“The poetics of sounds” – an expression borrowed from the title of a chapter from Tadeusz A. Zieliński’s book – describes the essence of Kazimierz Serocki’s mature works. His artistic attitude, related to his conviction that contemporary music was in need of a renewal, was consistently groundbreaking but did not provide for a revolution in the traditional understanding of the status of a musical work as a work with a specific shape and expression, characterised by a complex play of its elements and convincing drama of its form. The renewal was to concern its very substance – its sound expressed through various colours, shapes and movement formulas. It was also to respect the laws of human auditory perception and performing capabilities of musicians. The composer believed it was necessary, for, just like many of his colleagues, he saw in musical works of the mid-1960s a serious crisis, primarily associated with the form. The circumstances that had led to it were described by him during his Essen lecture:

It seems that there are still some taboos in music, a fact that is not unrelated to a crisis of form. What I mean here first of all is the fact that the rule whereby nothing can be repeated in a musical work is still strictly observed. In various compositions there are, of course, various permutations and derivatives of structures which formally come from the same basic structure – they remain unnoticed, also by professional musicians. I am talking about something else. I am not thinking about literal repetitions, as in the reprise of the sonata form, but about similarities of elements, which – repeated in a changed way – would somehow be discernible to the listeners, would enable them to understand and experience the form of the work. [...] It is not [...] a small problem. The formal process  must be seen  [emphasis I.L.] in one way or another. I believe that this is the reason why most good works composed today are relatively short, while those longer than 20 minutes are mostly unbearable. In order to find satisfaction in a longer composition, there must exist a possibility of experiencing its formal progression. I am thinking here not about any simplifications or cheap compromises, but about new formal elements.

Serocki tested these “new formal elements” in his Symphonic Frescoes (1963-64), the title of which was, as he said, “a kind of protest against the fashionable [...] abstract titles of compositions in Italian”. Here, the “new formal elements” were specific “sound structures”, which – in accordance with the idea presented during the Essen lecture – were transformed and combined, creating material for the construction of a musical form. Though the possibility of capturing the progression of the form by the listeners and the musicians was key, Serocki did not arrange these structures in accordance with some pre-defined pattern, but used them to create something “fresco-like” – hence the title of the piece. Thus Frescoes  began a whole series of works (in the 1960s: Continnum, Niobe, Forte e piano, Poems, Dramatic Story; in the 1970s: Swinging Music, Fantasmagoria, Fantasia elegiaca, Impromtu fantasque, Concerto alla cadenza, Arrangements, Ad libitum, Pianophonie), in which Serocki in a variety of ways tackled the problem of the form of contemporary works. Some of his solutions will be discussed elsewhere, but in any case the most important effect of these experiments was a highly individual music, recognisable from the very first moments of listening.

Serocki’s motivation to continue his aesthetic and technical experiments can also be found in the composer’s humorous saying, quoted by Zieliński:

Melody is commonly regarded as the rightful, official “spouse”, while sound is merely a “mistress” (i.e. some embarrassing addition), offering rich though not fully sanctioned delights. This has been accepted in music for quite some time.

Therefore, he decided to demonstrate that these roles could be reversed and that sound in itself was able to serve as the basic, form-creating element of the composition, just like melody and harmony had once done with all their nuances. This idea obviously brings Serocki’s oeuvre closer to the sonorist movement in Polish music of the last century, though it also brings into it new and different qualities. First of all, it is about the fact that fascination with unconventional timbres and ways of producing sound is associated with rich expressive hues as well as a complex, logical structure of the form and its drama. As a result, when it comes to Serocki’s works, we can reject all critical arguments concerning the superficial, easy dazzling with various effects, an accusation often levelled by journalists writing about the flagship works of Polish sonorism. This was largely thanks to the performer line-up of Seroci’s works, which, when compared to the sonorist mainstream, stood out by virtue of its quality. We can even say that what Serocki did for wind, percussion or even string instruments was equal in importance to what Penderecki did for bowed string instruments – he discovered their most deeply hidden secrets and with their help conjured up previously unimaginable sound worlds.

Such a close link between sound-timbre measures and the form means that they are highly varied in Serocki’s works. Alongside short, point-like motifs we have more complex figures (runs, glissandi, “arabesques”) as well as sound-masses (including various clusters). Such units are then combined into bigger entities and organised in accordance with the principle of contrast; they also undergo permanent development and variation. This creates an extraordinary polyphony of varying texture, tempo and dynamics, interwoven with the formal progression usually comprising several phases as well as dramatic climaxes and releases, stable and static spaces in addition to changeable and moveable ones.

Significantly, Serocki was incredibly consistent in pursuing his ideas and faithful to his own sound world, even in the face of changing fashions and tendencies in contemporary music. Suffice it to say that a majority of his most innovative compositions in terms of sound were written already in the 1970s, when heated debates were taking place in Polish musical circles (and not only there) over ways of moving away from the avant-garde. As Tadeusz A. Zieliński writes:

Serocki was turning away from this movement with particular abomination. Perverse returns to old sound idioms were organically alien to him; neostyle in any form simply did not make sense to him, while ostentatious primitivisms with regard to means of expression were seen by him as contrary to artistic creation as such.

Beginning with Symphonic Frescoes, each work by Serocki has its own rich scale of sounds and emotions generated through them. At the same time it seems that the composer had his own preferences in this respect. It has become customary, for instance, to emphasise his tendency to veer between great vitality and energy, aggression even, and subtlety and profound lyricism or elements of expressive irony and grotesque. Serocki also had his favourite media, which he used with particular persistence and versatility. These were, first of all, the piano, percussion instruments, recorders – from the time of writing Impromptu fantasque (1973) – as well as brass instruments, to which he may not have been directly devoting his attention since the times of his fascination with the trombone (perhaps with the exception of Swinging Music), but which he nevertheless always used masterfully. As Augustyn Bloch told Ewa Szczecińska, Serocki

wrote brilliantly for the brass [...]. As you can imagine, it’s not enough to write some little chord, five notes [...], they have to be arranged in space in a way that makes it possible to use the harmonics. And that’s what this art is all about [...]. In Serocki’s works it sounded as if at some point you heard a huge mass of sounds, while there were precious few of them in the score [...].

The clarinet, too, might have become another of the composer’s favourite media – which is suggested by his surviving correspondence with Benny Goodman – but any attempts in this respect were put on hold by his illness.

It is also worth mentioning that any summing up of Serocki’s sonic, formal and expressive discoveries brought with it an opening up of new vistas. Even in his opus ultimum  –  Pianophonie for piano, orchestra and live  electronic transformations – the composer not only expanded his musical language to include an element hitherto omitted (electronics), but also implicitly announced its further transformation, which, according to Tadeusz A. Zieliński, were to lead to an “original synthesis of ‘sonic’ and ‘melodic-harmonic’ music”. In addition, he thought about a work that would be “decidedly melodic”, but we do not know how we would have put his idea into practice. Perhaps in some sophisticated manner he would have returned to melody, though it would surely not have been any neostyle, but, rather, a new form of “sound colour melody” (Klangfarbenmelodie), still connected with the idea of renewing the contemporary musical language and with the search for links between sound and expression.

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• Tadeusz A. Zieliński, O twórczości Kazimierza Serockiego [On Kazimierz Serocki’s Oeuvre], Kraków 1985.
• Zofia Helman, “Serocki Kazimierz”  [in:] Komponisten der Gegenwart (Hg. Hanns-Werner Heister, Walter-Wolfgang Sparrer), edition text + kritik, München 1992-
• Kazimierz Serocki, Komponisten-Selbsportrait [Self-Portrait of a Composer] [typescript of a lecture, Essen 1965], University of Warsaw Library.
• Kazimierz Serocki, Klangfarben als Kompositionsmaterial [manuscript of lecture, Basel 1976], Warszawa, BUW.

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