With One Foot in Pop Culture

Prague, March 4, 2024

Barnaba Matusz talks with Paweł Hendrich, artistic director of Musica Polonica Nova

The 34th Musica Polonica Nova, starting on April 10, is Paweł Hendrich’s fourth as artistic director. This year, the festival will also feature his works. During one of the concerts, we will listen to Thall’Em All, in which Hendrich adapts the language of metal for a string quartet. He talks about the most important themes of the upcoming festival and the featured performers and composers.

The theme of this year’s Musica Polonica Nova is POPCULTURE / subculture. How will it be addressed by the featured artists?

This year’s resident composers certainly boldly use pop and subcultural elements. Marta Śniady follows the latest cultural trends, which is visible even in the way she creates her own image. A new version of her performance entitled Body X Ultra will be presented by Ensemble Kompopolex. From the very beginning, this group has been moving on the border between elitist and popular music. All composers whose works have been programmed for the concert of Ensemble Kompopolex act in a similar way, Monika Szpyrka included. To understand them, you need to have one foot in pop culture. On Wednesday, during the first concert of the Łódź-Wrocław series 71/42, in addition to Lumen by Marta Śniady, the SoundCheck ensemble from the Academy of Music in Łódź will perform Parallels by Cezary Duchnowski. Instead of classical percussion, we will hear a rock drum set. This composition differs significantly from what classical music is usually associated with. A point of reference for it can be found in the work of e.g. Frank Zappa. The second of our residents – Artur Zagajewski – is inspired by the punk subculture. During his monographic mini concert, the composer together with Maciej Koczur will perform a suite composed of the songs Danses Polonaises and LOVE, LOVE, LOVE, LOVE. They will thus break one of the longest-lasting traditions in the world of philharmonics, that is the separation of the functions of composer and performer. On the festival Sunday, Artur Zagajewski will go on stage with an electric guitar.

Alongside popular culture, other themes highlighted in the festival programme are modern technologies and the Internet. Are these subjects impossible to escape from in our days?

The subject of modern technology is now so ubiquitous that I treat it as part of pop culture. For this reason too, it fits perfectly into this year’s MPN. At the intersection of pop culture and technology we can find, for example, computer games. Game music is also a source of inspiration. The soundtrack from the Super Mario series, which has been popular for decades, inspired Andrzej Kwieciński, who composed [P|PE)s)]64. It had its premiere in 2020 in Tokyo, now you can listen to it here. We will also return with empty music by Jagoda Szmytka. This artist was one of the first in Polish music to address the issue of freedom in social media. Technology is one of the topics addressed by Pierre Jodlowski in the show Mad Max. It is full of references to the world of cinema. It would be impossible to implement if it were not for technological development and the emergence of the so-called augmented reality. Artificial intelligence will be present at Musica Polonica Nova too. NeoQuartet will perform Expect the unexp…lained by Adrian Foltyn. While working on this piece, the composer collected several hundred harmonic progressions used by DJs. Based on them, he created a generative algorithm, which became one of the means for composing the music.

When we look at the concerts on the festival Thursday, we will notice that accordion music appears several times that day.

The changing role of this instrument is highlighted by the title of the AccordiON/OFF, during which the Polityka Passport-winning accordionist Maciej Frąckiewicz will perform with the cellist Tomasz Daroch and the Silesian String Quartet. The emancipation of the accordion is one the most interesting and perhaps the most surprising phenomena in Polish music at the turn of the 20th century and the 21st century. It is also an interesting case of cultural advancement, because previously the accordion was not associated with classical music. Now this instrument is appreciated by composers, often using a radical musical language. On Thursday, the accordion will appear for the first time during the 34th MPN during a mini-recital by Aleksander Stachowski – a young, award-winning instrumentalist. A moment later, during AccordiON/OFF we will listen to, among others works by Grażyna Krzanowska, Marcin Bortnowski, and Michał Moc. Rafał Łuc from Kompopolex plays the accordion too. Grażyna Pstrokońska-Nawratil, an outstanding composer and teacher of a number of Wrocław artists, has created a new piece for this instrument – CalderaConcerto. On Saturday, it will be performed by Ensemble OMN conducted by Szymon Bywalec, and the soloist will be Maciej Frąckiewicz. Talking about OMN, it is also worth mentioning their other concert at MPN. The artists will present music by young composers – Mateusz Ryczek and Paweł Malinowski, who decided to address problems faced by modern humans in their works.

This is exactly what Musica Polonica Nova is about.

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What is this year’s Musica Polonica Nova festival about?

 Above all, it is about inspiration, fluid boundaries and connections. The history of contemporary music, like every art form actually, is conditioned by two tendencies. The first is to strive to maintain autonomy and continuity of tradition, the second is to search for new inspirations and means of expression. For a long time, musical art was primarily an art of its own matter drawing inspiration and driving force for development from itself. Yet nowadays the fear of the influence of external trends has weakened, and composers are increasingly drawing inspiration from both the dominant popular culture and plentiful subcultures. Boundaries in art still exist, but it is becoming easier to cross them. Contemporary music is no longer elitist, it is opening up to the world of everyday life and non-connoisseur audiences, outside academia. Sometimes it makes critical interceptions, venturing into the vast field of pop culture. But it also happens that composers simply and sincerely, without a hint of irony, take full advantage of popular music, enjoying its energy.

I think that regular participants of our festival will easily notice the ideas that connect this year’s edition with the previous ones. We return to the concept of networking, we again consider the relationships that contemporary music enters into, adding more layers. We are experimenting with the form of the festival again and challenging its traditional formats. When programming this year’s edition of MPN, we tried to abandon linear thinking and give recipients the freedom to create their own participation plan. This will allow listeners to have more individual, intimate relationships with music. Instead of a series of concerts, we have interconnected points. This idea will be best visible during the Saturday culmination, consisting of interwoven events in various spaces of the National Forum of Music venue.

Relationships, connections, bonds – this is, as always, an important topic for us. In this context, the series of mini-concerts 71/42 will be particularly noteworthy, beginning each day of the festival. How to understand the title of this series? These are simply the area codes of two cities: Wrocław and Łódź, symbolising the combined efforts of two music centres. As part of this project, students of the Grażyna and Kiejstut Bacewicz Academy of Music in Łódź will present their works created as part of a project authored by conductor Maciej Koczur. These will be inclusive concerts, addressed to a wide audience. The performers invited to co-create the festival include: Spółdzielnia Muzyczna contemporary ensemble, Ensemble OMN, NeoQuartet, NFM Leopoldinum String Trio and LutosAir Quintet. The programme also features a project by young composers combining electronic and organ music and a concert organised by the Polish Composers’ Union.

We have always wanted MPN to be a festival that audaciously builds relationships with other, non-musical spaces of the arts. This year we have begun collaboration with the Polish Theatre in the Underground in Wrocław. Thanks to this, we have a wonderful accompanying event in the programme – the play Finnegans W/Fake. Wojtek Blecharz’s music plays a key role in this performance, but the sound (sonorism) of the text is equally important.

A special place in this edition is occupied by two composers-in-residence of the festival: Marta Śniady and Artur Zagajewski. Not just because they make great music. They both daringly use pop and subcultural elements, crossing the boundaries of genres and artistic disciplines. In Artur’s music we can find punk rock rebellion, but also inspirations from architecture and urban planning, thanks to which his music becomes a perfect commentary on modern times. Whereas Marta draws from a wide range of pop culture and keeps her finger on the pulse of the latest trends, without losing her clearly individual character.

MPN also stands for curiosity about the world. We do not have ready answers, but we like to ask questions, dig deeper and observe the reality that surrounds us in the era of technological acceleration and cultural changes. At the same time, give something back, provide the audience with new impressions and perception strategies.

Join us!

Paweł Hendrich – Artistic Director

Musica Polonica Nova

Details of the programme are available on the NFM website:

Musica Polonica Nova (nfm.wroclaw.pl)

You can book tickets online here:

Tickets – Narodowe Forum Muzyki (nfm.wroclaw.pl)

 Agnieszka Szachnowska – Cybulska