Sonorism and experimentalism

The ‘Polish School’, sonorism, and electronic music Among the terms and labels attached to Polish music after 1956, those of the ‘Polish School’ and ‘sonorism’ are the most frequent and among the most elusive. The term ‘Polish School’ was not a new one: Mycielski had evoked a Polish musical school at the Łagów conference in 1949, though its meaning then was quite different, and the term was subsequently used in the preface to the programme book of the first ‘Warsaw Autumn’ festival in 1956, essentially in reference to Polish music since Łagów. But the term was reborn in the foreign press a few years later as visiting journalists tried to come to grips with Poland's avant-garde developments of the late 1950s and early 1960s, though it remained ‘somewhat enigmatic to Polish musical circles’. As Danuta Mirka has commented: The unifying features of this music were sought chiefly on the aesthetic plane, in its strong, ardent expression and the dynamism of its formal processes. Both of these qualities were equally strange to the experimental ‘asceticism’ of Western music in the 1950s and hence were all the more noticeable in the music coming from Poland … Characteristically enough, when foreign observers concentrated on the aesthetic unity of Polish music as an integral phenomenon in musical life, Polish critics reacted by turning their own attention to the variety and wealth of its stylistic resources.