Musicology Today 2012 100 Years of Polish Musicology

Józef Michał Chomiński — Portrait of a Scholar 163
and theoretical trends, and by the composers’ individual attitudes. In the
typology of individual musical genres, however, Chomiński’s dependence
on the artistic-literary trends of the period was less pervasive than in the
opera and the music drama, especially in the 20 th century. The less numerous
oratorios and cantatas did not inspire a classification of styles, though
their topics (mystical-historical, Biblical and mythological) are discussed in
the book. Still, especially with relation to Bach, the lack of a textual-symbolic
typology is a disadvantage, and Volume 5 of Musical Forms does not allow us
to gain a deeper insight into the cantata genres used by Bach. Notably, in the
same period (Kassel 1971) Alfred Dürr published his analysis of Bach cantatas
which wonderfully presents the various genres derived, first and foremost,
from the symbolic-theological contents of the texts and from their relation
to the musical setting. In Chomiński and Wilkowska-Chomińska’s Volume
V, the criteria for a detailed classification of forms remain autonomously
musical: technique, style, and texture.
Volumes 1 and 2 of Musical Forms, published in 1983 and 1987, are a new
presentation of instrumental forms, expanded so as to include new techniques
of composition developed after World War II, but also — a new approach
to the mutations of forms in musical history, now analysed from
a perspective that emerged from the theory and artistic phenomena of contemporary
music. Small forms are grouped here according to choreotechnical
criteria (dance forms), expressive qualities (lyrical instrumental forms),
technique conceived as a form-shaping principle (compositions based on figurations;
polyphonic and variational forms) and the architecture of the work.
Great instrumental forms, which are the subject of Volume 2, are mostly divided
by genre: from the sonata form (in sonatas, symphonies, quartets, concertos,
etc.), the suite, the symphonic poem — to stochastic principles and
spontaneous forms in the most recent music.
ThewholeseriesisprefacedinVolume1ofMusical Forms by a broadly
conceived theory of musical forms. After a brief historical survey of various
approaches to the problem of form, from Hugo Riemann, Ernest Kurth and
Hans Mersman to the logical symbolism of Susanne Langer, the authors concentrate
on the structural-acoustic reality of a musical work in its perceptible