our projects

As part of the „Muzyka polska dzisiaj – portrety współczesnych kompozytorów polskich” (‘Polish music today – potraits of Polish contemporary composers’) series launched in 2013, Polish Composers’ Union published another CD with Roman Maciejewski’s music for two pianos this year.

The CD (catalogue number: polmic 164) contains two piano works of the composer: Allegro concertante – two pianos version composed in 1944 and Pianoduo concertante for two pianos without orchestra composed between 1935 and 1936.

Anna Wielgus-Nowak and Grzegorz Nowak as Novi Piano Duo recorded the works for the DUX Recording Producers in the Krzysztof Penderecki European Centre for Music on 29 November – 2 December this year. Marlena Wieczorek, the author of the composer’s monograph published in 2008 in Poznań (PTPN publisher), wrote the booklet essay.

The project is co-financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage from the Culture Promotion Fund as part of the National Institute of Music and Dance programme ‘Muzyczny ślad‘ (Musical Trace).

As the culinary pasticcio added appeal to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century aristocratic parties, working just as strongly on the sense of taste as on that of sight, so the operatic pasticcio and the pasticcio practice in general have enlivened contemporary musicological research. The 18th volume of the English-language journal ‘Musicology Today’, published by the Institute of Musicology of the University of Warsaw and the Polish Composers' Union, is entirely devoted to pasticcio.

The presented volume is part of the Pasticcio. Ways of Arranging Attractive Operas research project, funded from the Beethoven 2 Programme, which is co-financed by the National Science Centre of Poland and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. It includes 14 articles based on presentations from the conference that summed up the project, Operatic Pasticcio in Eighteenth-Century Opera: Work Concept, Performance Practice, Digital Humanities, which was held in May 2021 at Warsaw University.

The texts analyse pasticcios with reference to the concept of the operatic work from very different perspectives: those of theatrical practice (Giovanni Polin); the audiences (Ina Knoth), culinary analogies (Berthold Over), and pleasure (Aneta Markuszewska). Anne Desler discusses singers’ dramaturgical choices and their creative contributions to pasticcio production. Raffaele Mellace traces changes in Johann Adolf Hasse’s composition strategies over the period of thirty years that separate his Siroe (Bologna 1733) from his eponymous self-pasticcio (Dresden 1763). Hasse’s Siroe is also considered by Emilia Pelliccia and Sonia Rzepka, who, using Laodice’s recitativo accompagnato sung by Elisabeth Teyber as their starting point, analyse that singer’s impact on the musical form of the work and on Hasse’s creative process, as well as presenting the functions and elements of the database that the project group has been working on.

Reinhard Strohm uses the example of Handel’s Scipione (1730) to talk about eighteenth-century stage practice as well as problems involved in contemporary editions of pasticcios. Three other articles (by Gesa zur Nieden, Jana Spáčilová, and Paologiovanni Maione) deal with the specific qualities of pasticcios staged respectively in such European hubs as Hamburg, Prague, Brno and Naples. At the foundation of every opera or pasticcio lay the literary libretti, whose migrations and forms constitute a crucial, extremely difficult aspect of the pasticcio research, taken up in her article by Anna Ryszka-Komarnicka. Interest in the pasticcio is also evident in contemporary operatic life. The dilemmas, questions, and decisions faced by musicologists and music life organisers in our own times in the process of staging pasticcios are the subject of two papers, by Bruno Forment and Clemens Birnbaum.

The journal is available online at: https://sciendo.com/issue/MUSO/18/1 

Details of the project can be found at: https://www.pasticcio-project.eu/ 

"For the sake of Polish musical culture, in order to widely disseminate Polish music, in the interests of Polish composers, musicologists and musicians, the Main Board of the Polish Composers' Union establishes the Polish Music Information Centre, which continues the tradition of the Polish Music Centre of the Polish Composers' Union and the activities of the Library and Music Collection of the Polish Composers’ Union – Polish Contemporary Music Documentation Centre, by collecting and sharing materials in the library section and information in the database section, extending the scope of interest to performers, institutions and music events in Poland."

This first sentence about the Polish Music Information Centre POLMIC was published 20 years ago, on 21 November 2001, in the Founding Act drawn up by members of the Polish Composers' Union.

Since then, we have been promoting Polish music by organising concerts in Poland and abroad. We publish albums – including  "The Sound Chronicle of the Warsaw Autumn", monographic albums in the series "Polish Music Today – Portraits of Contemporary Polish Composers", and books – distributed all over the world!

POLMIC operates within the structures of the International Association of Music Information Centers IAMIC.

The Polmic.pl portal is the first website dedicated to Polish contemporary music. We collect information about music and musicians in POLMIC databases, we run a Virtual Music Encyclopedia, we provide current information about musical life in Poland and we are the media patron of the most important events featuring contemporary music. We present the archives of the Polish Composers' Union in the POLMIC Digital Archive. We provide archives, books, magazines, sheet music and recordings in the scientific Library and Music Collection of the Polish Composers' Union.

20 years behind us and the whole world ahead of us! The new stage in our activity will be accompanied by a new graphic identification by the outstanding graphic artist Marcin Władyka.

Please visit www.polmic.pl and our headquarters at 27 Old Town Market Square in Warsaw!

Krzysztof Penderecki's music will be heard on 10 October 2021 at the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin as part of the popular Sundays@Noon series. The concert performed by Hard Rain Soloists Ensemble conducted by Sinead Hayes will be held as part of the "Krzysztof Penderecki: Europe in Tribute to the Master" project, organised by the Polish Composers' Union in collaboration with foreign partners.

The concert will begin and end with early compositions by the world-famous composer, conductor and teacher, a long-time Honorary Member and the Honorary President of the Polish Composers' Union, who passed away in March 2020. His Three Miniatures for clarinet and piano, showing no traces of later radicalism, were composed in 1956 when Penderecki was still a student of the State Higher School of Music in Krakow. Three years later he wrote Three Miniatures for violin and piano which heralds the 'sonoristic' period in his work. It was on the threshold of the 1960s that his career took off due to winning all three awards in the 2nd PCU's Competition for Young Composers. At the time he was also teaching at the Krakow academy and among his students was Marek Stachowski, whose Audition for flute, cello and piano (1970) we will hear at the concert.

Throughout his life Krzysztof Penderecki was an ardent promoter of the latest contemporary music. The programme will therefore include the works of Polish composers of the young generation: ReVerse 4 (2014) by Adam Porębski, Dance with my Breath (2015) by Agnieszka Stulgińska, and Lignes d'hauntologie / 1949? (2017) by Paweł Siek. The compositions will be performed by Hard Rain Soloist Ensemble (HRSE) – a contemporary music group from Belfast, whose remit is to present music by local composers in the context of works by leading exponents of contemporary music from around the world. The concert programme will be complemented by two contemporary Irish works: Blunt Instrument (2008-09) by Greg Caffrey and LUCA (2017) by Gráinne Mulvey.

The project is carried out by the Polish Composers’ Union / Polish Music Information Centre POLMIC in partnership with the Contemporary Music Centre in Dublin with the support of the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in Dublin. Co-financed by the Ministry of Culture, National Heritage and Sport from the Culture Promotion Fund.

More information: https://www.cmc.ie/

The database of information on Polish contemporary composers and their works is an electronic collection of data related to 20th and 21st-century Polish music. The principal source of information for this database are the publications and other collections of the Polish Composers’ Union’s Library - Recording Archive: the world’s largest, unique stock of books on Polish contemporary music (more than 5,000 vols.), a collection of scores (over 20,000 vols.), and recordings of works by Polish contemporary composers (13,900 LPs and over 2,500 CDs). The Polish Composers’ Union archives also include information about more than 500 music authors, derived exclusively from the composers themselves. This information was the basis for the Card Catalogue of Contemporary Polish Composers’ Works (developed in the 1950s and later), which in turn served as the starting point for the formation of the present database.

The database has been developed since 1995 in co-operation with Arka, an IT company. In 2003 its first internet version was made available at http://www.polmic.pl/. It included. however, only basic data concerning the composers and their compositions, moreover it was updated rather extremely rarely.

The new project, aimed for making available online full content of the POLMIC database, was launched in January 2021 and it was successfully finalised in September this year.

Now, the new database may be accessed from any place through the address

https://www.bazapolmic.infoforhumans.eu/index.php

Apart from basic information, it includes many interesting and useful details like information on texts and other contexts used by composers, scoring, dedications, first performances, and others. The databaser will be permanently developed and enlarged. At present its content are:

1015 names of contemporary Polish composers and 49135 descriptions of their works.

Everybody is welcome to use the new database. It may be accessed in two different ways:
without registering (you will be able to read its limited version, with selected data only) or
as registered user (strongly recommenended) with full content available without limitations).

Please contact us by mail if you wish to know more:
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Open the database (as non-registered user)