Dr Ewelina Boczkowska (University of Memphis), Music Between Nations: Identity and Exile in Jerzy Fitelberg’s 'Nocturne', 28 października 2025, godz. 16:00, ONLINE
Interdyscyplinarne seminarium „Migracje artystyczne w XIX, XX i XXI wieku” / Zakład Muzykologii – Muzyka polska za granicą
Music Between Nations: Identity and Exile in Jerzy Fitelberg’s 'Nocturne'
My talk examines how Jerzy Fitelberg expressed wartime exile in his Nocturne (1944; premiered 1946). The orchestral work, marked by Lydian inflections and neoclassical style, conveys a deep sense of longing for a displaced past. Drawing on archival sources, I reconstruct the circumstances of Fitelberg’s American period and his struggle with unresolved questions of identity, memory, and compositional legacy. I interpret the temporal and spatial tropes embedded in the Nocturne as musical reflections of his displacement. Fitelberg's case exemplifies a generation of Polish émigrés who, caught between nations, were doubly forgotten in postwar music histories.
Ewelina Boczkowska serves as Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Memphis. Her research focuses on the intersection of music, trauma, and the fluidity of memory. She is co-editor of the Routledge series 'Music and Sound on the International Screen'. Her third co-edited volume with Michael Baumgartner, Music, Ideology, and Commerce in European Popular Cinema: 1940s to 1980s, is forthcoming from Routledge. She has published on Chopin, film music, and Jerzy Fitelberg. She holds a PhD in musicology from the University of California, Los Angeles and was formerly a distinguished full professor in Ohio.
Photograph credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fitelberg_Jerzi.png
