Zygmunt
Krauze

Zygmunt Krauze was born in Warsaw in 1938. He studied piano with Maria Wilkomirska and composition with Kazimierz Sikorski. After graduating from the National Higher School of Music in Warsaw in 1962 (piano) and 1964 (composition), he was active as a pianist, composer, and supporter of avant-garde music in Poland. In 1965 Krauze debuted at the Warsaw Autumn festival with his String Quartet No. 1. In 1966, he received a scholarship from the French government to study in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, and that same year he won first prize as a pianist at the Gaudeamus Competition in the Netherlands. In 1967 he founded the ensemble Warsztat Muzyczny (Music Workshop), which he led for twenty-five years. Besides Krauze on piano, the ensemble consisted of clarinetist Czesław Pałkowski, trombonist Edward Borowiak, and cellist Witold Gałązka. Warsztat Muzyczny specialized in contemporary music performance, commissioned new works by many different composers, and performed extensively in Poland and abroad. In the 1960s, Krauze often collaborated with the British composer Cornelius Cardew and pianist John Tilbury. As a composer, Krauze has been inspired by traditional music, visual arts, and architecture. His music successfully implements various interdisciplinary perspectives and concepts, and involves experimental presentation formats such as walking concerts and sound installations. The Fluxus movement and performance art of the 1960s has also influenced Krauze. He is interested in the notion of space and often incorporates spatial dimensions into his compositions.

Krauze was one of the first Polish composers who performed his music in white cubes and gallery spaces. In the 1950s and 1960s, the paintings of the Polish avant-garde artist Władysław Strzemiński were an important source of inspiration for him. This was when Krauze developed his minimalist style in music, based on Strzemiński’s concept of unism. The compositions that implement this principle include Pięc kompozycji unistycznych (Five Unistic Pieces) for piano from 1963, Polichromia (Polychromy) from 1968, Utwór na orkistrę nr 1 (Piece for Orchestra No. 1) from 1969, and String Quartet No. 2 from 1970. As a pianist, he often performed his compositions and experimented with the sound of the instrument. At the invitation of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program, Zygmunt Krauze spent a year in Berlin, and during this time he composed several pieces. They include One Piano Eight Hands, written in 1973 for four musicians and out-of-tune piano, which premiered in April 1973 at the Wittener Tage für Neue Musik, and the composition Aus Aller Welt Stammende (1973), written for string instruments. In 1974, the Meta-Music Festival in Berlin commissioned Krauze to write a spatial composition entitled Automatophone for fifteen playing mechanisms and fifteen amplified plucked instruments. The premiere of this seventy-minute-long piece took place at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin in October 1974. 

Text: Monika Żyła