Once you think the resources of the early twentieth century avant-garde have finally been exhausted, then someone else pulls up the corner of a page of forgotten music and delivers yet another historical salvo. In this case, it is music belonging to the brother of a sister whose work we already know; namely Grazyna Bacewicz, the fiercely independent Polish violinist and composer who refused to tow the serial line, and created highly individual neo-Classical compositions into the 1960s. Bacewicz was born into a Polish ...
Read More
Once you think the resources of the early twentieth century avant-garde have finally been exhausted, then someone else pulls up the corner of a page of forgotten music and delivers yet another historical salvo. In this case, it is music belonging to the brother of a sister whose work we already know; namely Grazyna Bacewicz, the fiercely independent Polish violinist and composer who refused to tow the serial line, and created highly individual neo-Classical compositions into the 1960s. Bacewicz was born into a Polish-Lithuanian family, but made her career in Poland; her brother Vytautas Bacevicius is generally considered a Lithuanian composer, but made his career -- if you can call it that -- in the United States. Bacevicius was concerned with "cosmic music," though not that of outer, but inner space, the cosmos as contained within the spiritual dimension of a person. Bacevicius was an intensely complex person whose impoverished life was spent in obscurity and wholly devoted to his music, the vast...
Read Less
