• Duration: 11'
• Instrumentation: 0000-0000-batt-archi
• Year: 1959
• Type: parts, score

Kazimierz Serockis Episodes was written in 1959. It would seem that our little stabilization of that time (when Gomułka was head of the Communist Party) would be conducive to the writing of pieces in a certain sense singing the praises of the security of micro-prosperity, but nevertheless, works were being written that were full of inner anxiety. For todays young listener, raised in completely different times, that breath of the avant-garde, that freshness which Lutosławskis, Bairds or Serockis works brought at the end of the 1950s, is something natural and understandable. In those times, it must have been a real rarity. It is intriguing, though, how it happened that in the coarse reality of the Polish Peoples Republic, such outstanding works, saturated with inner depth, were written - such as, among others, Serockis Episodes. For this is no banal work. Perhaps the work was written at too early a stage in the avant-garde to be able to talk about a certain routine of writing in accordance with the spirit of the times. However, it is clearly visible in the music of Episodes, that a need to grasp reality was revealing itself at every step. In 1959, it was already clear that the Communists would not abandon the front in the battle for the masses, but that they would leave contemporary music essentially free of ideological influence, thus... shouldnt we taking advantage of favorable times - shake up the audience, perhaps with an atypical arrangement of the orchestra, perhaps with a completely different understanding of the composition of texture? And above all - with a completely new concept for shaping of the formal process? Even just the spatial disposition of the instrumental resources created completely new conditions for the listener. In the front, a row of violas; in the back, double basses. Celli set up in a V shape were surrounded with both groups of violins, behind which the composer spread out, in three different locations, percussion groups; only the double basses were left outside. This was not a thoughtless caprice of Serockis, for this type of spatial disposition of the elements of the orchestra made it possible to bring out truly excellent and refined topophonic ideas. And likewise, the process of the work, in which the values of melodic and harmonic language gives way to the peculiar character of sonorities, represents an innovation in the Polish music of that time. Thanks to the linkage of the process of sound in space with interesting timbral effects, the resulting music was colorful, attention-getting, fresh and striking. And at the same time, wonderfully composed from a formal standpoint - for Episodes proceeds with unusual flexibility; the music rolls by, as it were, in one breath. The individual links in the work (Proiezioni Movimenti - Migrazioni - Incontri) are connected to each other in an uncommonly logical and fluid manner, not losing any of their autonomy. Maciej Jabłoński