2014-08-28

Anna Sikorska talks to Jan Kanty Pawluśkiewicz as he begins his cooperation with PWM Edition.

Do you feel that you are more of a composer or more of a painter?

I compose music and I paint. When I deal with painting, music doesn’t exist, when I deal with music, painting doesn’t exist. When I’m Dr Jekyll, I’m Dr Jekyll, and when I am Mr Hyde, I’m Mr Hyde. They are different forms of communication or rather different types of interaction with someone who is sensitive to colour, form, composition or silence, sound and phrase. I feel I am both.

Soon half a century will pass since the moment of the “great meeting” which marked the beginning of the musical group “Anawa”. One may already start counting the generations that have been raised on the music created by architecture students of the Kraków Polytechnic. How did it happen that instead of making drawings at the board you made music that charmed not only Krakow, but all of Poland?

That is both a lyrical and terrifying question. Lyrical in the sense that if something we did as architecture students is present in people’s memory and functions to this day, that means that those architecture students must have done something right, and if to that they had added something original, it had the chance to last for so many years. On the other hand, it is terrifying that so much time has passed. It is comforting, that despite time passing those things have not grown so old. Back then they were something independent, something different from the obligatory trends, and we tried to do the best we can. It seems we had the needed predispositions.

Who was your musical mentor when you embarked on your journey as a composer? Rock musicians looked up to their American colleagues, so did the jazzmen, whose example did you follow, when writing your first compositions?

In principle, it’ hard for me to say whose example I followed, but I was more interested in the outsiders, like Harry Barris, John Cage, Charles Ives, Miles Davis, Bill Evans, the Modern Jazz Quartet. It is a palette of very different musicians that I listened to but they weren’t as significant for my compositions as Marek Grechuta had been, in my beginnings. We kept each other company while taking our first steps. We followed the rhythm and phrase of poetry, because our goal was to make music in which the element of poetry was very important. Here there were no partners because aside from the “Cellar under the Rams” cabaret no one did those kind of things.

Do you still write songs today, or does the weight of life experience get in the way of writing beautiful, simple melodies?

I haven’t had any traumatic experiences. As for the weight of maturity, my frame of mind oscillates somewhere between the third and fourth year of university. That’s my world view. I write songs very rarely these days, because I’ve already done it, but if I must, like for a film, if it’s an attractive offer, than definitely yes.

Your creative output consists of more than the songs known to so many generations, there are large-scale pieces, such as the Ludźmierz Vespers (Nieszpory Ludźmierskie), as well as film music. The music for Papusza was named as the best soundtrack at last year’s Gdynia Film Festival. One can say that whatever you set out to do turns out great. But what do you feel best doing? What kind of music do you like to compose the most?

I’d be very careful here. The impression that anything I set out to do succeeds is rather superficial, because I’ve written a lot of music that is out of the mainstream. I’ve also written a few large-scale works that are not easy to put on. The Ludźmierz Vespers are some sort of a phenomenon. We have the pleasure of speaking on the brink of the publication of the score by PWM, a publishing house with an almost 70 year long tradition, it is a very capacious archive of excellent works by composers of the highest rank. To be among them is an honour and source of pride for me. Each of these genres that you mentioned is significant because writing film music, theatre music and large-scale works take place at a different time. In my case, a commission to write film music means that I deal with film music. And so it happens with other genres. Sometimes I commission myself to write certain pieces. The Venetian Tales of Hell and Paradise, Papusza’s Harps, the Ludźmierz Vespers and the Easter Concertos all came to be because of my own private order and I felt obliged to get the job done well.

One can say that you are self-taught. Were you ever tempted to go study composition at the Academy of Music? Orchestration, harmony in works like the Ludźmierz Vespers is a great challenge for a self-taught musician.

I am not self-taught because I’ve had classes in form analysis, ear training, musical notation and music history at the music school. Van Gogh or Francis Bacon did not graduate from an academy of fine arts, yet they are quite significant in painting. Gombrowicz did not read philology at a university, Kazimierz Kutz never went to film school, Daniel Olbrychski didn’t major in drama. I would be proud, if you included me in that group.

They don’t teach composition at music school.

There is no school that teaches composition, just like there is no school that teaches one to write poetry or prose.

Yes, but there are those that study composition at the university level.

Yes, because they hope that something will come out of it. This is a very big risk. Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński put it in words beautifully, he wrote that a musical note is a splinter under the heart. If someone has that splinter elsewhere, he can study, but not much will come out of it. Composing is more of an inclination to collect musical impressions and convert them to musical notes, setting them in order, building them into scores.

Which of your compositions are you most sentimental about?

Papusza’s Harps (Harfy Papuszy) – since I had, years ago, discovered the beauty of her poetry on my own and, thanks to that, learned the customs of the Gypsies. In times when almost no one had heard of Papusza my fascination was so great that I studied the language of the Gypsies and wrote music to Papusza’s Gypsy phrase. It has nothing to do with actual Gypsy music, so it should strike a chord with the Gypsies, since gypsy music is similar to what surrounds it in the musical sense. In Spain it like Flamenco, in Bulgaria it has Balkan rhytms, in Poland it sounds like radio hits, but there is no classical Gypsy music. So I feel that if the Gypsies ever warm up to Papusza’s Harps, it could be their classical music. Perhaps I trust the Gypsy taste too much and I am too egotistical. Mr and Mrs Krauze and I have made a film in which the image and the music are equally significant. The film shows the world of the Gypsies not as we usually picture it or see it on television, we reach the depths of the very essence of Gypsy custom – the drama, the joy...

What kind of music do you listen to?

I’m keen on Mahler. I feel a real closeness with him because of his use of form, the extensive use of instruments, his predilection for kitsch, for quotes, and his incredible solidity and sensuality of expression. I’ve always felt close to Szymanowski as well. Years ago, I was interested in things played by jazz musicians that balanced on the borderline of jazz and classical music, the so-called third route – the Modern Jazz Quartet, Oscar Peterson, Thelonius Monk, Charlie Hayden – those that made history in the 1950s.

Who, in your eyes has been the great “revelation” on the Polish music scene over the past few years?

As for pop music, no one. Many names trouble us and push in quite persistently so one may grow to accept them, but I see nothing original. As for people I know, there is of course Gregorz Turnau, he is original. The rest is chewing on something that has already been written. On the other hand, we do have creation in the work of Paweł Mykietyn, because if someone writes an opera in which the main role is spoken, we should call it an act of creation, and a very original one at that.

Transl. Joanna Trafas

Phot. M.W. Hubner