Polish Week, Part II: The Klasztor i muzyka / Monasteries and Music conference in Częstochowa

Guido Kraus

Wednesday, June 24, 2015

Our coworker Guido Kraus attended the international conference Klasztor i muzyka / Monasteries and Music from May 5 to 8, 2015 at the Jasna Góra monastery. The conference was sponsored by the Polish research project Hereditas Monasteriorum, which we reported on in this space on Monday. The conference was organized and carried out by Remigiusz Pośpiech and Marek Derwich from the University of Wrocław and Brother Nikodem Kilnar OSPPE from the Jasna Góra monastery. It was a very large conference, with around 80 presentations that took place in three concurrent sessions. Representatives from almost every region of Poland were there and reported on the rich musical treasures and musical life of the various religious orders from the Middle Ages until today, with an emphasis on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Participants from Austria, the Baltic states, the Czech Republic, Germany, and Ukraine helped complete the picture of the monastic musical heritage of Poland: by pointing out concordant manuscripts and reporting on the historical situation in their countries, a comparison was made through which the special history of Polish monasteries became clear–a history marked by numerous incidents of monastic dissolution (which reached far into the nineteenth century) and losses of cultural assets.

Papers on music iconography, musical instruments, and the history of monastic music ensembles in the eighteenth century supplemented the many and varied presentations about the music material and repertoire of the monasteries. The orders of the Augustinians, Benedictines, Brothers of Mercy, Cistercians, Dominicans, Franciscans, and Jesuits formed the focus of this work. Over the course of the presentations, the following spiritual centers emerged: Gidle, Kraków, Krzeszów (Grüssau), Pelplin, Sandomierz, Vilnius, Warsaw, and Wrocław (Breslau). The regions of Galicia, Great Poland, and Silesia were emphasized, as were the musical life and collections of our host monastery.

We would like to mention in particular the presentation of our esteemed colleague Michaela Freemanova (Prague), who reported on the music collection of the Brothers of Mercy in Bohemia, and the work of Aleksandra Patalas (Kraków), who illustrated the historical musical life in the monasteries in the Dominican province of Poland. Tomasz Jeż (Warsaw) described the hours of the office as it unfolds in music for Silesian Jesuits. Many more can be named, which you can read here in the lists of participants and papers, with additional information about the conference on the conference website.

Guido will describe his own presentation in part 3 of this series, which will appear on Friday.

Photo credit: Jasna Góra, photo by Damian27 via Wikimedia Commons

Category: Events