In Awangarda, Lisa Cooper Vest explores how the Polish postwar musical avant-garde framed itself in contrast to its Western European counterparts. Rather than a rejection of the past, the Polish avant-garde movement emerged as a manifestation of national cultural traditions stretching back into the interwar years and even earlier into the nineteenth century. Polish composers, scholars, and political leaders wielded the promise of national progress to broker consensus across generational and ideological divides. Together, they established an avant-garde musical tradition that pushed against the limitations of strict chronological time and instrumentalized discourses of backwardness and forwardness to articulate a Polish road to modernity. This is a history that resists Cold War periodization, opening up new ways of thinking about nations and nationalism in the second half of the twentieth century.

About the Author

Lisa Cooper Vest is Assistant Professor of Musicology at University of Southern California

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction
1. Backwardness (Zaleglosc): Defining Musical Modernity in Poland before and after World War II
2. Lack (Brak): The Shifting Status of the Artist-Intellectual Class during the Thaw
3. The Dissemination of Culture (Upowszechnienie kultury): Rebuilding Elite Institutions and Educating Elite Audiences
4. Lag (Opóznienie): Genius Construction and Looking Back to Move Forward
5. Modernity (Nowoczesnosc): Boguslaw Schäffer and the Cult of the New
6. Awangarda: The Polish Avant-Garde as Tradition
7. Backward and Forward: The Polish Avant-Garde as Progress

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Reviews

"??Vest achieves an impressive new contextualization for Polish music: that the actual discourse was composer-led, with multiple agents debating what ‘modernity’ meant to their particular situation. . . . This detailed study will surely be required reading for any scholar on the subject."
— Slavic and East European Review

"Vest’s merits as a musicologist and writer include a lucid prose style (scattered with occasional gems of poetic description), a dramatist’s flair for rhetorical structuring, and an archivist’s eye for the telling detail suggesting a revisionist narrative. Her work is also unpretentiously but productively attuned to a wide array of contemporary critical and historiographical theory. . . .Vest packs a lot into an erudite yet readable 200 pages (plus substantial endnotes and bibliography) of tightly plotted, usually persuasive, and sometimes revelatory prose."
— Music & Letters

"In her compelling and lucid study, Lisa Cooper Vest explores an apparent paradox: how Poland, on Europe's periphery, with intellectuals obsessed over falling behind the "West," became a driving force of European modernity, thanks to—and despite—regimes stretching from right to left. An indispensable and absorbing study."—John Connelly, author of From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews

"This work is revelatory. A gripping read and a nuanced scholarly account of music-making under state socialism."—Danielle Fosler-Lussier, author of Music in America's Cold War Diplomacy

"This book will provide a crucial—indeed, indispensable—foundation for all future research on Polish music of the period."—Kevin C. Karnes, author of Arvo Pärt's Tabula Rasa

About the Book

About the Author

Table of Contents

Reviews