Death of senior Polish composer, 90
mainThe Association of Polish Composers reports the death in Salzburg yesterday of Boguslaw Schaeffer, the senior composer of his generation, after Penderecki. Both were part of the Cracow Group of composers that dragged Polish music into modernism in the mid-1950s. Schaeffer wrote his PhD thesis on the music of Witold Lutoslawski.
He was professor in Cracow from 1963 and in Salzburg from the early 1980s.
As a composer, he remained a purist, shunning the populism pursued by many of his contemporaries.
I like the high spirited ‘Project’ for tuba and tape
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7EynTTog_k
A major moment in my lifetime was discovering his book “Wstep do kompozycji” in my school library in 1976. I was so incredibly taken in by the wealth of graphic scores embedded inside it (excerpts of his and other composers’ works) that I made it a quest to try to find this huge publication of Polish origin. It wasn’t until almost 30 years later that I was able to track it down in a dusty old bookshop in Köln. They were contacted, they agreed to hold the book for me, and I stepped into their shop a few weeks later to retrieve it after traveling there from Dallas.