Frederic Chopin

This article presents a cycle of lyrical works entitled Z motywów Chopina (From Chopin’s themes) by Artur Oppman, published in 1893 in the volume Pieśni (Songs). The shape of this cycle had been modified over the years. In 1908, the poet changed its title and expanded it with new works. This change testifies to the evolution of the creative concept and the set of ideas about the function of the composer’s work. Contrary to the opinion rooted in the tradition of research about the conventional approach to the impact of Chopin’s work presented in Oppman’s lyrical poetry, the authors of the article demonstrate a far-reaching originality of the discussed work, focusing their attention both on issues related to understanding the narrowly-defined poetological knowledge and on the problem of translating musical means of expression into the language of a literary work.

The book presents the history of the International Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition narrated from the anthropological-cultural perspective and based on extensive source material, which enabled the authors to explore the less known aspects of one of the most important music competitions in the world.

In the world of classical music, a composer’s body rarely figures in the reception of their compositions. The reception of one composer, however, seems unique in this regard; observations about Frédéric Chopin's physical identity, and perceptions about his masculinity, significantly impacted upon the appreciation and understanding of his music, ultimately colouring the ways in which his works have been viewed. This article considers how Chopin’s masculinity was constructed during his life and following his death. It surveys a selection of press reviews and testimonies, alongside early Chopin biographies, in order to establish how the image of Chopin developed relative to physical weaknesses and (an apparent lack of) masculinity. Taken as a whole, this image encapsulates a sense of masculinity itself, pronounced and projected within nineteenth century music criticism. Alongside this core theme, the article considers some of the other preoccupations that may have played a part in ...

В статье предлагается интерпретация шести стихотворений цикла «Сон в летнюю ночь» — одного
из самых «темных» циклов четвертой книги стихов Б. Л. Пастернака «Темы и вариации».
Авторы показывают, как центральные для всей книги стихов темы рождения искусства и обстоятельства
первых пореволюционных лет могут быть связаны с одноименной комедией У. Шекспира.

The article offers an interpretation of six poems from the cycle A Midsummer Night’s Dream
(Son v Letniuiu Noch’), one of the most «obscure» cycles in Boris L. Pasternak’s fourth poetry collection
Themes and Variations (Temy i Variatsii). The authors demonstrate that the themes of the emergence
of art and the circumstances of the first post-revolutionary years — the central themes for the
entire volume — may be linked to the Shakespeare comedy from which the cycle’s name is drawn

In the mid-1830s, the writers of the first French music journal devoted to the piano, Le Pianiste, were confronted with a piano performance trend that they struggled to understand. When playing a written piece, some pianists were no longer improvising, or embellishing, or changing their performances from one time to the next. Instead, some were playing a given score exactly as written and playing a piece the same way repeatedly. The way that these new pianists performed was so different from what Le Pianiste’s authors were accustomed to, that they alleged that the new pianists were not piano players at all, but merely piano “pressers.” Further, their extreme fidelity to the score was causing them to overlook the music and lose their “natural heat.” Le Pianiste dubbed these players the “monochromatic school.”

Drawing on Le Pianiste’s description of monochromatic playing and its opposite, what we might call “polychromatic” playing, this paper discusses how the improvisatory — ornamenting, altering rhythms, or substituting pitches on the spot — was a central practice in performing the entirety of the written score in early nineteenth-century France. Further, it connects these performance practices to shifting notions about the role of the performer and the meaning of a musical work. Le Pianiste’s damning opinion of those who performed only what was written provides an unfamiliar viewpoint about the virtue of altering pieces in performance, and places this practice later than previously known. Further, it sheds new light on a musical ethos familiar to early nineteenth-century Paris, a place that nourished so many pianists, such as Chopin and Liszt. While my focus is on a microhistorical moment, this paper provides new information which helps define a point of transition in three large-scale trends over the century: the development of the Urtext — a fixed ideal “work”, the rise of performer as interpreter, and the decline of improvisation.

[Paper written in polish]
"Socrealizm i Etiuda Rewolucyjna. Artysta jako przyjaciel ludu w Młodości Chopina (1951) Aleksandra Forda
Main goal of this paper was to analyse methods of persuasion in socialist-realistic film "Youth of Chopin" (1951, dir. Aleksander Ford) within the context of: reshaping of post-war Poland, nationalistic tendencies within communist party and socialist realism as a mass culture.
Text was published in: Wybitni-Wizualnie, edited by N. Ziołkowska-Korczuk, Lublin 2014.

"Les composicions de Chopin han obert una nova era en la història del piano. Però corren el risc de ser malinterpretades si no s'ha conegut la manera de tocar del mestre, les intencions i la seva concepció de l'instrument - donat que el seu resultat en el paper és bastant diferent d'aquell món sonor en el que vivien realment" W.v.Lenz 1872

Aquest estudi pretén, doncs, donar a conéixer aquest món sonor a través de la recopilació i anàlisi de textos  d'aquells qui el varen poder escoltar.

In an analysis of Chopin's mazurkas, some narrative aspects stand out. The Viennese classical tradition offered a musical persona, who appears in the romantic period remembering some previous music. This implies temporality, and sometimes causality and transformation.

With the enhanced dependence on internet, the congestion control has emerged as a challenging task. It requires an efficient management of buffers and packet scheduling on a per flow basis. Each router in the network must implement some queuing discipline that governs how packets are buffered while waiting to be transmitted. Active Queue Management (AQM) algorithms have been designed to be able to actively control the average queue length in routers supporting TCP traffic, and thus to be able to prevent congestion and resulting packet loss as much as possible. In this paper, an Efficient CSFQ (Eff-CSFQ) algorithm has been proposed for congestion management, which improves the performance of regular CSFQ. We present simulation and analysis of the performance of Eff-CSFQ as compared to regular CSFQ, RED and FRED queuing algorithms using MATLAB. The parameters for comparison are Packet-Delivery Fraction (PDF), End-End Delay (EED), Throughput (TP), and Network Survival Period (NSP).

Controversies are a regular feature on the international classical music competition circuit, and some of these explode into scandals that are remembered long afterward. This essay draws from the sociology of scandal to identify the conditions that predispose classical music competitions to moral disruption and to examine the cultural process through which a scandal attains legendary status. The case considered in depth is the International Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition and the controversy surrounding Ivo Pogorelich’s elimination from the 10th Competition in 1980. Through an analysis of media coverage in Polish and English, I show how the scandal was discursively constructed through two interpretive frameworks: the collective memory of previous controversies at the Chopin Competition, and a generational divide. I also trace the legacy of the scandal over the decades that followed. Following Durkheim, I argue that controversies at classical music competitions should not be taken as an indication of their decline. Rather, scandals – especially legendary ones – can have positive effects for competition organisations and the wider social world of classical music, as long as they do not become chronic.

This paper begins by briefly reconsidering a previous analysis of medieval Galician-Portuguese poetry, in order to clarify the relation there is between deconstruction and a certain kind of literary production. The relation is transhistorical. The paper focuses on literary works that generate defamiliarization, troubling notions of identity in the very contexts these notions emerge. General criteria governing those literary works are then proposed with the help of theoretical ideas advanced by the Brazilian concrete poets. Finally Sousa Andrade and José de Alencar (Iracema) are presented as critical examples of the kind of literary production we are here interested in.

Program Book for the North American Premiere of CHOPIN WITHOUT PIANO, Swarthmore College, October 24, 2015. Includes program essays by Barbara Milewski and Allen Kuharski and English version of the performance text revised and edited by B. Milewski. Online streaming video of the performance available on Naxos Video Library.

Książka kreśli polityczne i kulturalne tło Warszawy młodzieńczych lat Fryderyka Chopina. Autorka wnikliwie bada i przedstawia środowisko muzyczne, w jakim wzrastał. Dowodzi, że pomimo trudnej sytuacji politycznej stolica była tętniącym życiem europejskim ośrodkiem. Zawarta w publikacji bogata ikonografia pobudza wyobraźnię i przenosi czytelnika w muzyczny świat młodego Chopina.
http://www.rp.pl/Muzyka/308219887-Miasto-ktore-uksztaltowalo-mlodego-Fryderyka.html#ap-1

Il volume porta un notevole contributo di informazione e di riflessione su un argomento certo non privo di bibliografia, anche recente. Questa possibile difficoltà è affrontata di petto dall'autore, il quale argomenta le sue personali opinioni sui problemi analitici e interpretativi posti da questi brani pianistici, derivandole dalla discussione e dal confronto con la più accreditata letteratura sull'argomento.

Le colloque a eu comme objet la culture musicale d’André Gide et le rapport entre son écriture et ses interprétations musicales. On a analysé la relation entre écriture et processus musicaux, et les liens entre les différents types d’expression artistique : littérature, musique, théâtre (qui couple les deux). La passion musicale d’André Gide, qui était aussi pianiste, ne pouvait pas rester sans influence sur ses autres travaux. Sa sensibilité musicale a certainement produit des effets sur son attitude à l'égard de l'écriture, et la notion du rythme devient une notion clé pour interpréter aussi ses productions écrites. Pour juger une œuvre littéraire, d’habitude il la lisait à haute voix, pour pouvoir mieux en évaluer la musicalité. Il cherchait partout l’harmonie (et, comme M. Schnyder a spécifié, pas seulement dans l’art mais aussi dans la vie réelle ; ceci faisait partie de sa nature) : on aperçoit cela dans toute son œuvre. L’écriture de Gide peut être appelée écriture euphonique (du grec εὖ, « bon » et ϕωνή « son ») ; ce but est atteint après un long labeur. Gide était un classique en sa conception artistique, et en particulier son panthéon musical comprenait Charpentier, Bach, Beethoven. Pour lui, aussi Chopin devait être interprété de manière classique, joué comme Mozart, parce qu’ils expriment la même joie calme et cristalline.

Between the 1910s and the 1940s, countless arrangements of Chopin’s piano pieces appeared in movies, ballets, musicals, or as hit singles on the radio. One such arrangement, the song “Till the End of Time” based on the Polonaise in A-flat major, Op. 53, topped the Billboard charts in a recording by Perry Como days after the surrender of Japan in August 1945. While military associations were attached to Chopin’s “Heroic” Polonaise already in the nineteenth century (one example is Jan Kleczyński’s 1870 programmatic narration of a knightly cavalcade), “Till the End of Time” provides a fascinating metamorphosis of the piece’s legacy, initiating a new melancholic frame of reception in the postwar popular imagination. In July 1946, the movie Till the End of Time capitalized on the success of the hit song, and added another layer to the piece’s complex intermingling of military and sentimental associations in its portrayal of a group of marines having to cope with the challenges of rehabilitation upon their return to the United States after the war. This paper will investigate the process of musical recomposition that effaces (or “covers”) the meanings attributed to the original as a metaphor for the urge to forget and start anew in postwar America. Inspired by Peter Szendy’s “philosophy in the jukebox,” I will argue that the repetitive structure of the hit song (that seems to repeat itself “till the end of time”) eschewed the dramatic potential of Chopin’s work in order to construe an image of America untouched by the miseries of war.

Obtenu lors du 83ème Congrès de l'AFCAS à l'Université du Québec à Rismouki, Colloque "Sémiotique appliquée, sémiotique applicable", pour la communication "Un triple niveau analytique pour l’étude du dernier style de Chopin : La Ballade op. 52 entre analyse formelle, narrative et thymique" en Mai 2015.
Sous la présidence d'honneur de Jean-Marie Klinkenberg.

The musical life of the 19th century was affected by the Romantic movement, during which many musical innovations were directly associated with the evolution of the piano, its music and the emerging virtuosos and amateurs performers. The piano was an intensively public instrument and became the realm of the virtuosos who not only demonstrated through their own piano music their abilities and imagination as composers, but also presented the individual characteristics of their keyboard technique in the music scene. Especially in Paris, the rapid rise in the popularity of the piano cultivated the environment for the public concerts, in which leading pianists, like Kalkbrenner, Thalberg, Herz, Hiller and the most famous Chopin and Liszt, were given the opportunity to thrive. As an expected result of this pianistic euphoria, piano manufacturers started being concerned about the improvements and the evolution of the construction of this instrument. The two main piano manufacturers during that period were Erard and Pleyel in Paris. The innovation of the “double escapement” action by Erard, in particular, became the prototype of all the modern piano actions. Furthermore, in relation to the sound quality of the two instruments, pianists had their own preferences. For instance, Chopin’s preference was towards the Pleyel pianos “…which he particularly cherished for their silvery and slightly veiled sonority and the lightness of their touch”. Also, the improvement of the piano construction contributed to the development of different approaches to piano playing. This is reflected in the programmes of the public concerts and Chopin’s early works, such as the Introduction and Polonaise Brillante op. 3 and the Variations brillantes op. 12.

The monographs, essays, collections of letters, iconographic material and other sources of information on the life and works of Fryderyk Chopin were, by the turn of the twentieth century, numerous and varied. Karłowicz’s Niewydane dotychczas pamiątki po Chopinie  (Unpublished souvenirs of Chopin), published in Warsaw and in Paris in 1904 is probably the first truly organic monographic miscellany of letters, drawings, other iconographic material, memoirs and other documents, written at the turn of the twentieth century. In addition, Karłowicz had arranged for the sources in his possession to be translated into French in order to have them published also in Paris, in the journal Revue musicale.
According to new sources, however, it is also possible that his hurry to publish the work made Karłowicz turn, even before the Revue musicale, to other journals that were not strictly musical. An unpublished letter which I have recently discovered sheds light on some important details with regard to his negotiations with another French periodical and, as we shall see, fills a number of gaps left by existing scholarship. Preserved among the Brunetière papers held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, this letter is addressed to Ferdinand Brunetière himself, with the aim of making a proposal for the publication of the material, probably in the Revue des deux mondes, one of the most important and prestigious cultural journals of the period, the editor of which Brunetière was at the time. This document tells us much more about Karłowicz’s intentions and editorial principles filling in this biographical gap and revealing new evidence about Niewydane dotychczas pamiątki po Chopinie.