Musicology Today 2012 100 Years of Polish Musicology

14 Małgorzata Woźna-Stankiewicz
greatly diversified disciplines taught at the Faculty of Philosophy as well as
in the university curriculum and teaching system. The offer of lectures, most
varied in the area of music history, was addressed to “many” of the Faculty’s
students, though at the same time they were absolutely indispensable for
the “chosen few” specially interested in musicology. Lectures in music theory,
on the other hand, were addressed primarily to the “chosen few”, and
the classes and seminars were meant only for those few, as they already required
from students a professional theoretical and practical musical background.
For this reason, in the years 1926/27–1938/39, the Musicological
Seminar held, apart from introductory and undergraduate seminars on music
history and theory (2 hours a week each), also specialised classes in musical
analysis (4 hours a week) based on 12 th –20 th -century musical examples
including Gregorian chant and European folk music. These classes were
taught by Jachimecki or entrusted by him to members of his staff. Also the
regularly held lectures and classes in the methodology of historical-musical
research (including the criticism of musical sources) and paleography —
were meant for the students specialising in musicology. Józef Reiss’s series of
monographic presentation of individual theoretical-philosophical treatises
(incl. Plutarch on music, treatises by Sebastian de Felstin and Franchinus
Gafurius), continued from the previous period, served the same purpose.
They were substantially supplemented by a systematic survey of the history
of music theory from ancient Greece to the Renaissance, as well as selected
problems of 19 th -and20 th -century music theory. There were also separate
general and single-subject lectures in musical aesthetics. From the academic
year 1926–1927, we can also observe a certain correlation between the topics
of doctoral dissertations (from 1932–1933 — also of MA theses), that is —
the academic interests of the “chosen few” students — and the subjects of
“monographic” lectures, which provided those “few” with the fundamentals
of knowledge, as well as being potentially addressed to “many” others.
The MA and Ph.D. theses, supervised only by Jachimecki and completed
in 1930–1939, concerned the 19 th -century and the first three decades of the
20 th century, concentrating almost exclusively on Polish composers born between
1769 (Józef Elsner) and 1882 (Karol Szymanowski). The other subjects