In the late 1960s, I encountered two pieces of post-war Polish music: a score and recording of Lutosławski's Trois poèmes d'Henri Michaux and a recording of Górecki's Refrain. To someone being schooled in Western avant-garde modernism, their impact was immediate, not least because they managed to be both contemporary and communicative as well as sounding totally different from current Western European music. When I visited my first ‘Warsaw Autumn’ festival in 1970 and spent a short period of study in Kraków on a British Council grant, I discovered that this combination was characteristic of most Polish music of the time. As more scores came to my attention, I began to realise how complex were the cultural and political currents in Polish post-war music. This book is therefore an attempt to encompass those aspects that seem to me to have been central in shaping Polish music of the past sixty years or so.

I have not aimed to be comprehensive. Without resorting to long lists of composers and their works, this would have been well nigh impossible. It would also have been counterproductive, because so few of their names and titles, let alone the music itself, are known outside Poland. I hope that the many composers on whose imaginative and invigorating work I have not elaborated will forgive my concentration on what, for want of a better word, is my personal ‘canon’.