Review of Making New Music in Cold War Poland: The Warsaw Autumn Festival, 1956–1968, by Lisa Jakelski

Abstract

It has become second nature for scholars of twentieth-century music to acknowledge that the "modern" of musical "modernism" was socially and culturally constructed, and that the meaning and valence of "new music" were contingent. Together with this insight has come the reevaluation of a historiography governed by teleologies of progress, greater interest in the power dynamics determining musical importance, and attention to the processes by which certain musical techniques were defined as "advanced." Yet if "new music" was contingent, on what was it contingent? And if these other accompanying tropes were constructions, by whom, where, when, why, and how were they constructed? [1st paragraph]