Remembering Danuta Szlagowska (1946-2018)
Monday, March 26, 2018
We were saddened to hear of the death of our dear colleague Prof. Dr. Hab. Danuta Szlagwoska, who passed away on 13 March 2018.
Prof. Szlagwoska had been a member of the RISM Poland working group in Gdańsk since 1997. Through her extensive documentation work there, she contributed immensely to the success of RISM in Poland.
Danuta Szlagowska was a musicologist and pedagogue who was highly esteemed by her colleagues. She had taught conducting, composition and music theory at the Gdańsk Stanisław Moniuszko Music Academy since 1976. She was vice rector of the the Institute of Music Theory there from 2008 to 2016. She also taught at the Feliks Nowowiejski Academy of Music in Bydgoszcz from 1993 to 2003 and at the Fryderyk Chopin University of Music in Warsaw from 2008 to 2014.
After studying musicology and psychology, Prof. Szlagwoska received her doctorate in 1976 with a dissertation on perceptual psychology and learning melodies (“Efektywność uczenia się melodii w zależności od rodzaju i liczby analizatorów zaangażowanych w procesie percepcji”) at the Institute of Psychology at the University of Warsaw before dedicating herself to working with musical sources at her new place of work in Gdańsk. Until the end of her life, she studied the music history of that city, the musical sources found there, and the compositions written in Gdańsk.
Together with her colleagues Barbara Długońska, Danuta Popinigis, and Jolanta Woźniak, Prof. Szlagowska published three thematic source catalogs as part of the series “Music Collections from Gdańsk” in cooperation with the RISM Central Office in Frankfurt am Main. Volume 1 documents the collection of music manuscripts of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Gdańsk (PL-GD, cited in RISM as PopinigisC 2011), volume 2 the music manuscripts of the former Gdańsk City Library which are today in the Berlin State Library (D-B, SzlagowskaC 2007), and the third volume the music manuscripts of the Gdańsk State Archives (PL-GDap, WoźniakC 2008).
Her intensive source-based work in Gdańsk led her to complete her habilitation thesis about the repertoire of seventeenth-century music manuscripts in Gdańsk (“Repertuar muzyczny z siedemnastowiecznych rękopisów gdańskich”) at the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences in 2007. Prof. Szlagowska’s writings were seminal studies in Polish musicology and source studies and brought the musical sources of the old Hanseatic city of Gdańsk and its music history closer to the international community.
In addition, Danuta Szlagowska produced Kultura muzyczna antyku (1983), an ethnomusicological study on older musical cultures of the world, in which she dealt with the ancient cultures of Mesopotamia, Israel, China and India, among others. Her Muzyka baroku, and introductory work on the topic of Baroque music, appeared in 1998. Her active participation in scholarly activities took her to more than forty national and international conferences. She worked as an editor for the series “Musica Baltica” and “Muzyka organowa.” Until 2011, she was a member of the academic advisory board for the journal Aspekty Muzyki.
Since 2014, Danuta Szlagowska had led the edition project “Thesaurus Musicae Gedanensis” as part of the National Programme for the Development of the Humanities. Editions of seventeenth-century works by Bernardino Borlasca (2016) and Thobias von Dürens (2017) have already appeared. Exemplary editions of works by the Gdańsk composers Daniel Jacobi and Johann Balthasar Erben are planned.
Prof. Szlagowska was a member of the Musicology Section of the Polish Composers’ Union and the Gdańsk Scientific Society.
For her decades of service as a teacher and musicologist, Prof. Szlagowska received awards and distinctions from the Music Academy in Gdańsk and the Chopin University of Music, a medal from the Polish Education Commission, prizes from the City of Gdańsk, and the Golden Cross of Merit from the Republic of Poland. In 2016, she received an honorary professor title from the Department of Conducting, Composition and Music Theory at the Fryderyk Chopin Music University in Warsaw.
The RISM Central Office mourns the loss of Danuta Szlagowska together with her family, friends, and colleagues. We will always keep her in our memory. We will miss our colleague, who was active in the field and had a wide range of academic interests. Through her unceasing scholarly work she will remain great role model for us all.
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