as well as his collaboration with renowned composers (e.g. Andrzej Koszewski, Krzysztof Penderecki, Jan Hawel, Marek Jasiński) and the conductor of the Szczecin Philharmonic – Stefan Marczyk. The article also discusses other issues, such as the didactic, social and cultural activity of Prof. Jan Szyrocki, his professional activity in the Szczecin branch of the Academy of Music in Poznań and in the College of Music Culture, founded on his initiative at the University of Technology in Szczecin, as well as information on his membership in cultural organizations and juries, awarded prizes, medals and distinctions.

From the end of the 1950s, the West German publisher Moeck officially represented the state-led music publishing house PWM ‘in the West’ with the permission of the Polish Ministry of Culture. Beside the distribution of score editions and orchestral performance materials by the PWM, Moeck also represented the interests of Polish composers in the Federal Republic of Germany directly in his own catalogue. Among the first authors of the new series of editions were Kotoński, Lutosławski, Penderecki, Serocki and Szalonek. They belonged to a circle that regularly participated in West German musical life in the 1960s. Despite the spirit of optimism and advantages for the composers, this cooperation also led to problems on several levels. These included the billing of performance materials and the handling of international copyright. This made the participants aware of various limits and led to conflicts – especially on the Polish side. Translation of Polish texts in vocal works into German and English was also not as straightforward as originally planned. The article offers new insights into Polish–German cooperation in the cultural field of music, which went on despite the difficult relationship between the two states then and also beyond the borders of the Cold War.

The article discusses the culture-creating activities of Mieczysław Tomaszewski (1921–2019) at the Polish Music Publishing House and within the context of Musical Encounters at Baranów Sando- mierski (1976–1981). The text is mainly concerned with Tomasze-wski’s publications relating to twentieth-century Polish composers: Karol Szymanowski, Witold Lutosławski, Krzysztof Penderecki and Henryk Mikołaj Górecki. The reflections of the Polish musicologist are closely entwined with the theoretical conceptions developed by himself: the conception of Wort-Ton, the method of integral interpre-tation of a musical work, the conception of nodal points in the lives of composers, or intertextuality in music. Applying these conceptions allowed him to describe Polish twentieth-century compositions at different levels and in different contexts: beginning with a synthetic periodisation of creative development, up to masterly analyses and interpretations of individual works that take into consideration their intertextual references. The Polish musicologist also paid careful at-tention to composers’ statements testifying to their original views and inner transformations. The problem of freedom was of particular im-portance to him, both in its personal, artistic aspect and in its histor-ical dimension. Tomaszewski as a person reveals himself throughout his activities as someone both free and committed.

Relevance of the study. During several years that preceded the creation of the Trio (1964), Leonid Hrabovsky wrote many other works in various genres and forms, ranging from suites and a sonata for solo instruments, a song cycle, and a cappella choruses, to large-scale compositions for orchestra and for mixed choir with orchestra, and even two one-act operas (piano scores). The composer’s stylistic priorities had been rapidly and strikingly evolving from “social realism with a human face” as evident in the Four Ukrainian Songs, towards a much more radical “sharp” expressionism and constructivism. This evolution caused the necessary changes in the techniques utilized by the composer. Hrabovsky was deeply impressed by the article Genealogia nowej muzyki (Genealogy of the new music) of the Polish musicologist Tadeusz Zieliński that was published in the magazine Ruch muzyczny, n. 20–21, 1963. Zieliński stated that, after historical periods of monody, polyphony and functional harmony, a new sonoric and timbral era had come. These ideas inspired Hrabovsky to move towards the radical avant-garde.
 The object of this research is the Trio by Leonid Hrabovsky.
 The purpose of the study is to reveal the inherent features that differentiate the piece from other avant-garde works of the early 1960s.
 Methods of research include technical analysis of the musical form and its dependence upon the pitch organization of the work, as well as comparative analysis.
 The results and conclusions. Being composed during several days in the spring of 1964, Trio became the first piece of Hrabovsky’s written in a definitely avant-garde style. It was premiered in 1966 and since then has become one of the composer’s most frequently performed works. The reason for such a success lies in the original concept of the piece that essentially differs from the other avant-garde works of that time. When discussing Trio, Hrabovsky always stresses the influence of the Polish avant-garde music attracting him during that period. Indeed, he borrowed a lot of devices from Miniatures for violin and piano by Krzysztof Penderecki, a score Hrabovsky knew and studied at that time. However, a comparative analysis of the two works reveals serious differences between them. While Penderecki operated with purely timbral (sonoric) objects and did not pay special attention to the pitch organization, Hrabovsky composed almost a classical three movement suite with the first movement in a ternary form and the last movement in the binary form. The classical principles of the pitch organization and the distribution of the pitch structures in Trio are similar to those in tonal music. These principles have been unusually applied to the sound material that has nothing in common with tonality. A combination of the traditional and new approaches to the form provided Hrabovsky’s Trio with unique qualities which made it not only an interesting artifact of the avant-garde period but one of the most valuable and artistically perfect works in the Ukrainian chamber music.

After the revolution in 1956, the cultural policy in Hungary shifted to allow a new openness toward Western-European movements: consequently 1956–1967 became one of the most important transitional periods of Hungarian music history. Composers turned away from the tradition of the foregoing thirty years, determined by the influence of Bartók and Kodály, imitating rather the works of Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Boulez, Nono, Lutosławski, Penderecki and Stockhausen. In this context the 78-year-old Zoltán Kodály’s Symphony, written in 1960–1961 for the Swiss Festival Orchestra and dedicated to the memory of Arturo Toscanini, was rejected by the young generation of composers and also Hungarian music critics, who turned themselves for the first time against the much-revered figure of authority. The Symphony’s emphasis on C major, its conventional forms, Brahms-allusions, pseudo self-citations and references to the 19th-century symphonic tradition were also received without comprehension in Western Europe. Kodály’s letters and interviews indicate that the composer suffered disappointment in this negative reception. Drawing on manuscript sources, Kodály’s statements and the Symphony itself, my study argues that the three movements can be read as caricature-like self-portraits of different phases of the composer’s life (the young, the mature and the old) and that Kodály identified himself with the symphonic genre and the C-major scale.

In the panorama of Polish music of the 2nd half of the 20th century the works of Silesian composers stand out. They were born in 1951 and thus they are referred to as the ‘Generation 51’ or the ‘Stalowa Wola Generation’ (from the place of their debut at the Festival ‘Young Musician for the Young City’ in Stalowa Wola in 1976): Eugeniusz Knapik, Aleksander Lasoń and Andrzej Krzanowski. They constituted the first generational phenomenon of such significance in Polish music since the debut of ‘Generation 33’ (Krzysztof Penderecki, Henryk Mikołaj Górecki and others). The musical style of these young authors was in tune with the Polish popular phenomenon of the 1970s of ‘New Romanticism’, consisting in a return to certain artistic and aesthetic values lost in modernism and avant-garde. One of the distinguishing features of Knapik’s, Lasoń’s and Krzanowski’s work is the application of various ‘intertextual strategies’ – quotations, allusions, and clear references to more or less specific musical traditions. In the works of ‘Generation 51’ composers, these strategies have a certain superior ‘axiological sense’ (Władysław Stróżewski), which is far from a purely ludic, postmodernist play on conventions and texts. The aim of the text is a review and an attempt to interpret those strategies. A methodological reference point will be the semantic analyses of possible intertextual references performed by Mieczysław Tomaszewski and Stanisław Balbus.

The subject for analysis were works for voice and piano by selected Polish composers of the 20th and 21st centuries, e.g. Grażyna Bacewicz, Tadeusz Baird, Henryk Czyż, Henryk Mikołaj Górecki, Henryk Hubertus Jabłoński, Wojciech Kilar, Zygmunt Krauze, Szymon Laks, Witold Lutosławski, Juliusz Mieczysław Łuciuk, Wojciech Łukaszewski, Paweł Łukaszewski, Maciej Małecki, Paweł Mykietyn, Edward Pałłasz, Konrad Pałubicki, Krzysztof Penderecki, Witold Rudziński, Marian Sawa, Kazimierz Serocki, Tadeusz Szeligowski and Romuald Twardowski. An important matter for the author was to determine whether there are common features for this creative genre. She also attempted to find an answer to the question if the trends from the second half of the 20th century were reflected in songs. The scope of analysis covered the repertoire the author knew from her performance practice from the standpoint of a pianist. To the general characteristics of selected songs she added a review of famous trends, techniques and styles of composition, such as impressionism, neoromanticism, expressionism, dodecaphony, serialism, punctualism, minimalism, sonorism, spectralism, neoclassicism, vitalism, postmodernism, aleatoricism, bruitism, microtonality, electronic music, musique concrète, stochastic music, references to previous periods, to folklore and to popular music. She compared musical notation of the analysed works. She also confronted forms of songs with contemporary composition techniques. Interesting was the approach of composers to chamber relations in a duo and the way they made texts musical. Most composers distanced themselves from the avant-garde in works for voice and piano which had a specific poetic text because of the clarity of narration. Matching composers unequivocally to just one trend turned out impossible. Various techniques and phenomena may co-exist in one piece and in the same way one creator may search for different means of expression.

„Mother weeping” in the masterpieces of Polish music of the 20th century The theme of the sorrowful mother has been present in music for centuries. The medieval sequence Stabat mater dolorosa brought many excellent interpretations. As far as the music of Polish composers in the 20th century is concerned, the first name to be mentioned is Karol Szymanowski and his masterpiece: Stabat Mater, Op. 53 (1926). This work, using a text in Polish and referring to folklore, set one direction for the interpretation of the theme of the sorrowful mother in the Polish music of the last century. It was continued by Andrzej Panufnik in his touching interpretation of Gorzkie żale in the suite Hommage à Chopin for voice and piano (1949), and particularly Henryk Mikołaj Górecki in his Symphony of Sorrowful Songs (1976). The second line is marked by compositions referring to the Latin tradition, with no clear references to Polish themes – such as Stabat Mater by Roman Padlewski (1939) and Stabat Mater by Krzysztof Penderecki (1962). The article outlines both lines of interpretation of the “Mother weeping” motif in the works of Polish composers of the 20th century on the example of the above-mentioned masterpieces of Polish musical culture of the last century. Abstrakt Motyw Matki Bolesnej obecny jest w muzyce od wieków. Średniowieczna sekwencja Stabat Mater dolorosa przyniosła wiele znakomitych interpretacji. Jeśli chodzi o muzykę polską XX wieku, w pierwszej kolejności należy tu przywołać nazwisko Karola Szymanowskiego i jego arcydzieło Stabat Mater op. 53. Utwór ten, wykorzystujący tekst w języku polskim oraz odwołujący się do ludowości, wyznaczył jeden kierunek interpretacji motywu Matki Bolesnej w muzyce polskiej ubiegłego stulecia. Nawiązał do niego m.in. Andrzej Panufnik w niebanalnej interpretacji Gorzkich żali w suicie Hommage à Chopin na głos i fortepian, a przede wszystkim Henryk Mikołaj Górecki w Symfonii pieśni żałosnych. Drugą linię interpretacyjną wyznaczają kompozycje utrzymane w tradycji łacińskiej, bez wyraźnych odniesień do wątków polskich – jak Stabat Mater Romana Padlewskiego i Stabat Mater Krzysztofa Pendereckiego. Artykuł przybliża obie linie interpretacyjne motywu „łzy lejącej” w twórczości kompozytorów polskich XX wieku na przykładzie przywołanych wyżej arcydzieł polskiej kultury muzycznej ubiegłego stulecia.

AbstractInstead of using Milton's famous opening lines, librettist Christopher Fry begins the text for Krzysztof Penderecki's opera Paradise Lost with the invocation that opens Book III, which alludes to acts of creation both biblical and literary. While the primordial effects of Penderecki's instrumental introduction to the opera parallel this allusion in easily discernible ways, his melodic lines used within this introduction also parallel this allusion in ways understood using recent theoretical perspectives on the composer's neo-Romantic style. These melodies exhibit a rare feature of paradoxicality, in that they are at once finite and infinite within stylistic constraints. This musical paradox corresponds to notions of paradox in accounts of cosmological creation, in a literary-operatic creation in which the author is character, and in the hypostatic union of the divine and human in Jesus Christ, a union foregrounded more in Fry's and Penderecki's opera than in Milton's original poem.

A multimedia explosion of musical styles, political satire and dramatic intrigue, the Polish National Opera ended their trio of Polish operas in April 2004 at Sadler's Wells with Krzysztof Penderecki's Ubu Rex. Based on Alfred Jarry's absurdist play, Ubu Roi – in other words Poles (1888), Ubu Rex (1991) resonates well with Poland's political situation in 2004, prompting us to read the opera as an insightful exploration into the identity of a nation navigating the legacy of Soviet rule and its emerging future in Europe.

As with the symphony, the rites have been read over opera as a form many times, yet even in the 21st century it stubbornly refuses to lie down and die. Three recent premières exemplify the basic strength of the genre: a revision of a radical 20th-century icon, and two wholly new works, one based on a psychological science-fiction classic (twice turned into a feature film), the other on a historical, post-medieval King of Sweden. What links the three together is the psychological examination of the events portrayed.

IntroductionCoffee, as a stimulant, and the spaces in which it is has been consumed, have long played a vital role in fostering communication, creativity, and sociality. This article explores the interrelationship of café space, communication, creativity, and materialism. In developing these themes, this article is structured in two parts. The first looks back to the coffee houses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to give a historical context to the contemporary role of the café as a key site of creativity through its facilitation of social interaction, communication and information exchange. The second explores the continuation of the link between cafés, communication and creativity, through an instance from the mid-twentieth century where this process becomes individualised and is tied more intrinsically to the material surroundings of the café itself. From this, we argue that in order to understand the connection between café space and creativity, it is valuable to consider the rich polymorphic material and aesthetic composition of cafés. The Social Life of Coffee: London’s Coffee Houses While the social consumption of coffee has a long history, here we restrict our focus to a discussion of the London coffee houses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was during the seventeenth century that the vogue of these coffee houses reached its zenith when they operated as a vibrant site of mercantile activity, as well as cultural and political exchange (Cowan; Lillywhite; Ellis). Many of these coffee houses were situated close to the places where politicians, merchants, and other significant people congregated and did business, near government buildings such as Parliament, as well as courts, ports and other travel route hubs (Lillywhite 17). A great deal of information was shared within these spaces and, as a result, the coffee house became a key venue for communication, especially the reading and distribution of print and scribal publications (Cowan 85). At this time, “no coffee house worth its name” would be without a ready selection of newspapers for its patrons (Cowan 173). By working to twenty-four hour diurnal cycles and heightening the sense of repetition and regularity, coffee houses also played a crucial role in routinising news as a form of daily consumption alongside other forms of habitual consumption (including that of coffee drinking). In Cowan’s words, “restoration coffee houses soon became known as places ‘dasht with diurnals and books of news’” (172). Among these was the short-lived but nonetheless infamous social gossip publication, The Tatler (1709-10), which was strongly associated with the London coffee houses and, despite its short publication life, offers great insight into the social life and scandals of the time. The coffee house became, in short, “the primary social space in which ‘news’ was both produced and consumed” (Cowan 172). The proprietors of coffee houses were quick to exploit this situation by dealing in “news mongering” and developing their own news publications to supplement their incomes (172). They sometimes printed news, commentary and gossip that other publishers were not willing to print. However, as their reputation as news providers grew, so did the pressure on coffee houses to meet the high cost of continually acquiring or producing journals (Cowan 173; Ellis 185-206). In addition to the provision of news, coffee houses were vital sites for other forms of communication. For example, coffee houses were key venues where “one might deposit and receive one’s mail” (Cowan 175), and the Penny Post used coffeehouses as vital pick-up and delivery centres (Lillywhite 17). As Cowan explains, “Many correspondents [including Jonathan Swift] used a coffeehouse as a convenient place to write their letters as well as to send them” (176). This service was apparently provided gratis for regular patrons, but coffee house owners were less happy to provide this for their more infrequent customers (Cowan 176). London’s coffee houses functioned, in short, as notable sites of sociality that bundled together drinking coffee with news provision and postal and other services to attract customers (Cowan; Ellis). Key to the success of the London coffee house of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was the figure of the virtuoso habitué (Cowan 105)—an urbane individual of the middle or upper classes who was skilled in social intercourse, skills that were honed through participation in the highly ritualised and refined forms of interpersonal communication, such as visiting the stately homes of that time. In contrast to such private visits, the coffee house provided a less formalised and more spontaneous space of sociality, but where established social skills were distinctly advantageous. A striking example of the figure of the virtuoso habitué is the philosopher, architect and scientist Robert Hooke (1635-1703). Hooke, by all accounts, used the opportunities provided by his regular visits to coffee houses “to draw on the knowledge of a wide variety of individuals, from servants and skilled laborers to aristocrats, as well as to share and display novel scientific instruments” (Cowan 105) in order to explore and develop his virtuoso interests. The coffee house also served Hooke as a place to debate philosophy with cliques of “like-minded virtuosi” and thus formed the “premier locale” through which he could “fulfil his own view of himself as a virtuoso, as a man of business, [and] as a man at the centre of intellectual life in the city” (Cowan 105-06). For Hooke, the coffee house was a space for serious work, and he was known to complain when “little philosophical work” was accomplished (105-06). Sociality operates in this example as a form of creative performance, demonstrating individual skill, and is tied to other forms of creative output. Patronage of a coffee house involved hearing and passing on gossip as news, but also entailed skill in philosophical debate and other intellectual pursuits. It should also be noted that the complex role of the coffee house as a locus of communication, sociality, and creativity was repeated elsewhere. During the 1600s in Egypt (and elsewhere in the Middle East), for example, coffee houses served as sites of intensive literary activity as well as the locations for discussions of art, sciences and literature, not to mention also of gambling and drug use (Hattox 101). While the popularity of coffee houses had declined in London by the 1800s, café culture was flowering elsewhere in mainland Europe. In the late 1870s in Paris, Edgar Degas and Edward Manet documented the rich café life of the city in their drawings and paintings (Ellis 216). Meanwhile, in Vienna, “the kaffeehaus offered another evocative model of urban and artistic modernity” (Ellis 217; see also Bollerey 44-81). Serving wine and dinners as well as coffee and pastries, the kaffeehaus was, like cafés elsewhere in Europe, a mecca for writers, artists and intellectuals. The Café Royal in London survived into the twentieth century, mainly through the patronage of European expatriates and local intellectuals such as Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, T. S. Elliot, and Henri Bergson (Ellis 220). This pattern of patronage within specific and more isolated cafés was repeated in famous gatherings of literary identities elsewhere in Europe throughout the twentieth century. From this historical perspective, a picture emerges of how the social functions of the coffee house and its successors, the espresso bar and modern café, have shifted over the course of their histories (Bollerey 44-81). In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the coffee house was an important location for vibrant social interaction and the consumption and distribution of various forms of communication such as gossip, news, and letters. However, in the years of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the café was more commonly a site for more restricted social interaction between discrete groups. Studies of cafés and creativity during this era focus on cafés as “factories of literature, inciters to art, and breeding places for new ideas” (Fitch, The Grand 18). Central in these accounts are bohemian artists, their associated social circles, and their preferred cafés de bohème (for detailed discussion, see Wilson; Fitch, Paris Café; Brooker; Grafe and Bollerey 4-41). As much of this literature on café culture details, by the early twentieth century, cafés emerge as places that enable individuals to carve out a space for sociality and creativity which was not possible elsewhere in the modern metropolis. Writing on the modern metropolis, Simmel suggests that the concentration of people and things in cities “stimulate[s] the nervous system of the individual” to such an extent that it prompts a kind of self-preservation that he terms a “blasé attitude” (415). This is a form of “reserve”, he writes, which “grants to the individual a [certain] kind and an amount of personal freedom” that was hitherto unknown (416). Cafés arguably form a key site in feeding this dynamic insofar as they facilitate self-protectionism—Fitch’s “pool of privacy” (The Grand 22)—and, at the same time, produce a sense of individual freedom in Simmel’s sense of the term. That is to say, from the early-to-mid twentieth century, cafés have become complex settings in terms of the relationships they enable or constrain between living in public, privacy, intimacy, and cultural practice. (See Haine for a detailed discussion of how this plays out in relation to working class engagement with Paris cafés, and Wilson as well as White on other cultural contexts, such as Japan.) Threaded throughout this history is a clear celebration of the individual artist as a kind of virtuoso habitué of the contemporary café. Café Jama Michalika The following historical moment, drawn from a powerful point in the mid-twentieth century, illustrates this last stage in the evolution of the relationship between café space, communication, and creativity. This particular historical moment concerns the renowned Polish composer and conductor Krzysztof Penderecki, who is most well-known for his avant-garde piece Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima (1960), his Polymorphia (1961), and St Luke Passion (1963-66), all of which entailed new compositional and notation techniques. Poland, along with other European countries devastated by the Second World War, underwent significant rebuilding after the war, also investing heavily in the arts, musical education, new concert halls, and conservatoria (Monastra). In the immediate post-war period, Poland and Polish culture was under the strong ideological influence exerted by the Soviet Union. However, as Thomas notes, within a year of Stalin’s death in 1953, “there were flickering signs of moderation in Polish culture” (83). With respect to musical creativity, a key turning point was the Warsaw Autumn Music Festival of 1956. “The driving force” behind the first festival (which was to become an annual event), was Polish “composers’ overwhelming sense of cultural isolation and their wish to break the provincial nature of Polish music” at that time (Thomas 85). Penderecki was one of a younger generation of composers who participated in, and benefited from, these early festivals, making his first appearance in 1959 with his composition Strophes, and successive appearances with Dimensions of Time and Silence in 1960, and Threnody in 1961 (Thomas 90). Penderecki married in the 1950s and had a child in 1955. This, in combination with the fact that his wife was a pianist and needed to practice daily, restricted Penderecki’s ability to work in their small Krakow apartment. Nor could he find space at the music school which was free from the intrusion of the sound of other instruments. Instead, he frequented the café Jama Michalika off the central square of Krakow, where he worked most days between nine in the morning and noon, when he would leave as a pianist began to play. Penderecki states that because of the small space of the café table, he had to “invent [a] special kind of notation which allowed me to write the piece which was for 52 instruments, like Threnody, on one small piece of paper” (Krzysztof Penderecki, 2000). In this, Penderecki created a completely new set of notation symbols, which assisted him in graphically representing tone clustering (Robinson 6) while, in his score for Polymorphia, he implemented “novel graphic notation, comparable with medical temperature charts, or oscillograms” (Schwinger 29) to represent in the most compact way possible the dense layering of sounds and vocal elements that is developed in this particular piece. This historical account is valuable because it contributes to discussions on individual creativity that both depends on, and occurs within, the material space of the café. This relationship is explored in Walter Benjamin’s essay “Polyclinic”, where he develops an extended analogy between the writer and the café and the surgeon and his instruments. As Cohen summarises, “Benjamin constructs the field of writerly operation both in medical terms and as a space dear to Parisian intellectuals, as an operating table that is also the marble-topped table of a café” (179). At this time, the space of the café itself thus becomes a vital site for individual cultural production, putting the artist in touch with the social life of the city, as many accounts of writers and artists in the cafés of Paris, Prague, Vienna, and elsewhere in Europe attest. “The attraction of the café for the writer”, Fitch argues, “is that seeming tension between the intimate circle of privacy in a comfortable room, on the one hand, and the flow of (perhaps usable) information all around on the other” (The Grand 11). Penderecki talks about searching for a sound while composing in café Jama Michalika and, hearing the noise of a passing tram, subsequently incorporated it into his famous composition, Threnody (Krzysztof Penderecki, 2000). There is an indirect connection here with the attractions of the seventeenth century coffee houses in London, where news writers drew much of their gossip and news from the talk within the coffee houses. However, the shift is to a more isolated, individualistic habitué. Nonetheless, the aesthetic composition of the café space remains essential to the creative productivity described by Penderecki. A concept that can be used to describe this method of composition is contained within one of Penderecki’s best-known pieces, Polymorphia (1961). The term “polymorphia” refers not to the form of the music itself (which is actually quite conventionally structured) but rather to the multiple blending of sounds. Schwinger defines polymorphia as “many formedness […] which applies not […] to the form of the piece, but to the broadly deployed scale of sound, [the] exchange and simultaneous penetration of sound and noise, the contrast and interflow of soft and hard sounds” (131). This description also reflects the rich material context of the café space as Penderecki describes its role in shaping (both enabling and constraining) his creative output. Creativity, Technology, Materialism The materiality of the café—including the table itself for Penderecki—is crucial in understanding the relationship between the forms of creative output and the material conditions of the spaces that enable them. In Penderecki’s case, to understand the origins of the score and even his innovative forms of musical notation as artefacts of communication, we need to understand the material conditions under which they were created. As a fixture of twentieth and twenty-first century urban environments, the café mediates the private within the public in a way that offers the contemporary virtuoso habitué a rich, polymorphic sensory experience. In a discussion of the indivisibility of sensation and its resistance to language, writer Anna Gibbs describes these rich experiential qualities: sitting by the window in a café watching the busy streetscape with the warmth of the morning sun on my back, I smell the delicious aroma of coffee and simultaneously feel its warmth in my mouth, taste it, and can tell the choice of bean as I listen idly to the chatter in the café around me and all these things blend into my experience of “being in the café” (201). Gibbs’s point is that the world of the café is highly synaesthetic and infused with sensual interconnections. The din of the café with its white noise of conversation and overlaying sounds of often carefully chosen music illustrates the extension of taste beyond the flavour of the coffee on the palate. In this way, the café space provides the infrastructure for a type of creative output that, in Gibbs’s case, facilitates her explanation of expression and affect. The individualised virtuoso habitué, as characterised by Penderecki’s work within café Jama Michalika, simply describes one (celebrated) form of the material conditions of communication and creativity. An essential factor in creative cultural output is contained in the ways in which material conditions such as these come to be organised. As Elizabeth Grosz expresses it: Art is the regulation and organisation of its materials—paint, canvas, concrete, steel, marble, words, sounds, bodily movements, indeed any materials—according to self-imposed constraints, the creation of forms through which these materials come to generate and intensify sensation and thus directly impact living bodies, organs, nervous systems (4). Materialist and medium-oriented theories of media and communication have emphasised the impact of physical constraints and enablers on the forms produced. McLuhan, for example, famously argued that the typewriter brought writing, speech, and publication into closer association, one effect of which was the tighter regulation of spelling and grammar, a pressure toward precision and uniformity that saw a jump in the sales of dictionaries (279). In the poetry of E. E. Cummings, McLuhan sees the typewriter as enabling a patterned layout of text that functions as “a musical score for choral speech” (278). In the same way, the café in Penderecki’s recollections both constrains his ability to compose freely (a creative activity that normally requires ample flat surface), but also facilitates the invention of a new language for composition, one able to accommodate the small space of the café table. Recent studies that have sought to materialise language and communication point to its physicality and the embodied forms through which communication occurs. As Packer and Crofts Wiley explain, “infrastructure, space, technology, and the body become the focus, a move that situates communication and culture within a physical, corporeal landscape” (3). The confined and often crowded space of the café and its individual tables shape the form of productive output in Penderecki’s case. Targeting these material constraints and enablers in her discussion of art, creativity and territoriality, Grosz describes the “architectural force of framing” as liberating “the qualities of objects or events that come to constitute the substance, the matter, of the art-work” (11). More broadly, the design features of the café, the form and layout of the tables and the space made available for individual habitation, the din of the social encounters, and even the stimulating influences on the body of the coffee served there, can be seen to act as enablers of communication and creativity. Conclusion The historical examples examined above indicate a material link between cafés and communication. They also suggest a relationship between materialism and creativity, as well as the roots of the romantic association—or mythos—of cafés as a key source of cultural life as they offer a “shared place of composition” and an “environment for creative work” (Fitch, The Grand 11). We have detailed one example pertaining to European coffee consumption, cafés and creativity. While we believe Penderecki’s case is valuable in terms of what it can tell us about forms of communication and creativity, clearly other cultural and historical contexts may reveal additional insights—as may be found in the cases of Middle Eastern cafés (Hattox) or the North American diner (Hurley), and in contemporary developments such as the café as a source of free WiFi and the commodification associated with global coffee chains. Penderecki’s example, we suggest, also sheds light on a longer history of creativity and cultural production that intersects with contemporary work practices in city spaces as well as conceptualisations of the individual’s place within complex urban spaces. References Benjamin, Walter. “Polyclinic” in “One-Way Street.” One-Way Street and Other Writings. Trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter. London: Verso, 1998: 88-9. 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