Warsaw, Institute of Art, Polish Academy of Sciences, Długa 26, Conference Hall
Sobieski Hall, located on the ground floor of the Institute building, will serve as the exhibition space for the exhibition Musicians in the circle of Parisian “Kultura”.
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The role of Paris as one of the centres of global migration in the world of culture and music has been discussed many times, as has the activity of musicians from Central and Eastern Europe in the French capital. With regard to Polish music, researchers have been particularly interested in the neoclassical movement, including the role of Nadia Boulanger as a teacher of several generations of Polish composers and a promoter of Igor Stravinsky's artistic concepts.
However, the subject of Paris and its role in the culture of Central and Eastern European countries still seems far from exhausted and its study may yield new perspectives and discoveries. In the proposed conference, we aim to examine the role of Paris as a key hub of cultural transfer and exchange between the French capital and Central and Eastern European countries, including both the states as well as diasporic communities.
Who was responsible for promoting musical ideas from Paris in Poland, Lithuania and other countries? What did newcomers bring to Paris and how did their presence transform its musical life? What networks did they create? What role did the great masters, individual artists and organisers of musical life play as actors building various circles of influence and relations between Paris and their homelands, between artists and their native cultures? What role did Paris play in the lives and work of emigrants who found their place there, both in the interwar period and during the Cold War? At the conference we want to discuss the above issues, following thematic areas centred on various cultural networks with Paris as a focal point.
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The official conference language is English.
Conference will be held as a part of the DAINA 3 research project ‘Polish and Lithuanian émigré music cultures in France and the USA in the twentieth century.’
Programme Board:
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Prof. PAN dr hab. Beata Bolesławska-Lewandowska, Institute of Art, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw
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Prof. PAN dr hab, Jolanta Guzy-Pasiak, Institute of Art, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw
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Prof. dr hab. Iwona Lindstedt, Instutute of Musicology, University of Warsaw
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Prof. AMFN dr hab. Barbara Mielcarek-Krzyżanowska, Feliks Nowowiejski Academy of Music, Bydgoszcz
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Conference Secretary: Łucja Siedlik, PhD candidate, Institute of Art, Polish Academy of Sciences, email: lucja.siedlik@ispan.pl
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We are delighted to announce two keynote lectures by distinguished scholars Annegret Fauser and Jeanice Brooks.
16 September 2026
Dr. Annegret Fauser, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Fiber Artist & Cary C. Boshamer Distinguished Professor Emerita of Music
Forging Identities: Life as a Foreign Musician in Modernist Paris
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a city in possession of sophisticated culture, must be in want of distinguished foreigners to augment its cosmopolitan reputation across the globe (pace Jane Austen). How else could a local space become a globally revered place as arbiter of taste? This grand framework of constructing cultural superiority opened a fascinating space for foreign musicians in Paris to forge a career either by building out from Paris—for example, as did Serge Koussevitzky—or centering their musical life in the French capital—for example, Wanda Landowska. It is a process of identity formation that merges the imaginary (imaginaire) with the practical, the political with the economic, notions of alterity with those of differently configured selves. Although I am focusing this contribution on musicians who came to Paris from Eastern Europe and Russia in the early twentieth century such as Koussevitzky, Landowska, and Igor Stravinsky, I am framing this discussion more broadly by evoking composers from other areas of the globe, including Aaron Copland, Frederick Delius, Cole Porter, and Heitor Villa-Lobos. While the core of my contribution explores the lived experience of foreign musicians in Paris—drawing on recent work on life writing—I will also include some of their musical evocations of the city, not least Delius’s Paris: Song of a Great City (1899) and Porter’s “You don’t know Paree” (1929).
17 September 2026
Prof. Jeanice Brooks, University of Southampton
Listening to Eastern Europe in Nadia Boulanger’s Paris
In 1933, Zygmunt Mycielski summed up Nadia Boulanger’s approach to music in a report for the readers of Conferencia, the journal of the Université des Annales. “What good is it,” he reported, “to know dates, names, and facts in history, if one cannot recognise the style, its characteristics completely founded in a certain way of being that only the auditory intelligence can discern?” This paper asks what it meant to listen for the East, exploring what musicians and audiences could hear in the major performing venues and educational institutions of interwar Paris. What repertoire and performance styles were presented or understood as representative of an Eastern European past? And how were performers and composers arriving from Eastern Europe presented as conforming (or not) to a “certain way of being” characteristic of their origins? Eastern Europe, as historian Larry Wolff has argued, was part of an Enlightenment project of world mapping essential to creating the notion of Western civilisation. More recently, Kevin Karnes has explored how listening contributed to this picture. Here, I ask how modernist music culture in Paris built on existing understandings of the East not only to understand its musical past, but also to construct its future in the Western imaginary.