THE MUSIC THAT HAS ALWAYS BEEN
A preamble to WIOŚNIANKI
If you’ve ever been to a concert where a new piece is premiered and the composer is present, there might be an opportunity for the composer to speak about the piece, in a pre-concert chat or perhaps they write about the work in the programme notes. That’s what I’m going to do right now, but in an extended format, and also articulate the fundamental reason behind my recent creative work. The impetus behind it all, so to speak.
My talk is called “The Music That Has Always Been”, because lately I feel that composing is about listening and discovering- perhaps rediscovering- the music that is ravelled up inside of us, whether we listen to it or not. To quote Gary Saul Morson and Morton Shapiro, culture is not something that we are born separate from, and then dipped into, like Achilles into the River Styx. We are cultural from the outset. Born with culture. The dilemma is, are we paying attention to it?
To speak most plainly about this piece, WIOŚNIANKI is a setting of Polish children’s folk poetry, authored and edited by Edmund Bojanowski, and was intended for singing and learning by the children at a number of orphanages established by Bojanowski. For this work building orphanages and libraries for the poor, Bojanowski was given the title “Blessed” by the Catholic church in Poland. These orphanages (ochronki) that Bojanowski established were not only for parentless children, but also for children who had been neglected or from other destitute backgrounds. Bojanowski, despite being of noble heritage, did not want the children to forget their peasant heritage, and so he composed poetry inspired by their folk songs for them to sing and enjoy.
Considering most of these children came from rural, farm-labouring backgrounds, the poetry is rich in natural imagery. Thus we form a parallel also to the ancient Slavic tradition of wiośnianki, vesnianky (UKR) viasnianky (BEL), spring songs, sung often in March in order to finally dispel winter and initiate the growing season.
It might seem strange for a composer, living and working today, to compose music setting 19th century Polish peasant poetry meant to be sung to orphans, and not write music about something, say, more pertinent. But, to again speak plainly, this is what I truly love about the creative freedom of being a composer: I can do what I want. At a great cost, sometimes.
But is it actually an artist’s imperative to be current, relevant, contemporary? In some ways, yes, but the lightning strike of inspiration, that bewitchment, often occurs in funny places. This piece, like many of my recent works, comes from a place of dissatisfaction. As I read Bojanowski’s poetry, and listened to field recordings of folk singers in Poland, western Ukraine and Belarus, most of them very elderly, it occurred to me that I was studying something that was practically dead. And yet, I could not shake the feeling that it was important for me to “show off” this world, this place and time, that our contemporary living have almost forgotten about. And I was not alone in this assertion. If we study the ways of the composers before us, we will notice something interesting. Bela Bartók. Sofia Gubaidulina. Claude Debussy, Igor Stravinsky. Carl Orff. Galina Ustvolskaya. Lou Harrison. Anton Webern. Meredith Monk. What do all these composers have in common? All are considered important artistic voices of the 20th and 21st century, participating in the vast and cataclysmic changes present in modern artistic life. Despite this, and their stylistic differences amongst each other, they all had one thing in common: They looked backward, sometimes far backward, instead of forward. What we often view as radical progress in 20th century art, is actually the return of the ancient and primitive, a strangeness and otherness channeled by what has been forgotten by modernity’s short attention span. Orff, Debussy, and Bartók were so horrified by late German Romanticism that it forced them to find new ground to stand on. On the other side of the coin, globalisation allowed composers to experience other paradigms of music making. The discovery of gamelan music, that ancient Indonesian musical tradition, at the 1889 Paris Exhibition Universelle delighted Debussy so much that he was inspired enough to abandon both his formalised conservatoire training and the last vestiges of Romanticism in his music.
This desire for new ground, for fresh soil to plant new roots in, is tied up with the chaos of the 20th century. In 2025, living at the “end of history” as Francis Fukuyama described, the era of post-post modernism, an unconscious longing finally spills out in unexpected ways. Sometimes virtual realities supersede our interest in the shared experience of the common material world. It is now possible to “check out” from modernity, rather than merely criticize it. And many do. Attend a Latin Catholic mass and find yourself surrounded by people who live their religion as if it was 1920. Slow living and cottagecore Instagram aesthetics invoke both a nostalgia for the past and a deep-seated resentment of modern living. The unipolar delights of progressivism and capitalism no longer delight us, as the system feels tired and evil, and we are forced to ask the question: has the baby been thrown out with the bathwater? Have we eradicated something that makes us feel grounded, real, and inspired?
I also think this problem is distinctly Canadian. If you are a second or third generation settler, you probably have very little understanding of where your family is from. Family stories and heirlooms are lost, names and places that had meaning and importance become unfamiliar.
Canada prides itself on being a “post-state” nation, but the cost of that is we are all obliged, almost required, to forget where we came from. I think about how less than a hundred years ago my great-grandparents were farming and logging to scrape out a living in both Poland and Alberta. They would have had more in common with people during Charlemagne’s reign, than with us today. I should also point out that I know nothing about farming! Hundreds, perhaps thousands of years of collective memory has been forgotten in less than a century.
What does this mean for composers? Are we also suffering from memory loss or a sense of discontinuity? And are we worse off because of it? I have noticed that lots of composers now operate as if the 20th century never happened, picking up from where music left off around 1890 or so. It is now permissible to “memory hole” that controversial era of music making when music was jarring, atonal, and bafflingly esoteric. Many desire a continuity with the past. But first we must reconcile with it. Or alternatively, begin at a new ground zero.
In Christos Hatzis’ 1996 essay “Towards A New Musical Paradigm”, he identifies, correctly, I believe, that the new ground zero for Western classical composition arrived not with atonality in the 1910’s, but rather with John Cage and the minimalist composers after World War II. This new paradigm is by far the biggest break from the dialectical traditions of Western music, a more overt rejection of the “Faustian” values of Western culture which thrives on discourse, to use an identifier borrowed from Oswald Spengler. Western music could now be non-dialectical, spiritual, meditative, ego-less.
Meanwhile, back In the conservatory, we study fugues, counterpoint, themes and variations, classical harmony, and when we begin composing and “finding our voice”, we are taught to reject this dialectic of composing music. Then we are taught to wrestle with the epistemological rift of post-1945 music, which bears little or no resemblance to any music before it, besides the obvious. And wrestle we do with this reality! As I struggled to choose a modern piece for my RCM piano exams, I cringed at the atonal, polytonal and sonoristic selections in my book.
“Ah, but this is how composers write music today. So learn to play it!” My piano teacher said. Of course, he could not explain to me why it was considered “right” to compose in this way, or understand it… Nor could I make sense of the massive void that seemed to separate the Romantic and the Modern repertoire in my RCM piano repertoire book. At that point I had already wanted to “check out” from the 20th century. That is not to say that there are many composers who work hard to reconcile musical tradition with post World War II “whatevers”. But I think most composers working today agree that there is still a very obvious rift, and a composer’s stylistic allegiance hinges majorly on how much they choose to accept or deny the heritage of 20th century musical experimentation.
We are now at a point where a complete rejection of this heritage is completely normal. Nevertheless, as I eventually warmed up to contemporary music, and started learning Anton Webern’s Variations for solo piano during my undergraduate music degree, I could not help but be fascinated by the fact that Webern, that great future visionary of Western music, was obsessed with medieval music and wrote a dissertation on Renaissance composer Heinrich Isaac! And so, curiosity was implanted in my head. Are “good” composers actually looking forward, or do most of them look backwards? Let’s look at some examples.
Where would Stockhausen, Webern, Goeyvaerts be without the numerology and isorhythms of medieval music theory? Where would Messiaen and Duruflé be without plainchant?Orff without ancient Greek drama? Ustvolskaya without znamenny chant? What of Stravinsky, Bartók, Janaček, and the folk music tradition? Górecki and Pärt without ancient Catholic and Orthodox singing traditions? Cage without the ancient wisdom of the I-Ching?
The list seems endless to me.Even Claude Debussy, possibly the first truly “modern” composer, considered himself an ancienniste, someone dedicated to antique culture! All of these composers sought out a tradition to build a new, radical practice. But why?
Dissatisfaction with a sclerotized musical tradition, perhaps. Richard Wagner had ultimately strangled them all. But also, they had a pessimism and anxiety about a “future” music. A fear of rootlessness, and also a fear of relying too much on what has already been done.
That is all the past. Now it is 2025. What is the right path to head on? Do we continue our ground-zero attitudes, or do we reconcile with the past and memory-hole Boulez and Stockhausen? I think the answer is somewhere in between. Emerging out of this “Age of Progress”, after capitalism, communism, fascism and globalisation, we are left with the sense that the “progress” that defined contemporary culture was not so much about progressing as it was destroying. Rituals, heritage, religion, regionalism, rurality, all casualties of modernity, or the more common desire regular people to “keep up with the Joneses”. Why hold to these old ways and traditions that make me look weird, old-fashioned, and even worse- small minded?
When Bartók transcribed his first folk song, and attempted, without Romantic sentimentality or whitewashed nationalism, to integrate the authentic feeling and power of the peasant music of his culture, this act was simultaneously a rejection of Western zeitgeist and a reconciliation of his training as a composer with the ethnic roots from whence he came. Bartók died in 1945, but he must have been aware of how much was being lost in the grand sweep of modernity at this point already.
May I suggest that there is something here for artists to do? To behave, in some sense, like cultural conservationists rather than pretending that art music is an extension of the rec and leisure industry? There is too much at stake and it all risks disappearing.
WIOŚNIANKI is an invocation of a time and place that no longer exists. Although the melodies and notes are my own, my hope is that there is something to understand here. To remember and not forget. I have already talked about what it means to be rootless in modernity. To feel this deeply and artistically, is the “melancholy of the conservative”. When I say conservative, I mean in its most literal sense, one who conserves, in that we believe in the vitality and value of the past, and in some sense, possess a desire to make it live again, albeit temporarily. The melancholy, I believe, is the inevitable truth that the one who conserves is ultimately fighting a never ending battle of losses. That which is “old” will eventually give way to the new. Even in environmental conservation the victories are few and far between. However, it is important that we do not allow this sense of loss to burden or discourage us, rather to embrace the melancholy, and pretend that the past is alive before us and to let it temporarily bewitch us with its strangeness.
If you’ve ever been to a concert where a new piece is premiered and the composer is present, there might be an opportunity for the composer to speak about the piece, in a pre-concert chat or perhaps they write about the work in the programme notes. That’s what I’m going to do right now, but in an extended format, and also articulate the fundamental reason behind my recent creative work. The impetus behind it all, so to speak.
My talk is called “The Music That Has Always Been”, because lately I feel that composing is about listening and discovering- perhaps rediscovering- the music that is ravelled up inside of us, whether we listen to it or not. To quote Gary Saul Morson and Morton Shapiro, culture is not something that we are born separate from, and then dipped into, like Achilles into the River Styx. We are cultural from the outset. Born with culture. The dilemma is, are we paying attention to it?
To speak most plainly about this piece, WIOŚNIANKI is a setting of Polish children’s folk poetry, authored and edited by Edmund Bojanowski, and was intended for singing and learning by the children at a number of orphanages established by Bojanowski. For this work building orphanages and libraries for the poor, Bojanowski was given the title “Blessed” by the Catholic church in Poland. These orphanages (ochronki) that Bojanowski established were not only for parentless children, but also for children who had been neglected or from other destitute backgrounds. Bojanowski, despite being of noble heritage, did not want the children to forget their peasant heritage, and so he composed poetry inspired by their folk songs for them to sing and enjoy.
Considering most of these children came from rural, farm-labouring backgrounds, the poetry is rich in natural imagery. Thus we form a parallel also to the ancient Slavic tradition of wiośnianki, vesnianky (UKR) viasnianky (BEL), spring songs, sung often in March in order to finally dispel winter and initiate the growing season.
It might seem strange for a composer, living and working today, to compose music setting 19th century Polish peasant poetry meant to be sung to orphans, and not write music about something, say, more pertinent. But, to again speak plainly, this is what I truly love about the creative freedom of being a composer: I can do what I want. At a great cost, sometimes.
But is it actually an artist’s imperative to be current, relevant, contemporary? In some ways, yes, but the lightning strike of inspiration, that bewitchment, often occurs in funny places. This piece, like many of my recent works, comes from a place of dissatisfaction. As I read Bojanowski’s poetry, and listened to field recordings of folk singers in Poland, western Ukraine and Belarus, most of them very elderly, it occurred to me that I was studying something that was practically dead. And yet, I could not shake the feeling that it was important for me to “show off” this world, this place and time, that our contemporary living have almost forgotten about. And I was not alone in this assertion. If we study the ways of the composers before us, we will notice something interesting. Bela Bartók. Sofia Gubaidulina. Claude Debussy, Igor Stravinsky. Carl Orff. Galina Ustvolskaya. Lou Harrison. Anton Webern. Meredith Monk. What do all these composers have in common? All are considered important artistic voices of the 20th and 21st century, participating in the vast and cataclysmic changes present in modern artistic life. Despite this, and their stylistic differences amongst each other, they all had one thing in common: They looked backward, sometimes far backward, instead of forward. What we often view as radical progress in 20th century art, is actually the return of the ancient and primitive, a strangeness and otherness channeled by what has been forgotten by modernity’s short attention span. Orff, Debussy, and Bartók were so horrified by late German Romanticism that it forced them to find new ground to stand on. On the other side of the coin, globalisation allowed composers to experience other paradigms of music making. The discovery of gamelan music, that ancient Indonesian musical tradition, at the 1889 Paris Exhibition Universelle delighted Debussy so much that he was inspired enough to abandon both his formalised conservatoire training and the last vestiges of Romanticism in his music.
This desire for new ground, for fresh soil to plant new roots in, is tied up with the chaos of the 20th century. In 2025, living at the “end of history” as Francis Fukuyama described, the era of post-post modernism, an unconscious longing finally spills out in unexpected ways. Sometimes virtual realities supersede our interest in the shared experience of the common material world. It is now possible to “check out” from modernity, rather than merely criticize it. And many do. Attend a Latin Catholic mass and find yourself surrounded by people who live their religion as if it was 1920. Slow living and cottagecore Instagram aesthetics invoke both a nostalgia for the past and a deep-seated resentment of modern living. The unipolar delights of progressivism and capitalism no longer delight us, as the system feels tired and evil, and we are forced to ask the question: has the baby been thrown out with the bathwater? Have we eradicated something that makes us feel grounded, real, and inspired?
I also think this problem is distinctly Canadian. If you are a second or third generation settler, you probably have very little understanding of where your family is from. Family stories and heirlooms are lost, names and places that had meaning and importance become unfamiliar.
Canada prides itself on being a “post-state” nation, but the cost of that is we are all obliged, almost required, to forget where we came from. I think about how less than a hundred years ago my great-grandparents were farming and logging to scrape out a living in both Poland and Alberta. They would have had more in common with people during Charlemagne’s reign, than with us today. I should also point out that I know nothing about farming! Hundreds, perhaps thousands of years of collective memory has been forgotten in less than a century.
What does this mean for composers? Are we also suffering from memory loss or a sense of discontinuity? And are we worse off because of it? I have noticed that lots of composers now operate as if the 20th century never happened, picking up from where music left off around 1890 or so. It is now permissible to “memory hole” that controversial era of music making when music was jarring, atonal, and bafflingly esoteric. Many desire a continuity with the past. But first we must reconcile with it. Or alternatively, begin at a new ground zero.
In Christos Hatzis’ 1996 essay “Towards A New Musical Paradigm”, he identifies, correctly, I believe, that the new ground zero for Western classical composition arrived not with atonality in the 1910’s, but rather with John Cage and the minimalist composers after World War II. This new paradigm is by far the biggest break from the dialectical traditions of Western music, a more overt rejection of the “Faustian” values of Western culture which thrives on discourse, to use an identifier borrowed from Oswald Spengler. Western music could now be non-dialectical, spiritual, meditative, ego-less.
Meanwhile, back In the conservatory, we study fugues, counterpoint, themes and variations, classical harmony, and when we begin composing and “finding our voice”, we are taught to reject this dialectic of composing music. Then we are taught to wrestle with the epistemological rift of post-1945 music, which bears little or no resemblance to any music before it, besides the obvious. And wrestle we do with this reality! As I struggled to choose a modern piece for my RCM piano exams, I cringed at the atonal, polytonal and sonoristic selections in my book.
“Ah, but this is how composers write music today. So learn to play it!” My piano teacher said. Of course, he could not explain to me why it was considered “right” to compose in this way, or understand it… Nor could I make sense of the massive void that seemed to separate the Romantic and the Modern repertoire in my RCM piano repertoire book. At that point I had already wanted to “check out” from the 20th century. That is not to say that there are many composers who work hard to reconcile musical tradition with post World War II “whatevers”. But I think most composers working today agree that there is still a very obvious rift, and a composer’s stylistic allegiance hinges majorly on how much they choose to accept or deny the heritage of 20th century musical experimentation.
We are now at a point where a complete rejection of this heritage is completely normal. Nevertheless, as I eventually warmed up to contemporary music, and started learning Anton Webern’s Variations for solo piano during my undergraduate music degree, I could not help but be fascinated by the fact that Webern, that great future visionary of Western music, was obsessed with medieval music and wrote a dissertation on Renaissance composer Heinrich Isaac! And so, curiosity was implanted in my head. Are “good” composers actually looking forward, or do most of them look backwards? Let’s look at some examples.
Where would Stockhausen, Webern, Goeyvaerts be without the numerology and isorhythms of medieval music theory? Where would Messiaen and Duruflé be without plainchant?Orff without ancient Greek drama? Ustvolskaya without znamenny chant? What of Stravinsky, Bartók, Janaček, and the folk music tradition? Górecki and Pärt without ancient Catholic and Orthodox singing traditions? Cage without the ancient wisdom of the I-Ching?
The list seems endless to me.Even Claude Debussy, possibly the first truly “modern” composer, considered himself an ancienniste, someone dedicated to antique culture! All of these composers sought out a tradition to build a new, radical practice. But why?
Dissatisfaction with a sclerotized musical tradition, perhaps. Richard Wagner had ultimately strangled them all. But also, they had a pessimism and anxiety about a “future” music. A fear of rootlessness, and also a fear of relying too much on what has already been done.
That is all the past. Now it is 2025. What is the right path to head on? Do we continue our ground-zero attitudes, or do we reconcile with the past and memory-hole Boulez and Stockhausen? I think the answer is somewhere in between. Emerging out of this “Age of Progress”, after capitalism, communism, fascism and globalisation, we are left with the sense that the “progress” that defined contemporary culture was not so much about progressing as it was destroying. Rituals, heritage, religion, regionalism, rurality, all casualties of modernity, or the more common desire regular people to “keep up with the Joneses”. Why hold to these old ways and traditions that make me look weird, old-fashioned, and even worse- small minded?
When Bartók transcribed his first folk song, and attempted, without Romantic sentimentality or whitewashed nationalism, to integrate the authentic feeling and power of the peasant music of his culture, this act was simultaneously a rejection of Western zeitgeist and a reconciliation of his training as a composer with the ethnic roots from whence he came. Bartók died in 1945, but he must have been aware of how much was being lost in the grand sweep of modernity at this point already.
May I suggest that there is something here for artists to do? To behave, in some sense, like cultural conservationists rather than pretending that art music is an extension of the rec and leisure industry? There is too much at stake and it all risks disappearing.
WIOŚNIANKI is an invocation of a time and place that no longer exists. Although the melodies and notes are my own, my hope is that there is something to understand here. To remember and not forget. I have already talked about what it means to be rootless in modernity. To feel this deeply and artistically, is the “melancholy of the conservative”. When I say conservative, I mean in its most literal sense, one who conserves, in that we believe in the vitality and value of the past, and in some sense, possess a desire to make it live again, albeit temporarily. The melancholy, I believe, is the inevitable truth that the one who conserves is ultimately fighting a never ending battle of losses. That which is “old” will eventually give way to the new. Even in environmental conservation the victories are few and far between. However, it is important that we do not allow this sense of loss to burden or discourage us, rather to embrace the melancholy, and pretend that the past is alive before us and to let it temporarily bewitch us with its strangeness.
