KONWERSATORIUM ZAKŁADU MUZYKOLOGII
1 grudnia 2026 (wtorek) o godz. 11:00, Sala Sobieskich, ul. Długa 26. Zapraszamy!
Chopin beyond Borders? Theorizing the International in Polish Music History
In this talk, I will consider how scholars have, and might continue to, think about Polish music history through an international lens. In particular, I will ask how the canon has been used to build networks of transnational investment and connection. While the canon is often theorized in terms of the establishment of national identities across the long nineteenth century, I wish here instead to consider how its claims to universalism can function transnationally and internationally. To develop these ideas, I will consider a number of examples drawn from reception of Chopin’s music in twentieth-century political contexts, including efforts to engage Polish diasporas through his music, ideas of otherness as they circulated around the International Chopin Competition, and efforts by the Polish state to promote Chopin abroad.
Prof. Mackenzie Pierce is a scholar of twentieth-century musical culture in Poland. He is author of Sounds of Survival: Polish Music and the Holocaust, published by the University of California Press last year, and has published on various aspects of Poland’s musical past in venues such as the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Journal of the Royal Music Association, Journal of Musicology, and Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Active in both the US and Europe, his research has been supported through fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, and the Beinecke Foundation. He serves as associate professor of musicology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. This fall, he is a US Fulbright Scholar at the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences.