1968 Warsaw

Sep 21, 1968 – Sep 29, 1968
Warsaw

Festival info

Start: Sep 21, 1968

End: Sep 29, 1968

Locations: Warsaw

Hosting member(s)

Description
Description

Held during the 12th International Festival for Contemporary Music Warszawska Jesień (Warsaw Autumn)

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“Organizers of the 1968 Warsaw Autumn/ISCM Festival initially projected a series of sixteen concerts. The ISCM would plan six of the performances; Warsaw Autumn committees would handle the remaining ten. The ISCM relied on established protocol to determine its 1968 festival program: an international selection jury, chaired by Lutosławski and comprising representatives from Sweden, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Spain, convened in Warsaw in mid-January 1968. They made their choices from a pool of candidate works that the ISCM’s national sections had submitted.

…

“[T]he program … changed significantly in the weeks just before the festival. The trigger for these changes was the invasion of Czechoslovakia on 20–21 August by five members of the Warsaw Pact. … Did the ISCM have an obligation to respond? The organization’s policies indicated that it did not. … But 1968 was different. Poland’s involvement in the Czechoslovak crisis forced the issue of whether the ISCM’s past procedures still sufficed to meet the moral demands of the present political moment. … The Swedish section … thought the 1968 ISCM Festival should not take place at all. … ISCM President Strobel resisted these demands: in early September, he announced that the festival would take place in Warsaw as scheduled. Not everyone agreed that the show should go on: just before the festival began, the Norwegian, Swiss, and Swedish sections announced their cancellations in quick succession. … The … effect of the boycott was to throw the ISCM Festival program into disarray.”

–From Lisa Jakelski, “The Limits of Exchange,”
in Making New Music in Cold War Poland: The Warsaw Autumn Festival, 1956-1968 
(University of California Press, 2017), pp. 145, 150-151.

Programme information
Locations