AMS Philadelphia 2009 Abstracts - American Musicological Society

Abstracts Friday afternoon 99
the interview, since tracing his career in the SS affords insight into the kinds of experiences
that he brought to the discussion of current affairs with Sibelius. During the year when Kloss
had been based in Radom, i.e., from November 1939 to December 1940, the SS Death’s Head
units operating in the rear of the regular army were responsible for torturing and murdering
huge numbers of the Polish intelligentsia, Catholic clergy, aristocrats, as well as Jews. Kloss’s
particular unit—the Eleventh SS Death’s Head Standard—became notorious and was singled
out for special blame by General Blaskowitz in a written complaint to Hitler, later used as
evidence in the Nuremberg trials. Additionally, the paper will reproduce bank records from
the Deutsche Bank in Berlin disclosing that Sibelius remained on the Nazi payroll right up
until the end of the war: he was even prepared to put aside growing moral qualms about
Nazi anti-Semitism in order to continue to receive substantial sums. If several generations of
post-war historians and musicologists have behaved as sanitizers—collectors of the detritus of
history—so that nothing should mar pristine images of musical heroes, the task of this paper
is to present the truth about Sibelius’s actions and let listeners draw their own conclusions.
WILLIS CONOVER MEETS POLISH JAZZ: COLD WAR CULTURAL
POLITICS AND THE BIRTH OF AN EASTERN AVANT-GARDE
Zbigniew Granat
Nazareth College of Rochester
The story of Polish jazz offers a fascinating glimpse into the reception and transformation
of American jazz on the East side of the Iron Curtain. This process began with an extensive
imitation of American models, which in this part of Europe was hampered by censorship and
other restraints imposed by socialist regimes. In the same way that secret tunnels built under
the Berlin Wall—as depicted in the Roland Richter movie der tunnel (2001)—symbolized
for East Berliners the roads to freedom, Willis Conover’s radio program Jazz Hour broadcast
by the Voice of America represented the main channel through which “the music of freedom”
unabashedly traveled across the borders to all corners of the Eastern Bloc. This unusual form
of jazz education was instrumental in the development of many different European styles of
jazz.
This paper focuses on the intersections of political and artistic influences, both foreign and
domestic, which contributed to the creation of the Polish jazz idiom. In the mid-1950s Poland
functioned as a meeting place of two politically opposed trends: the American propaganda
that used jazz as a “secret sonic weapon” to promote the superiority of the West, and the socialist
propaganda, which, as early as 1955, officially embraced jazz in an effort to project a
progressive image to the outside world. This relatively open political climate created an environment
in which artists such as Krzysztof Komeda, Tomasz Stańko, and Andrzej Trzaskowski
could recast the received brand of American jazz as an experimental art music combining free
jazz, avant-garde techniques of composition, and Polish folk music. This unique style of free
jazz, paralleled by similar radical developments in Polish art music of the 1960s, played crucial
roles in the shaping of Poland’s modern cultural identity defined by the country’s unique position
between the East and the West.