The Musical Language of Kazimierz Serocki in the Light of the Composer’s Self-Reflection

The article is an attempt to reconstruct the fundamental elements of Kazimierz Serocki’s musical language on the basis of his own statements concerning his music. Those statements come first and foremost from his lectures prepared for the Meisterkurs für Komposition at the Musik-Akademie in Basel (1976), whose manuscripts are now held in the Polish Composers’ Archive of the University of Warsaw Library. The lecture texts (Notations- und Realisationsprobleme, Klangfarben als Kompositionsmaterial, Chance der offenen Form) present a whole set of problems which Serocki considered as the most important for his method of composition. The central place among these problems is occupied by the idea of “composing with sound colour” (“mit Klangfarben komponieren”). Sound colour plays a decisive role in the creative process, as it constitutes self-sufficient material for composition. Sound colour has a form-shaping role in the musical work, since it can build sequences of sound structures in various configurations, which perform various functions in the piece. The idea of composing with sound colour is presented by the composer in the context of an adequate way of notating sound phenomena and the possibility of performing music from such notation. This idea was also related in the lectures to the principles of constructing polyvalent open forms (mehrdeutige Form) out of small- and large-scale components. Pitch organisation, on the other hand, remains of secondary interest in the composer’s commentaries. Serocki’s self-reflection provides us with original and innovative answers to the most important problems that contemporary composers have had to face in their work. It also provides significant and hitherto frequently little-known insights into the components of the unique style of the author of Pianophonie, and these insights can be effectively utilised in the course of future research on Serocki’s work.